“More than 200 people on Monday night marched to the Pearl District condominium tower where Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler lives to demand his resignation,” reported the Oregonian in August. It was three months into protests over the death of George Floyd while being arrested by Minnesota police, and the national groundswell showed no sign of abating. “The demonstration quickly turned destructive as some in the crowd lit a fire in the street, then placed a picnic table from a nearby business on top of the fire to feed the blaze. People shattered windows and broke into a ground-floor dental office, taking items including a chair, also added to the fire, and office supplies. Shortly after 11 p.m., a bundle of newspapers was set ablaze and thrown into a ground-floor storefront in the residential building.” Wheeler then told his neighbors he would be moving out.
Crowds protested all night in front of Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s house earlier in August, a move Peduto said was “crossing the line.” Peduto, too, had been doing his best to encourage progressive activists he was on their side. CBS noted that he “can’t please anyone.” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan supported CHAZ, the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” where protesters set up barricades and declared themselves an independent country free of policing, but murders there built pressure to shut it down. Eventually, demonstrators marched to Durkan’s home, leading her to send an angry letter calling for an investigation, and possible expulsion, of the city council member who organized that event.
The list goes on.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was tolerant of the protests — though she did criticize its violent elements — but they came to her door anyway. Now, her block is locked down by police officers who are under orders to arrest anyone who won’t leave. Her neighbors have nicknamed the street “Fort Lori.” The mayor of the city fresh off its most violent month in 28 years explained, “We have a right to our home, to live in peace.”
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo put a Black Lives Matter sign on his home, but that didn’t stop activists from spray-painting “San Jose will be free” on it and setting a flag on fire in front of the home. Liccardo referred to them as “menacing thugs” in a tweet, which he later deleted.
Want some more? Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio have all had the mob visit their homes. Protesters held a die-in at Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger’s house.
What all of these mayors have in common is that they are liberal Democrats. The ostensible reason for the protest at Peduto’s home in Pittsburgh was the arrest of an activist — an arrest Peduto condemned.
Presidential elections are usually pitched as opportunities for one party or the other to reshape the contours of domestic politics, and this year is no different, we’re told, especially with another Supreme Court battle looming. But what if the actions of a newly elected president represent a lagging, not a leading, indicator?
This is not an argument that a new president would be forced to shift his agenda by less-compromising members of his own coalition. Instead, it points to the fact that the ground is shifting underneath everyone’s feet. The presidential election remains important, but it is the tip of a very large, migrating iceberg.
Just ask the vexed progressive mayors holed up in makeshift fortresses or putting their homes on the market while still in office.
One argument made by and for Joe Biden against President Trump is that a Biden victory would calm the streets. “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” he said in a speech a few weeks ago, adding: “I want a safe America. Safe from COVID, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops. Let me be crystal clear: safe from four more years of Donald Trump.”
A group helmed by Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks “war-gamed” out the elections and found, Brooks wrote in the Washington Post, that “a landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.”
Putting aside that that sounds more like intimidation than anything else, there’s little evidence that that’s true. Sure, some people might go home because Trump as president provokes them into the streets. But the hardcore activists, the ones setting up tent cities every night in Portland and smashing windows, are not likely to stop just because Joe Biden wins. Just ask them: “A Joe Biden Presidency Will Require Mass Protests, Too,” proclaimed a headline in Jacobin. The article warned: “There are good reasons to believe passing the baton from Trump to Biden isn’t going to result in any profound change when the next uprising comes — which, between the pandemic, a historic depression, looming food shortages, and the ongoing ravages of climate change, it will certainly do. In fact, if tens of millions of liberals simply switch off and fail to resist the next presidency with the fervor they brought to Trump’s four years, it could end up much worse.”
Shadi Hamid argued in the Atlantic that Democrats would likely have more trouble conceding an election defeat in November than Republicans would. “I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change — at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.”
The Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in August seemed designed to ignore this dynamic completely. There, the party painted a picture of a big tent party, full of Republicans who had defected to Biden and Democrats who are centrist in policy and nature.
But it was only half the picture, so partial as to be a distorted representation. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders nearly beat Joe Biden for the nomination. It took marshaling all the resources of the Democratic Party to stop him from doing so. And few would argue that the far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the future of the Democrats. She clearly is, yet space for her at the convention was limited to a one-minute video.
It’s hard to overlook, however, that we are not seeing protesters at Biden’s house. This isn’t only about Biden’s flirtations with his left flank, which activists tend to consider insincere. It’s about playing the long game. Getting Biden to submit now doesn’t make sense. Far better to elect him to the presidency first. They don’t need to force Biden into submission because he isn’t standing in their way. Mayors, police, and federal law enforcement are. When the protesters block cars, they aren’t doing it to convince people to vote for Joe Biden. They are menacing the drivers into compliance. And that compliance comes regardless of how that person plans to vote in the future. The “American Street,” so to speak, is in give-me-now mode. Biden, by necessity, is in just-you-wait mode.
This alignment causes the left-leaning media to cover the protests dishonestly. CNN and MSNBC have both featured segments in which a reporter stands in front of burning buildings and declares the protests are mostly peaceful. And then there’s the gaslighting. Reporters have tried to say that riots weren’t happening, and anyway, if they were happening, they weren’t that bad, and if they were that bad, well, it’s probably right-wing agitators causing them.
Jason Johnson, a professor of politics and journalism at Morgan State University, hit most of these notes in a piece for Vox. He urged people not to refer to the riots as riots and added that “the focus and amplification of property damage … is a reflection of the press’s ghoulishly misplaced priorities.”
Paul Krugman of the New York Times, CNN’s Josh Campbell, and the Washington Post’s Dan Zak all posted variations of the idea that their respective cities — New York City, Portland, and D.C. — are all free and clear of riots because their personal neighborhoods and breakfast nooks are safe and quiet. This is part of what keeps the issue below the surface in the first place. If your town is on fire, you know what’s taking place across the country. But if you rely on the many reporters who sympathize with the rioters, you can believe you have until Inauguration Day in January to confront any changes.
Journalists know something really big is happening in America and need to ignore the violence of the protests in order for it to continue. This is in large part because of the discrepancy between what the protests are ostensibly about and what they have become about.
In the wake of the death of George Floyd, at the hands of a police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, the nation was largely united on the raw injustice of police brutality and on the idea that black lives absolutely do matter. It’s the next steps that caused a rift.
When the movement decided defunding police would be a policy goal, it lost a large chunk of its audience. Progressive Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey found himself on the wrong side of the issue while in a crowd of agitated protesters. They hurled invectives at him for not supporting the move to defund police, while Frey walk-of-shamed out of the crowd, looking precisely as defeated as he surely was. The city also considered entirely eliminating its police department in response to protester demands. Instead, Minneapolis Public Radio reports, “the City Council moved $1.1 million from the police to the health department to fund ‘violence interrupters’ who would mediate conflicts and head off further trouble.” The “violence interrupters” must not be succeeding. “Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police?’” said Councilman Jamal Osman. “That is the only public safety option they have at the moment. MPD. They rely on MPD. And they are saying they are nowhere to be seen.”
Where are the police we told to take a hike? Just like that, cities such as Minneapolis are living in a new reality they created in the heat of the moment. National parties and leaders are talking to themselves.
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter the organization has become a well-funded business, a logo seen on T-shirts and signs. During NBA games, “Black Lives Matter” is printed on the court alongside Disney and Vistaprint, just another brand. Yet as cities around the country continue to be set ablaze, the idea of black lives mattering rarely gets mentioned.
Instead, we hear a lot about “dismantling” the system, rejecting the premises on which America was founded and replacing it with something new. It’s not just the protesters either. Rep. Ilhan Omar called for this “dismantling,” saying: “We must recognize that these systems of oppression are linked. As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality. So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
Revolutionaries always wish to start over from the beginning. Whether Year Zero in Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Year One on the French Revolutionary Calendar, the past is gone and the future starts now.
We saw this summer the absurd focus on pulling down old statues. The reason, ostensibly, was to remove statues of the Confederacy, but the rioters quickly moved on to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Virgin Mary, Frederick Douglass, and on and on. Anyone who believed it had anything to do with black lives was kidding themselves. It was a campaign of what scholars such as Robert Bevan have called the physical “destruction of memory,” clearing the ground.
In July, Nancy Pelosi was asked about a Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore being ripped down by rioters: “Shouldn’t that be done by a commission or the City Council, not a mob in the middle of the night throwing it in the harbor?” Pelosi’s response? “People will do what they do.”
What does it matter, in other words, what leaders say and do? Here, the people rule, and the mystical forces of history operate on autopilot.
An important aspect of this mob mentality, though, is that the mob is misrepresenting the will of the masses: 73% of the public wants funding for police to stay the same or actually increase. This is not, in fact, people “doing what they do”; it’s a hijacking, plain and simple.
When two police officers were ambushed and shot in the head in Compton this month, Newsweek reported that protesters went to the hospital and tried to block the entrance while chanting despicable things. “Crowds of protesters blocked the entrance to St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, where the wounded officers were in a critical condition, police said. Some protesters chanted ‘we hope they die,’ the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter. A witness told ABC7 that some had tried to break into the hospital’s emergency room.”
That is not some nebulous example of people doing “what they do,” nor is it a ho-hum expression of a popular mandate. But if our political leaders insist it’s unpreventable zealotry stemming from a righteous heart, that’s exactly what it will become.
Shortly after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Twitter lit up with calls from prominent liberals promising violence and riots if Republicans try to push through a nominee. Reza Aslan, a writer and former CNN talking head, tweeted: “Over our dead bodies. Literally.” Writer Laura Bassett tweeted: “If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.”
The problem, of course, is that the riots are happening anyway. It once might have meant more than symbolic ethical bankruptcy when cultural elites threatened violence. Now, it’s just cluelessness — do they know what their country looks like at the moment? Would it matter if they did?
It’s an easy out to let folks such as Pelosi and big-city mayors throw their hands up and walk away. That’s an abdication. If our leaders believe America to be ungovernable, it will soon become so, no matter what dog-and-pony show takes place on the tip of the iceberg.
Karol Markowicz is a New York Post columnist and a Washington Examiner contributing writer.
