By DOUG SHAVER
July 24, 2020
From the ABC News website yesterday about the goings-on in Portland, Ore.:
Protesters in this liberal, predominantly white city have taken to the streets peacefully every day for more than five weeks to decry police brutality.
This is political semantics in full force. There are, or used to be, constitutionally legitimate laws against disturbing the peace. If I cannot go into downtown Portland to conduct my routine business because of a mob of protesters, then those protesters are disturbing my peace. They are therefore not engaged in peaceable assembly and therefore are not protected by the First Amendment.
Some of their defenders will say I am the one playing semantic games. So be it. That is what public debate is for. It is how reasonable people resolve such disagreements. But reasonable people are not running this nation any more. A few are still trying to regain control, but they are too few and their efforts are probably too late. The second American civil war has begun, and we are witnessing the Battle of Portland.
We have also witnessed an interesting rhetorical reversal. For years, progressives have assured us that we ordinary people, unenlightened by academic studies of race and gender, routinely commit acts of violence by the way we talk about certain victims of oppression. Barely 20 years ago, when I was new to Internet discussion forums, it was considered a truism that nobody had a right not to be offended. Now, it seems, all except privileged people have such a right. And because of my demographic characteristics, I am privileged, and so if I offend any non-privileged person, I commit violence against them.
But if a mob of thugs calling themselves protesters invade my house, steal my property and then set fire to the house, they commit no violence as long as I suffer no personal injury. And, because they committed no violence, it was a peaceful protest.
The rejoinder will be: Of course not. Your personal property is one thing. Government property is another.
But government property is public property, which by definition makes it everybody's property. Of course there is a necessary distinction between personal and public property, but the distinction doesn't erase this fact: If you steal public property, you steal from me, and if you destroy public property, you destroy something that is mine.
And the thugs will then say: By your argument, it is our property, too, and we can do as we wish with it. But no. If it is everybody's property, then you can do with it only what everybody wants. Of course this raises a problem. Not everybody wants to do the same thing with public property. But that is why we have representative government, with public debates, votes, and procedures whereby those who feel their interests were not adequately represented to petition for redress of their grievances.
And then the thugs will say: We tried all that, and our grievances were ignored. If rioting is the only way to get your attention, then we must riot.
So be it. But if local law enforcement cannot or will not quell the riots, then we have a power vacuum, and some other agency that can and will quell them will move in. That cliche about nature abhoring a vacuum is not true in general, but it is very true of human nature and any power vacuum. People who perceive a benefit to controlling a situation will take control if they can, and they will use any means available to them.
Whether most of the protesters understand any of this is quite beside the point. They no doubt surely believe in good faith that they are doing nothing more than exercising their rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and petition for redress of grievances, because other people whose opinions they respect have told them so. What the opinion leaders themselves believe could be something entirely different, but the mobs aren't asking them any questions. The mobs are just showing the world how much they sympathize with the nation's victims of oppression.
This will start to sound like a conspiracy theory, but you don't need a conspiracy when you have a consensus, and the ABC News article reveals the consensus within the mainstream press. It is taken for granted by the typical journalist that (a) the protests are just about police brutality and social justice and (b) the killing of George Floyd was sufficient evidence that the nation's police are characteristically brutal and (c) this brutality is primarily if not exclusively motivated by racism.
Many journalists do reject this consensus, and they say so on any platform that will let them, but the establishment that runs the mainstream media calls them far-right apologists for racism and believes they have thus discredited anything they say. Mainstream journalism is no longer about speaking truth to power. It is about empowering truth, as mainstream journalists define truth. And the truth, so defined, is becoming very empowered. Empowered enough to have already started the next civil war.
The linked article, like many others since this all began, has much to say about how so many of the protesters insist that they disapprove of the destruction and the occasionally incontrovertible instances of unprovoked violence. Very well. We cannot blame the majority for the behavior of a thuggish minority within their midst. But, the thugs will always take advantage of situations like this, and we can blame the majority's leadership for ignoring this fact—assuming they actually did ignore it, and I'm not taking their word for it that they did.
Progressives are not the only Americans who think this nation is rotten to the core. People on the fascist right—the real one—think so, too, and they have no objection even in theory to provoking deadly violence in ways that make their adversaries seem to be the provocoteurs. We can all agree that this should not happen, but progressives seem to have adopted a selective reverse naturalistic fallacy. Instead of inferring ought from is, they infer is from ought: In some situations, whatever should be the case, is the case, and we're justified in acting accordingly.
In the present situation, any faction—on the left, on the right, or anywhere else—if convinced that the republic needs to be destroyed, is presented with a golden opportunity to make that happen. And if several such factions see that opportunity, none of them needs to be in overall control. It is enough that each of them understands the notion of divide and conquer. It is a notion that thugs understand instinctively. The thugs don't need to be allied in this enterprise. They certainly won't be allied when it's over, and they know that. It makes no difference. Each faction can work on its own while doing the dividing. They won't need to fight each other until the dividing is done. Then they can go after each other; but by that time, it won't matter to the rest of us which of them conquers all the others.
Next: Some political philosophy
(This page last updated on July 24, 2020.)