It turns out that the presence of federal law enforcement officers was not the source of violence in Portland that it was made out to be. Violence has continued weeks after their withdrawal.
It has continued, not only in Portland, where a man was shot and killed over the weekend, but in several places around the country. Kenosha erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. A couple of weeks before that, Chicago’s Miracle Mile suffered what some leftists called a “proletarian shopping spree” (what the rest of us call mass looting). Other examples abound.
The continuing unrest is obviously turning into a rather serious liability for the Democratic Party around the country, prompting eleventh-hour denunciations. The hollowness of Democrats’ denunciations of violence and looting is amplified by the fact that they come nowhere near the fierceness of their denunciations of the police, employing modest efforts to restore order.
The Democrats’ previous approach of addressing the untenable problem by ignoring it, evidenced by thundering silence on the issue at the Democratic National Convention, has been at least partially abandoned, leaving the party in a bit of a fix. Democrats can no longer openly tolerate the violence that is leaving parts of some cities looking like Dresden.
At the same time, they can hardly embrace the police and the efforts necessary to enhance public order after months of railing against them. The question, political and practical, hovers over what the government’s response to the disorder ought to be. Some attempts were made earlier in the summer, and may be resurrected, to equate the unrest in places such as Portland with that in Hong Kong.
The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor penned a column back on July 27, reductionist even by the paper’s exacting standards, entitled “The echoes of Hong Kong in Portland,” which echoes the best of the Soviet-U.S. equivocacy in journalism in the last century.
It’s not surprising that liberals would want to make that particular pivot. The Hong Kong protesters have, rightfully, garnered almost universal sympathy. Even the New York Times editorial board is ostensibly siding with Hong Kong, having apparently discovered in Xi Jinping a communist dictator with whom the outlet, at long last, finds offense.
There are obvious distinctions to be made, once one gets past the sophistry of superficial comparisons. Even Tharoor emerged briefly from the confines of fanatical relativism to admit, almost apologetically, that “protesters in the United States aren’t arrayed against a single-party dictatorship bent on snuffing out their waning political autonomy.”
It is notable that the Hong Kong protesters rejected the rhetorical narcotic that has intoxicated demonstrators — and indeed the bulk of corporate America, professional sports, and many in media — around the U.S. since late May. Their message has, in many ways, been diametrically opposed: They are fighting against, rather than demanding, the dismissal of professors and public figures who deviate from approved thought.
They protest, rather than agitate for, a “cancel culture,” desperately opposing a Chinese government that elevated canceling culture to a cruel science in the 1960s and is proving quite adept at methodically canceling Uighur culture. “Police brutality” in Communist China means something profoundly different than it does on the streets of Chicago, Denver, or San Francisco.
It is not incongruous to abhor the regime that forbids dissent, and sympathize with dissidents of that regime, while simultaneously abhorring violent opponents of order in a free society and supporting the state’s duty to repress that violence. The first, and most legitimate, role of government in a free society is to establish order under the rule of law. It is the prerequisite condition for human freedom.
Relinquishing that duty in the face of mob discontent bears consequences that are difficult to reverse. Among other things, it creates a vacuum, which will be filled increasingly by private citizens, resulting in further incidents as witnessed recently in Kenosha and Portland. Nor will fettering the police placate the ideological mob, for which no reform short of revolution will be sufficient.
Professor Harry Jaffa illustrated the necessary distinction vividly when he wrote to remind us that “no American statesman ever violated the ordinary maxims of civil liberties more than did Abraham Lincoln, and few seem to have been more careful of them than Jefferson Davis.” Jaffa continued, “Yet the cause for the sake of which one slighted these maxims was human freedom, while the other, claiming to defend the forms of constitutional government, found in those forms a ground for defending and preserving human slavery.”
Concern over civil liberties is understandable, especially in a time when certain local and state governments have arguably been hyperactive in the application of emergency powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But we would do well to be reminded of Alexander Hamilton’s warning in “Federalist 51,” that if government is to submit to the absurd congeries of the moment, “we shall be obliged to conclude that the United States will afford the extraordinary spectacle of a government destitute even of the shadow of constitutional power to enforce the execution of its own laws.”
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant and columnist.
