As I
write this, America is four months into the Coronavirus lockdown and one month
into the George Floyd Riots. Are these two things unrelated? Probably not –
when all the news that came in this spring seemed tailored to convince people
that 1) normal life is over, and 2) the authorities are incompetent, forces
like the ones we’re seeing in action right now were bound to come out of the
woodwork sooner or later.
Could
anyone have predicted in advance that the outcome would be a riot whose theme – as if to satisfy the natural human desire for variety – would smoothly flow from “black
lives matter,” to “defund the police,” to “all statues are racist,” as rioters
rushed forth to topple Union and Confederate memorials alike? Probably not, though
the basic elements have long been in place.
Three
weeks ago, I wrote an article about the riots in which I bluntly stated that
the forces of law and order are all pushovers. Since then, nothing has happened
to make me change my mind. At the beginning of the fiasco, you had the
Minneapolis Police Department staging a “tactical retreat” and letting
“protesters” burn their police station. Now, you have the Mayor of Birmingham
taking down his city’s Civil War monument on the grounds that he would rather pay a $25,000 fine (for violating the state law against removing statues) than
deal with continuing unrest.
As
before, the chaos has generated plenty of howls of impotent outrage from right
wing media. Here is a typical example from Breitbart, excerpt below:
“With the
ongoing 1619 Riots, that were sparked with the death of George Floyd, the
establishment media and elected Democrats finally did it — finally decided to
show their true colors and desperation by openly embracing, championing, and
encouraging violence. Before the 1619 Riots, as a country, on the right and
left, we all agreed there was one line that could never be crossed; that we
could never, ever, ever condone or encourage violence of any kind. You see, we
all knew that was the slippery slope to hell. We all knew our civilization and
democracy depended on…”
Any
well-educated conservative or libertarian can look back across the last century-and-a-half
of American history and see the step by step unravelling of the constitution
and way of life that our founders gave us: The rise and growth of imperialism, the
Federal Reserve Act, the New Deal, the usurpation of the war-making power by
the President, the Warren Court’s displacement of Congress as America’s top legislature,
and the Sexual Revolution (i.e. the reason that most American children no
longer grow up with both parents).
We can
all see the welfare state, the takeover of our education system by central
planners and the ensuing collapse in its quality, the combination of
overregulation and a loose monetary policy which has made American
manufacturing uncompetitive and ruined the economic prospects of the working
class, the fact that America now has the world’s highest incarceration rate, and
so forth.
How,
then, can someone conclude that statue-toppling, of all things, is what has finally put us on the wrong side of the civilization-vs-barbarism line?
Now I could
just say that Breitbart is exaggerating the importance of the present moment in
order to get more clicks – i.e. for the same reason that so many Democratic
news sources insisted that the 2018 midterm was the most important election in
their viewers’ lifetimes. But I think that something bigger is going on here.
America’s
mainstream conservatives are howling in agony because, after more than a
century of trading their liberty for safety, they are seeing that the bargain
has gone sour. They’re not getting any safety.
Take
another look at that Breitbart quote. The article says that, up to this point,
the fundamental consensus at the heart of American society was that “we all
agreed there was one line that could never be crossed; that we could never,
ever, ever condone or encourage violence of any kind.”
What happens if you look
at this from the point of view of its supposed audience, people who admire
George Washington and the other American founders? Does the Breitbart claim
make any sense? Did Washington and his comrades believe that violence was
always wrong?
No, they
didn’t. If you had asked these men what they thought the basic principle
undergirding American society was, they would probably have described some sort
of consensus about the rights and liberties of the newly independent United
States, which the American people had a mutual duty to defend, against both
foreign powers and government overreach, using violence if necessary.
But what
happened sometime between 1776 and today is that the fundamental ethos of American
right-wing politics shifted away from “these are our rights, and we will
spill our blood to defend them,” and toward “nothing that goes on
in politics ought ever to endanger my life or my property or my job or my social
status.”
And now
the right is gnashing its teeth because, after giving up so much liberty in exchange for
safety, the left is laughing at it and refusing to deliver the goods. Since people
on the right have forgotten how to engage in confrontational politics – even
when, like President Trump, they are holding important offices – they can’t
actually do anything to hold the left to its end of the bargain. That the deal
is being broken for such a stupid reason – all cops are bastards and all statues
are racist – just rubs salt in the wound.
Now, I ought to make it clear that I,
personally, don’t think that immediate revolutionary violence would have been
the right answer to all of the abuses of power that I listed a few paragraphs up.
Nor do I think that the right is in a good position to have a revolution –
violent or otherwise – today. What people have got to understand is that
violence is only the top of a whole pyramid of risky, disruptive, and otherwise
confrontational acts that people have got to engage in from time to time to in
order to win or maintain their freedoms.
The
participants in the Boston Tea Party, for instance, never caused bodily injury
to anyone, and they were careful to harm no property other than the tea they
were dumping into the harbor. It was when Parliament overreacted to this very
limited action, by suspending the Massachusetts legislature and closing the
Port of Boston to the innocent and the guilty alike, that violence became a
necessity in the eyes of most of Massachusetts’ colonists.
After
independence was won, the new nation faced its first constitutional crisis with
the Alien and Sedition Acts. Basically, what happened was that Congress passed
a law which made it illegal to criticize the government. The state legislatures
of Virginia and Kentucky then passed unanimous resolutions stating that the
Sedition Act was unconstitutional, and absolving their citizens of the duty to
obey it. Was this a risky move? You bet. Colonial legislatures had been
dissolved for defying Parliament just a few decades earlier.
But it
worked – most Americans sided with Virginia and Kentucky and saw the new law as
illegitimate; most printers refused to obey it; many printers who got charged
with sedition were acquitted by sympathetic juries, and one who wasn't –
Matthew Lyon – ended up as the only American elected to Congress while in jail.
Fairly soon, the Sedition act was gone and the men responsible for it had been
voted out of office.
The story
continues in much the same vein. As America began its westward growth, thousands of abolitionists risked imprisonment to defy the fugitive slave laws long before their views prevailed in the corridors of power. In 1857, it was Benjamin Curtis’ surprising willingness to give up one of the highest offices in the land - by resigning from the Supreme Court in protest of the Dred Scott decision - that undermined that decision's legitimacy to a degree that has never been seen with any Supreme Court decision since.
In
the twentieth century, great gains have been made by various movements willing
to employ boycotts, strikes, illegal marches and sit-ins, and other
confrontational tactics; what they all had in common was a willingness to take
personal risks in order to disrupt business-as-usual and force a confrontation
with one’s political opponents, from which the easiest course of action (for
the opponents) was to back down.
This way
of doing things is alien to the modern right, which is why the modern right has
such a losing record. Consider the case of Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla,
who was fired after word got out that he had supported the winning side
in California’s Proposition 8 election over same sex marriage. Since people who
voted with Eich were in the majority, it would probably have been easy
for a strike among other Mozilla employees who shared his views to force the
board of directors to change its mind.
But the
right showed no solidarity. The other conservative employees chose to keep
their heads down in the hopes of taking home a few more paychecks before the
sky fell in on them too. And that’s why people who say the wrong things about sexual
deviants are getting fired like a bunch of dogs from academia, the medical profession,
and woke corporations across America. If they stood together, they could have put
an end to it – those industries wouldn’t have been able to handle the sudden
loss of a third or so of their personnel – but conservatives instead have chosen
to let themselves get picked off one by one.
And then
there are the men who have to deal with ex-wives or school counselors trying
to change their children’s genders without their consent. My two cents are that
if this ever happens to you, then you had best get out of the country as soon as you can.
Sure, it will mean giving up your job and the various comforts of American life,
but when your child is at risk of being sterilized and mutilated, what’s the holdup?
Vladimir Putin has treated Edward Snowden well; someone fleeing the transgender
movement would probably be met with a similarly warm welcome in his country. If
a little snow isn’t up your alley, you could take your case to the asylum
courts of Manilla instead; Rodrigo Duterte has about the same attitude toward
Western degeneracy that Putin does.
I’ve said
before that if it were my child on the line, I would be willing to hijack a
plane to Siberia if that’s what it took. And yet the transgender child cases that
I have seen in the media have never ended with a parent taking even the simple
expedient of walking across the wide-open Mexican border.
Perhaps
you remember the case of Alfie Evans, the British baby who died in a hospital
two years ago after the NHS decided that his life wasn’t worth trying to
preserve, and got a court order to forbid his parents from taking him to Italy
for experimental treatment. One might ask oneself, if the unjust killings of
people like Eric Garner and George Floyd can lead to riots, why was there no
“Alfie Evans Riot?”
And one
might answer that it’s because people on the right know that burning and
looting private property isn’t an ethical way to protest one’s grievances against
the government – which is a good point. But the thing is, the Alfie Evans
protestors didn’t even engage in carefully-targeted vandalism against one of
the guiltier government agencies, a la Boston Tea Party. Nor did they
take hostages and offer to release them on condition that the baby was sent to
Italy, nor did they do anything else that might make the authorities reluctant
to repeat the same course of action the next time a baby with a mysterious
disease lays wasting away in a British hospital.
What we
have right now, across the western world, is a political order in which one
side is willing, like the Founding Fathers, to stick their necks out for their
cause and engage in a lot of confrontational politics, plus the occasional act
of violence, when it suits their purposes. On the other side of the aisle, people
are generally content to signal their beliefs in the most low-risk, low-reward
ways possible – this is the reason, for example, why President Trump’s role in
the present unrest has mostly been that of tweeter-in-chief.
As long
as conservatives have a job to walk back to the next morning, most of them are
willing to let the political winds blow in whatever way the left decides
to steer them. That’s how they ended up accepting a system in which only the
other side got to be disruptive, and as each of their freedoms was lost, they
comforted themselves by saying, ‘at least we’re still free from violence.’
But now the time has come that they aren’t free from that, either.
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