It is clear that mayhem in more than 70 cities across the United States is not merely a spontaneous outburst of public anger about the terrible death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed at the hands (and knee) of a white Minneapolis police officer.
It is true that there have been many large, peaceful demonstrations of justified outrage. But in an ironic act of cynical cultural appropriation, to which many commentators turn a blind eye, these have been traduced by white, left-wing militants, many dressed in antifa black, who visit vandalism, beatings, and even death on innocent citizens and the police.
There has also been a squalid orgy of mass looting, some organized and some opportunistic, which shows that even though genuine revolutionaries make up only a small minority, their ideology that all property is theft has spread and infected our culture like a pandemic.
Let’s focus on the revolutionaries. New York City’s deputy police commissioner, John Miller, says they operated with detailed targeting, advance scouts, encrypted communication, resupply routes for weapons (such as rocks, bottles, gasoline, and other fire accelerants), the raising of bail money for people who have been arrested, and medics in key locations.
“Disorder, property damage, violence, and violent encounters with the police [were planned] before the first demonstration or before the first arrest,” Miller concluded. This is obviously true.
We’re watching a social crackup linked to decades of leftward drift, moral relativism, and education displaced by propaganda. Generations have been inculcated with the fabrications of Howard Zinn, a professed Marxist and anarchist whose textbook on America is still in schools persuading children that their country is uniquely terrible, with an unbroken history of base betrayal, self-delusion, and hypocritical ideals.
This is also the view of antifa, a portmanteau word meaning “anti-fascist” that was coined by Soviet propagandists nearly a century ago to camouflage efforts to spread Stalinism, which was itself fascist. Under this pretense, antifa marauds America, attacking and terrorizing decent people.
If the view that America is evil were confined to those citizens willing to take up arms against the country, it would be markedly less dangerous. But Zinn was spectacularly successful in sowing doubts about America, and the uncertainty that he nurtured silences millions upon millions of people who might otherwise more vocally repudiate the revolutionaries. Many, mostly on the Left but also in the middle and on the Right, lack the cultural confidence to defend their great and good nation against the excoriation of its detractors. I doubt that any reader has not seen them fall silent, unsure of themselves, when critics are in full cry.
How will the worst civil unrest since the 1960s play out in the presidential election? Gerald Seib, in his smart Wall Street Journal column, looked for lessons from 1968 and 1979. In both, there were terrible crises: the Tet Offensive, implosion of the Johnson presidency, and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in the first and stagflation, gasoline shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and “malaise” in the second. Amid both, despairing voters reacted by turning against the incumbent party in hope of finding normalcy with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Do today’s pandemic, economic slump, and massive urban violence therefore doom President Trump? Will voters again turn on the incumbent? That is far from certain. Voters in 1968 and 1980 were not turning against only the incumbent but also against Democrats, against the party of the Left. In their anguish, they looked to the party that promised law, order, and a return to normalcy.
Does anyone cleareyed really think Republicans rather than Democrats are most associated with today’s crises? Look at antifa and the property-is-theft mob — are they on the Left or Right? Is it Republicans or Democrats who want to perpetuate a job-destroying economic shutdown and who equivocate about political violence? Which mayors and governors support the protests and take a hands-off approach to the protection of property? It’s Democrats. And liberals consistently parrot critical race theory to semijustify destruction as legitimate protest.
Joe Biden speaks against “needless destruction,” but Trump calls out “thugs,” which probably strikes a chord with voters who are dismayed by what they see happening to America. Biden utters bromides about tackling “systemic racism,” but almost everyone knows that America is less racist now than ever before, and his words, downplaying the truth about improvement, weakly echo the irredeemable hostility of America’s detractors.
Trump presides over our current crises and has done so in a characteristically incoherent and self-centered manner, but it would be no surprise if nationwide yearning for an end to unrest, for the protection of property, and for economic revival put him back into the Oval Office for another four years.
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