Extremists in their element as anarchy rules in US street riots

Extremism on the left and right is spreading through Western societies like a virus and is dragging us down into chaos.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the BOK Center on Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, his first since the outbreak of COVID-19.

Revolution is always ugly, mostly violent and generally produces results its progenitors never wanted.

Is there enough unrest in western societies right now to talk of revolution?

Bernie Sanders wanted a revolution in the US, but the corona­virus killed his chances. Jeremy Corbyn wanted a revolution in Britain. Voters finally decided they didn’t want him.

But make no mistake. Political extremism has come roaring back into US, British and European politics.

Extremism exists on both left and right. Indeed, they might be considered a single, mutually ­dependent organism. In London, Black Lives Matter protesters attacked statues and attacked police. This called forth right-wing racist protesters allegedly seeking to protect the statues.

In fact, both sides were seeking to enact a regular ritual of extremism — street fighting.

In the US, the Black Lives Matter movement is a very mixed bag. At the kindly end, it has harnessed enormous goodwill and drawn on the deep reservoirs of sentiment for justice and decency in the US. Every civilised human being, and surely every American, was shocked and appalled by George Floyd’s callous, vicious death.

But beyond that sentiment, unanimity disappears. There is a deep ideological battle over what Floyd’s death means and how the US should go forward.

Many, many demonstrators are motivated by justified moral indignation and a desire for racial justice and racial equality. But the leaders of Black Lives Matter are much more ideological. In the first week, the demonstrations involved a great deal of violence. More than 400 police officers were injured. More than a dozen people have been killed.

Members of the right-wing Boogaloo movement watch a demonstration near the BOK Center where President Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday.

The Floyd case throws up sharp, difficult questions. The numbers of unarmed blacks shot by police in any year is generally half of whites similarly killed but is still disproportionately high. But are terrible cases such as the Floyd killing the result of bad actions by individuals, or racism and brutality in certain police cultures, or a sign that the whole of American society is not only systemically racist but racist to its core and in all its operations, such that justice requires a complete social and political revolution?

If the extreme indictment of American society is accepted, then extreme measures are justified for its rectification.

Philosopher Roger Scruton defined extremism as: taking a political idea to its extreme limits, regardless of any harm or counter-productive side effects; a complete intolerance towards any other views; and using means that dis­regard the life, liberty and human happiness of others.

Those are the methods of extremism. A political movement can also have inherently extremist goals, such as disenfranchising one group of people or suppressing parliamentary democracy.

In the US, there is serious, violent extremism on left and right. On the right, white supremacists and racists generally spout vicious conspiracy theories and atavistic hatreds that shame humanity.

There are active racist groups in the US that allege the corona­virus is a deliberate creation of the Jews. Others claim the Jews are behind the riots, while of course Black Lives Matters claims that US racism is connected to what it alleges is Israeli racism.

There is plenty of general grumpiness among right-wing and conservative people in the US, but on the fringe there is real craziness and extremism. The US and other countries have seen gunmen motivated by racial hostilities and conspiracy theories carry out sickening terrorist attacks.

There are also plenty of groups that are extreme but fall short of direct violence. Crazy websites such as QAnon weave the most involved and ludicrous conspiracy theories around everyday life.

Occasionally, their madness spills into the real world.

But extremism also has a very big life on the left and is becoming strangely more mainstream. Throughout the most violent ­stages of the recent protests there were a number of mainstream liberal commentators, in organs as august as The New York Times, who justified violence against property by demonstrators.

This was intensely irresponsible. Mob violence against property is grievously damaging to the innocent owners of the property — Korean convenience store proprietors, black pharmacists, neighbourhood grocery stores — and often devastatingly damaging to poorer districts that struggle to ­attract businesses.

Worse even than that, it legitimises the idea that the institutions of democracy are no good and your policy prescription is so important that you can break the law and trample over other people’s rights to achieve it, thus satisfying Scruton’s criteria of extremism.

Holding mass demonstrations that flout health rules in a pandemic similarly privileges your ideology over the law.

The Black Lives Matter website makes an effort to be inclusive but it is deeply ideological. Its aim is not racial equality but advancing black lives. It also seeks to disrupt the nuclear family and end heteronormativity. And it doesn’t much like capitalism.

Supporters cheer for Donald Trump at his Tulsa rally.

It is inherently extremist. Joe Biden was considering Florida congresswoman Val Demings as his vice-presidential running mate. Demings is black and well regarded. But she was once a police officer.

Hawk Newsome, the chairman of BLM in New York, declared: “When black people become police officers, they are no longer black. They are blue.” This is extremely insulting to Demings and would not be a respectable comment in any other context. But also this deep hatred of the institution of the police, the idea that there can never be a good police officer, has a long heritage in Marxist thought and communist practice. Communist activists of old would try to recruit soldiers, but they regarded the police as an implacable institutional enemy.

The same people who founded BLM also founded the Movement for Black Lives, and it is more overtly political. Its 2016 platform, for example, included the declaration that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians.

This is a grotesque statement that is manifestly untrue and as disconnected from reality as any far-right website or QAnon nuttiness. But the Movement for Black Lives is far more powerful than a crazy right-wing website. The statement demonstrates how ­virulently the old moral disease of anti-Semitism infects both the extreme right and the far left. ­Rioters in Los Angeles attacked synagogues and Jewish schools.

The Movement for Black Lives also demands reparations payments for slavery. This is a demented policy. Would African-Americans whose ancestors were not slaves get the reparations payments? Or rich African-Americans? Or mixed-race people? It is a recipe for endless social division and racial grief.

It also demonstrates the extremism of these movements. They are not trying to create, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, a colourblind society. They are trying instead to re-racialise society. This represents the complete repudiation of traditional ­liberalism and the universalism that was always its genius and its moral purpose.

No one living in the real world could doubt that African-Americans have suffered huge disadvantage in the US. Very few people would begrudge any movement of resources to address the disadvantage. That is the normal melior­ative path of liberalism, reform and democracy.

The path of extremism rejects all this. It prescribes not reform but revolution.

A man is lifted to safety during clashes between protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and opponents in London. Picture: AFP

A lot of movements on the postmodern left have rejected democracy, or some element of the rule of law, in one way or another. Numerous climate-change activists have argued that democracy cannot bring change quickly enough and therefore should be suspended. Numerous MeToo activists reject the normal rule of law, based on the presumption of innocence and the right to trial, with their demand that alleged victims always be believed — although this does not prevent the hypocrisy in not believing ­alleged victims of sexual assault when the alleged perpetrator is Biden or Bill Clinton.

But it is in the rejection by radical activists of the normal understanding of racial equality and equality under the law, as the goal of reform, where left movements have most clearly moved into extremism. Two books on US bestseller lists demonstrate this. Ibram X. Kendi, in How to be an Anti­racist, argues that racism is not about being racist, or supporting racial discrimination, or hostility to one race or another. Rather, it is about failing to campaign relentlessly against racism, failing to see it everywhere, failing to offer sufficient compensation, monetary and otherwise, for past racism.

He writes: “The language of colour-blindness, the language of not racist, is a mask to hide ­racism.” He also envisages a federal department of anti-racism that could vet all government policies to make sure they do not promote racial ­inequity.

Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility writes: “White identity is inherently racist.”

These ideas are extreme and they are tragic. They have a genuinely Marxist and totalitarian derivation. They mean that no one is ever good enough in their private behaviour unless they are fulsomely expressing support for the BLM agenda.

This ideological formulation turns life on its end. Normal people leading normal lives are not OK if they never engage in any racist thought or action. Rather, normal people leading normal lives are always in the wrong except whey they are shouting anti-racist slogans.

This is not just a madness of the familiar Marxoid faux academic variety. BLM and its attendant leaders, especially its legions of supporters in academe, have done well to popularise the sentiment, especially among affluent young whites.

The sign carried by protesters gives this syndrome of ideas pithy expression: “Your silence is violence.” In other words, unless you are actively part of the BLM movement you are guilty of structural violence and therefore, logically, some violence against you is also justified.

This sentiment, this theoretical construct, lies behind the deeply anti-intellectual and threatening cancel culture that is as virulent in Australia as anywhere. The idea is that it is criminal for you to express any belief that is not part of the approved dogma, and it’s almost especially wicked to uncover or draw attention to any facts that don’t fit the approved narrative.

It goes without saying that hundreds of thousands of the protesters would not endorse the theoretical formulations behind this movement.

These ideas throw up infinite paradoxes and contradictions. Bella D’Abrera of the Institute of Public Affairs identified an exquisite Australian example this week. For decades now, the humanities departments of our universities have been sedulously teaching that Australia, like other Western societies but with our own particular sins and crimes, is inherently, systemically, root and branch a racist enterprise. Yet when the Chinese government agrees with this broad consensus of Australian academe and ad­vises its students and its citizens not to come to Australia because it is racist, the universities rise up to cry out: No! No! No! We are multicultural and welcoming and tolerant and egalitarian.

NSW police guard a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Picture: AFP

This demonstrates that the university administrators, like many folks who live under an oppressive and irrational ideological regime, lead a kind of double life, or at least have a sort of double mind.

In the context of a humanities courses or related discussion at university, yes they acknowledge Western power is inherently racist and Australia is structurally racist and all the rest. But outside of the licensed insanity of university humanities departments, in the real world, and especially to support their institutional business model, they readily acknowledge that Australia is one of the most welcoming and least racist societies on earth.

But wait, if that’s true, we (and the US) don’t need a revolution.

Re-racialising society, as the ideologues behind the BLM movement want, is a recipe for endless conflict, for new division and hostility. After a generation or two of that sort of policy, you can rest assured that everyone will hate everyone and politics will be viscerally tribal.

It will also lead to a lot more street fighting. Extremists of the left and the right have always ­enjoyed that.