Cracks in the Establishment's Wall We Didn’t See in 1968
Comparisons have been made between the current wave of protests and those we saw at various points in 1968. “Riots” following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and during the Democratic National Convention led many observers to believe change was at hand.
Instead, the nation went with the Law and Order candidate. The war on drugs got its start. And the Southern strategy of the Republcan party gave refuge and comfort to a generation of Dixiecrats.
Richard Nixon became the focus of protests. Each nationally televised press conference was watched for signs that the next wave of evil was to be unleashed upon the American people. Anti-war organizers tried mightily to broaden the scope of anti-war protests, but it was the behavior of the president and his minions that drove people into the streets.
A group of us up and coming baby boomers thought the “system” was set to self-destruct. I remember an argument between roommates over whether paying the phone bill was necessary because the imminent fall of capitalism would make the question moot. (We paid it when the cut off notice came.)
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate wrote about the differences between now and then, and concluded the answer can be found in the heart and soul of the protests of each era. As was true of the initial protests of the current era, the fervor back in the day was focused on an individual leader.
Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.
Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.
Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.
The protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are different. Despite five decades of activism in San Diego, I couldn’t begin to name even one of the people involved leading in local protests. I look at the images coming out of protests nationwide and notice that my generation (and my race) aren’t over represented for a change.
https://twitter.com/Kristen_Taketa/status/1268293210138345472?s=20
What is also different is the speed at which this generalized dissent has spread to the local level.
While Mayor Faulconer and the “right” side of the city’s establishment may have thought they were ahead of the curve in announcing the end of police using the carotid restraint and supporting an independent citizen’s review panel, I doubt they were prepared for the 11 hour City Council meeting on Tuesday, where hundreds of people logged in to express opposition to next year’s police budget.
The Council also voted -unanimously-- to move forward on a rental assistance policy for San Diegans that would have been inconceivable just a few weeks ago.
https://twitter.com/lucasoconnor/status/1267980149154144256?s=20
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Despite the almost unbelievable fawning of Republicans in the U.S, Senate, there are clear signs that the U.S. military establishment has had enough of Donald Trump.
Defense Secretary Esper has broken with the administration (let’s see if they can make him walk it back before they fire him) over the use of US armed forces via the 1807 insurrection act.
I’ve seen letters from the leadership of both the Army and the Navy addressed to personnel under their command distancing themselves from the administration.
From the Washington Post:
The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad — the massing of protesters, the ensuing crackdowns and the awkwardly staged displays of strength by a leader determined to project authority.
In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.
“I’ve seen this kind of violence,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.”
https://twitter.com/jamiedupree/status/1268287402507976705?s=20
While there certainly were rank and file objections/protests during the Nixon era, the fact that active brass are willing to make “read-between-the-lines” kinds of statements, is significant.
No, this doesn’t mean the military’s gonna rise up. And it doesn’t mean that the military industrial complex is any less interested in making money and keeping up their influence. It does mean they’re hedging their bets. THAT never happened in the 1960s.
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At the heart of these protests is the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” A half dozen years ago, pushback against the phrase and the movement it represents was commonplace.
All Lives Matter was coined by those willing to deny the truth to preserve their privilege. Blue Lives Matter was coined as code for ‘we support cops’ (wink, wink) beating up those people.
For all the hateful rhetoric and outright lies of the Trump administration, in 2020 the public seems to be getting it.
We at Civiqs have been tracking public attitudes around Black Lives Matter for three years. So we have something no one else does—we can see where we came from, and what impact the current wave of racial justice protests is having on public opinion. And, the short version of it is, the protests are having a dramatic positive impact on the fight for racial justice:
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The folks at Buzzfeed tracked law enforcement / military aircraft activity over San Diego this past weekend. See if you can guess where the protests were:
As crowds protesting police brutality swelled in cities across the United States this weekend, law enforcement agencies and the National Guard took to the skies — watching from hundreds of helicopters and planes circling overhead.
Surveillance planes are always in action over the nation. To give an overview of the airborne response to the current civil unrest, we mapped flights by local police, state and federal law enforcement, and military planes from 7 p.m. Central Time on Friday, May 29, to 7 p.m. Central Time on Sunday, May 31. The locations of large demonstrations coincided with the most intense aircraft activity.
We identified law enforcement aircraft from information on their operators in the Federal Aviation Administration’s registration database and tracked them using signals from the planes’ transponders compiled at the crowdsourced flight-tracking website ADS-B Exchange.
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And finally, here’s what Fox News is doing as things look bad for their man in the White House:
https://twitter.com/PhilippeReines/status/1268164620260343809?s=20
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