Joe Dunman in February, when briefly it seemed like there might be a viable future.
Dunman nails it: Bernie Sanders' agenda is "pretty much just 'catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.'"
Fast forward to now, and Joe Dunman on well-mannered left-wing protest movements (again at Twitter: @JoeDunman).
---
I'm a broken record on this but any serious reading about coups, uprisings, riots, and assassinations through global history will make you really appreciate how polite and patient American left-wing protest movements really are.
Modern right-wing protest movements, on the other hand, are bloody as hell. Spree killings, assassinations, bombings, beatings, you name it. The anti-abortion movement alone is an endless string of violent behavior. An incomplete list of victims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
That doesn't mean there's been NO left-wing violence, of course. There's been some. But compare the damage a crowd of thousands can do to what amount of damage they've actually done and it's really striking how passive they are.
The thousands of people now showing up nightly in Portland could very easily and very quickly take and destroy that federal building. Instead they play endless games of chemical weapons tag with a couple dozen goons in riot gear.
It is estimated that 500k people showed up to the Women's March in DC in early 2017. Do you know what 500k people can't do? Nothing. They can do anything they want, if they work together in even the loosest possible way. Instead, signs and slogans, and everybody went home.
Mayors Wheeler and Frey and Fischer still walk freely around their cities with the barest security if any at all. They don't fear retaliation from demonstrators, and rightly so, because demonstrators have shown no interest in extra-institutional forms of justice.
Historically speaking, this is really something. Hell, lynchings were (and perhaps still are) a regular occurrence in America. Violent mob justice is part of our culture. And yet, protesters' demands are limited to institutional calls for action. Arrest the cops! Defund them!
Of course the counter-rhetoric paints protesters as lawless and destructive in cartoonish ways. But if the protesters were as violent as they've been portrayed, there probably wouldn't be any cops left to arrest. No departments to defund. No mayors left to resign.
---
(for the next few days, I'll be titling my posts after songs. That should confuse them even more)
No comments:
Post a Comment