What we’re seeing in the last week is a pretty old story.
The crowd is almost a mirror. The majority of protesters showed up wanting to hold signs and chant slogans, because people are mostly good people. A handful of organizers might have had a list of concrete demands that never really penetrated the consciousness of the crowd or the media, as crowds are wont to confusion and media are wont to spectacle. A substantial minority showed up wanting to throw rocks and light fires because it reflects their sincere attitude towards the brokenness of the social compact. Another set showed up wanting to break windows and steal things because it reflected selfish anarchic glee. A small opposition group wanted to accelerate the chaos of the protests to undermine its message. All of these groups largely ignored that there was a pandemic going on, which may leave a long shadow on the communities involved. There is no telling these groups apart in the dynamics of the crowd. The audience to these acts is wide, and some will be disgusted, some sympathetic, depending on what kind of people they are prepared to see. That is the self-reflective quality of a roiling crowd.
It’s at this point in the script that leaders start directing people towards non-street-based action. The town hall on reimagining policing starts next week. The local leaders start inviting organizers to sit down with police unions for some kind of discussion. People dust off their police reform checklists and start trying to check another box or two. It’s mostly the same checklist from a decade ago, sadly. The sense that what’s happened over the last week has an unsustainable cost is sinking in, and will mostly redirect people’s energies.
This is, of course, part of the process. If the news hadn’t spent 72 hours showing burning buildings, the community meeting and legislative campaign wouldn’t have gotten any notice. When the majority is comfortable, inertia is quite inviting. Letter writing campaigns by the downtrodden are seen as a nice act of civic engagement, almost their own reward.
If the left does its job from here, a convulsion of social unrest sets the stage for a meaningful second act. That second act can accelerate some good reforms that increase trust and accountability between police and their communities — and which, frankly, I think most people would find nonpartisan if they weren’t swayed by the politics of opposition.
There is, of course, something pitiable in the fact that a substantial amount of energy has to go into conflict and destruction in order to direct a smaller amount of energy into dialogue and construction. But that’s a quality of our society. This is what political engagement looks like among people who fear the law, distrust the institutions that make and enforce it, and don’t believe that their fellow citizens sincerely hear them. Sometimes that’s a lazy posture, but sometimes, it’s with cause. Black people, specifically, have some good cause to feel that they exist on oppositional terms to American society. They are marked by 400 years of social engineering to make them into a racial underclass, with all of the social judgments that attend it. Their social alienation will likely persist until the day that you can look at a page of demographic data and not see a clear American racial underclass, and there’s not even a conversation around the reparations that would require. For now, many American blacks don’t feel heard when they cry for their own lives, much less when they do a letter writing campaign.
The people who pick up the pen and not the torch in times of crisis are themselves a privileged class because they feel they have a receptive audience. All too often, those pens don’t get busy until the torches are already on parade. If war is politics by other means, rioting is politics by another class. A deeply unequal society does not politically engage on common terms.
We’ll see what comes of this round of unrest. There have been bouts of unrest that saw rights backslide. In America, the politics of this past week certainly have value for the right. The accelerationists, the law and order crowd, those who traffic in racial antagonism all find something useful to bolster their campaigns in the last week. A highly politicized pandemic in the middle of this complicates matters, to say the least. In a tight 2020 race, the messaging to the white suburbs that carried the 2018 election takes a new tack.
But it can also, always, be a pivot towards progress. What was got in the last week was the attention of the whole country, which is rare. In this moment, the country is looking for leadership that can speak to peace between all these actors, and their audiences. If they can find it, transformative things are possible. So pray that out of all the noise of the last week and the attention that it got, people gravitate towards a signal.