Riots

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2021 World edition.  The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return. Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us.

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years. The site's senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of 'the Riot Squad', a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives. Cockburn couldn't be bothered to watch the whole mini-documentary (seriously, must everything be a video these days?

President Biden made an outrageous error on Tuesday when he decided to opine on the pending verdict in the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd. 'I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict. Which is — I think it’s overwhelming in my view,' Biden told reporters. 'I wouldn't say that but the jury has been sequestered now and cannot hear me say that.' Unlike Rep. Maxine Waters, who riled up protesters on Saturday, Biden's statement came after the jury started deliberations and thus likely cannot be considered tampering. That does not mean it is not still deeply irresponsible. In the US justice system, it is the jury's responsibility to determine if someone is 'guilty' or 'not guilty' based on their findings of fact in the case.

The causes of violent rioting and looting are complicated and often include real, unaddressed grievances. One thing is clear, though: looting has few winners and many losers. The losers in the long run are often those breaking the windows and making off with the bling. Many of us are trying to get a handle on the unrest we’ve witnessed in 2020. History doesn’t repeat itself, and, pace Mark Twain, it may not even rhyme, but sometimes a little context helps, if only to suggest possibilities. The considerable scholarly literature on the ‘race riots’ of the 1960s is mostly sympathetic to the rioters. It excuses or at least countenances violence because its authors share what they perceive to be the rioters’ goals: racial equality, social justice and the like.

As has been my habit for the last few presidential elections, the afternoon of Election Day found me in Manhattan at a discreet, semi-secure, undisclosed location for a long and thoughtful lunch. The 2016 iteration of this ceremony was exceedingly thoughtful and found some of our party pushing luncheon well into tea time. Indeed, it was about 11:30 p.m. on election night 2016 when, smiling in front of my computer, I had a call from the last hold out from our band of what Athenaeus called Δειπνοσοφισταί, 'learned banqueters’, still brightening the corridors of our place of congregation.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the 'right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better.

Portland has had one of the most turbulent histories of any town in America. At the time of the Great Depression it was as rowdy a riverfront port as Shanghai or Marseille, where some shopkeepers still took their payment in gold, women in tight skirts loitered in doorways on Salmon Street, and loggers drank and gambled away the afternoon.Then Portland enjoyed an economic boom, largely thanks to government shipbuilding contracts, and quickly cleaned up its act. If you happened to have visited from around 1945-65, you would have been struck by the long rows of neat clapboard houses, most with a US flag fluttering out front, and a waterfront area conspicuously free of girly bars and vomit.

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’ The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous.

It is the law that makes us 'the best of animals.' So saying, Aristotle had a very specific conception of justice in mind: 'The law is reason free from passion.' Committed to live under it, mankind is 'perfected.' There is, however, a flip side. 'When separated from law and justice,' as happens when passion overwhelms reason, mankind 'is the worst of all.' Which would make this the worst of times. The streets of America’s greatest cities are aflame. Some of it is anarchic. Most of it is methodical mayhem. Cultural Marxists are not merely desecrating statuary, they are erasing history. Naturally, this is done under the guise of ideals such as ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-fascism’, and ‘equality’.