ABC News beat the competition last weekend with this priceless piece of newspeak: “Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,” read a tweet from one of the country’s largest media organisations.
Whatever our differences, we can surely all agree that the phrase, “a peaceful demonstration intensified”, has a reassuringly gentle quality to it. It’s perhaps how the Luftwaffe might have described events during the Blitz: tens of thousands of Londoners were killed after Germany’s peaceful demonstrations against British resistance intensified.
It’s fair to say that most of the people demonstrating on America’s streets this summer have a peaceful, lawful intent: to challenge police brutality, expose inequality; denounce a political order they see as inimical to the nation’s values. There have doubtless too been provocations at times by law enforcement officers that have triggered violent responses. But there’s no doubt that a significant number of the protesters are politically motivated radicals with a revolutionary agenda, armed to the teeth and committed to violence.
A short round-up of a few of this week’s clashes gives a flavour of what’s going on. In Seattle, 59 police officers were injured as a mob threw rocks, explosive devices and other projectiles. In Portland, petrol bombs were thrown as protesters continued to try to destroy federal property. In Louisville, dozens of armed members of an organisation that calls itself the Not F***ing Around Coalition failed in their eponymous objective by assembling for a protest and accidentally shooting a few of their own members. In Austin, a Black Lives Matter protester brandished an assault rifle at a motorist who shot the man dead.
These are not examples of peaceful protests intensifying. These are disturbingly like early scenes from a civil war. You hear little about them because they don’t fit the media’s happy narrative of an unarmed, concerned citizenry resisting the violent efforts of the state to crush it.
The job of any democratic government in these circumstances is to permit legitimate expressions of protest while protecting lives, property and the general order that is essential to the functioning of society. But the situation in some cities suggests that many mayors have decided not to meet that objective but to permit, for political reasons, the collapse of order.
It was against this backdrop that the Trump administration ordered federal law enforcement officers into Portland, large sections of which have descended into violent chaos over the past month. While law enforcement is a primarily local responsibility, federal property in the city – such as the US courthouse and other buildings – was being attacked and burnt with impunity. The mayor of nearby Seattle, whose city has also been gripped by violence for weeks, denounced the move by the federal government. “We are seeing a dry run for martial law,” Jenny Durkan said.
She isn’t. This is in fact an extraordinary example of chutzpah by a local government official. In cities like Portland and Seattle municipal leaders have wilfully allowed violent protests to unfold, at times deliberately restraining their local police forces from using riot and crowd-control techniques developed and approved by their own authorities. Despite some of the more agitated reporting about federal “paramilitary” forces on the streets, the officers deployed in Portland have acted in accordance with the law. Those arrested have been read their rights and processed through the legal system. On Wednesday it was announced that federal agents would begin a phased withdrawal from the city. The larger reality is that cities are descending into a chaos achieved in part by the connivance of the people who control them. It’s not just protest. The hostility that mayors of places like Seattle, Portland, Chicago and New York have expressed towards their police forces has resulted in an explosion of violent crimes.
Chicago is on course to record one of the deadliest summer months in its history. In New York, which is also experiencing its worst summer for crime in decades, a one-year-old child is among the victims this month. Other cities have recorded similar surges in violence. These are not protesters. These are gang members, drug peddlers, robbers and murderers. They are exploiting the vacuum created by municipal politicians, who have for decades presided over decay and despair and who have now cynically chosen as the main target for retribution not the criminals but their own police.
Just over three months from the presidential election, the US is engaged in a high-stakes and perilous political and social showdown. The Trump administration, beset by its own political failures and a hostile media, is attempting to regain control of cities and seize the political initiative by demonstrating a determination to face down lawlessness and revolution.
Protesters, aided and abetted by civic leaders across the country, are executing a kind of moral blackmail. Vote to get rid of President Trump in November or the violence you’ve seen this summer will be merely a foretaste of the disorder to come.
Either way, to put it in the argot of the modern media, expect the current peace to intensify.
The Times
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As American cities have endured another week of violent unrest, news organisations have scrambled to come up with verbal formulations that cast every incident as an act of heroic defiance against the dark forces of autocracy rather than an attempted insurrection by highly motivated revolutionaries.