The first is the inevitable backlash. In Asheville, police immediately dismantled the zone the protestors set up so no one would get any wild ideas about the necessity of police. Which leads me to believe that CHAZ's days in Seattle are numbered, too. Look at any revolution in France in the 19th-century that involved barricades and you'll see the same dynamics at play, now.
Any display of the citizenry organizing and maintaining a community by cooperation is an existential threat to the power of the state. The foundation of the state is violent coercion- laws find legitimacy in the state's capability to violently enforce them against an unwilling population. So if all of a sudden there's wide spread, community led efforts to maintain order and public security without violence, that brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions that the police would rather citizens not ask in the first place.
The other major aspect that I don't have a clear answer to is what happens when Biden starts saying his usual spiel about how change only comes through the slow, incremental processes of Congressional politics? That argument was already on its last legs but how do you expect to hold up now? Two months ago if you talked about abolishing the police, you would've gotten strange looks before dismissing the idea because they've never heard of it. Now, there are debates on Twitter about finding a different slogan because the idea is catching on so fast.
Anytime you have concerned liberals or media figures saying that we need to find a slogan that isn't so divisive, what they're telling you is that they don't believe in this idea. Saying "Think of what the Republicans will say" is a distraction, because whatever they're going to say whatever you're worried about no matter what you do. Like, do you really think Trump isn't going to spend the next five months talking about how Democrats want to destroy the police if the slogan changes? Come on.
What makes "defund the police" so compelling is that it presents a clear, identifiable goal and policy initiative all in one. If someone is made uncomfortable by the idea, it's a good way to start a conversation about how yes, the idea is to gradually reduce police funding and redirect it to other, targeted projects like mental health crisis responders and housing that eliminates the need for police in the first place.
Changing that to something like Stacey Abrams "Transform the Police" is really the best way to destroy every bit of momentum the protests have built. Because what the fuck does that phrase even mean? What are your policy goals, how will you enforce them, how will you measure their effectiveness or lack thereof? The only possible outcome of such a slogan is to add a level of vagueness so impenetrable that people just give up talking about it because the conversations devolve into endless bickering over what the goals are even supposed to be.
Again, this isn't the result of incompetence or fear on people like Abrams part. The point is to co-opt, then sabotage, and this is the best way to do that. I have hope though, that they're too late and will have to reckon with the movement instead of kneecapping it.
Hell, the protests got Minneapolis to defund their police department, Los Angeles to propose cutting $150 million from their departments budget, and Louisville to ban no-knock warrants that killed Breona Taylor. Point is, people are figuring out that they can get shit done of they make it happen. Thanks to covid, everyone has plenty of time on their hands and no worries about losing a job, so what else are they gonna do?
Sidebar: I hope this also makes everyone realize the 40-hour work week is a tool meant to exhaust and demoralize people so these kind of mass political movements don't happen. Just saying, if we're throwing out old bullshit, that should be on the list of things to go.
Back on point, who really going to accept anything about incremental change again? The problem of revolutionary moments is that official leaders who could capitalize on the movement are reluctant to do so for obvious reasons. But it's hard to think of someone more committed to orthodox politics than Biden so I have no idea how his "I'm going to do literally none of these things" will play out over the next few months.
My guess is, not well. The noise that Kamala Harris is his current VP frontrunner is also not reassuring. Harris' career as a prosecutor presents the same liability that it did with Klobuchar, with the added bit of flavor that Harris declined to prosecute Steven Mnuchin for his foreclosure factory mortgage company. That Harris received a $2000 donation from Mnuchin is also bound to come up, more then once, if she ends up being Biden's pick.
These contradictions- puffing herself up as the tough-on-crime top prosecutor who was ruthless against truancy but took money from someone who kicked old women out of their homes for being 27 cents short- destroyed Hariss' campaign. They'll do nothing but harm to Biden's, too, but, then again, the man has nothing but bad VP options so it's really just a case of picking your poison and praying.
A nice side effect of all this will be that the failure to contain covid19 will be blamed on the protestors, sliding past the multiple failures on both the federal and state level and that the thousands of cases in Florida, Texas, and Arizona we're seeing would've been exposed weeks ago before the protests started. Buuuut these things will quickly stop matter as the media looks for a way to discredit the protests since the usual canards of "but the looters" isn't working.
Sidebar 2: It's really telling how the death of black men and the destruction of property are treated as moral equivalents. That this is such a reliable go-to reveals how slavery- both the classical chattel model and the current penal model- have embedded the idea that black men especially are little more than biological pieces of property.
One thing I have been absolutely loving though is the destruction of all those Confederate and Columbus statues. Columbus was an idiot who was called out, correctly, by everyone in his time fire being wrong about every thing. It's baffling that we celebrate a dude who never set foot in any part of the future America's- let alone credit him for "discovering" the continent- so we can do without the ultimate example of failing upwards. That he sold 9-year-olds into sex slavery is also a pretty good reason to decapitate whatever statues of his we can saw through.
Of course, there are naysayers. Tut-tutters more concerned with perpetually hearing both sides of an issue rather then recognizing illegitimate arguments both current and historical.
A quintessential example of such a person is Andrew Sullivan. Like most people who were wrong about the Iraq War, Andrew suffered no consequence for his actions and developed the idea that criticism of his empty, pretentious opinions was an attack on free thought itself.
Sullivan riffs on this theme again in his latest column, Is There Still Room for Debate? which, I'll be honest, I tried really hard to read all the way through but just couldn't. Still, there are two points Sullivan makes that I want to engage with.
He notes that in the current discourse there are two main thoughts- namely, the rejection of the idea that America is an "imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them," and that ultimately, America is "in its essence not about freedom but oppression... all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race," with the conclusion being that "the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled."
The first point I wavy to look at is that America is an imperfect work in progress that slowly but surely improves itself. My beef with this idea is that it treats the myriad sins of America's past as innocent mistakes, like they were the equivalent of a toddler who shit their pants just after being toilet trained. The thing is, none of that is true. If you go back to all of our worst atrocities, there were people advocating those things happen specifically because of the harm they would cause.
Pretty much every awful thing we've ever done has been done with explicit intent. Busting out the "we're imperfect but trying" trope is an act of denial, a refusal to acknowledge the causes, idealogies, and consequences of our past and how those things linger into our present.
What kills me in this argument is the treatment that the principals of religious freedom etc. etc. were all just a smokescreen for slavery like it's some kind of joke. Because you know what slavers, and Jim Crow, and the homophobes of the present all use as justifications for their oppressive policies? Religious freedom, limited government, personal freedom, and the equality of all human beings.
Sure, the liberal ideal of equality of all humans sounds really good, on paper. But if you question and interrogate that philosophy, as Sullivan advocates, you find that the proponents of that idea had a very stringent definition of who qualified as a human being.
If you were black, mixed race, or a woman, your humanity was nonexistent, questionable, or negligible, respectively. So, you could say, that under this liberal order, in order to gain the so-called inalienable rights granted to all free people, you first have to go through a blood soaked gauntlet to prove you deserve the basic dignity and recognition of being a person.
This liberal order is why we even need a slogan like Black Lives Matter. Why would we need to be so insistent about this fact if we didn't live in a society that treated the death of innocent black men and the theft of merchandise as equivalent losses? Maybe the fact that this hallowed liberal order doesn't recognize the inherent value of life is probably why it's losing legitimacy?
I don't know where things are going or how they'll shake out. Mass public movements are like rivers carving new paths out of the rocks, you can't predict the exact course or the speed the current will develop. Mix that in with out of touch, hilariously incompetent political elites and well, there's a lot of ways this clown show can go.
Stay safe out there, and remember to wear your masks.
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