The images on TV news are misleading. They can’t be otherwise. TV news seeks out the most dramatic visuals, and those are likely to be small fires and burning vehicles, police cars damaged, and riot-clad police.
These are images associated with violence, with insurrection, with riot. They help create a narrative, but they do little to explain what is actually happening in Los Angeles — and elsewhere. They obscure the truth by eliding complex discussion. And they feed into right-wing talking points that Democratic cities and states like L.A. and California are ungovernable, and that the federal government has to step in to restore order and protect average working Americans from insurrection.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, however. Federal immigration agents — masked and in military-style garb — descended on Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs to conduct workplace raids and the mass round-ups of undocumented workers. The communities responded with protests and active efforts to deny agents access to immigrant workers.
Violence followed (I use the passive voice here because the specific point of ignition is hard to identify).
The Associated Press (https://apnews.com/article/rodney-king-riots-national-guard-los-angeles-69114889118a85f8f29c4d76c076a45f) offers what I think is a clear overview of what has been happening, reporting that
protests have mainly been peaceful and been confined to a roughly five-block stretch of downtown LA, a tiny patch in the sprawling city of nearly 4 million people. No one has died. There’s been vandalism and some cars set on fire but no homes or buildings have burned.
More than 100 people have been arrested over the past several days of protests. The vast majority of arrests were for failing to disperse, while a few others were for assault with a deadly weapon, looting, vandalism and attempted murder for tossing a Molotov cocktail.
Several officers have had minor injuries and protesters and some journalists have been struck by some of the more than 600 rubber bullets and other “less-lethal” munitions fired by police.
Note the sober, mostly straightforward language, the way the writer attempts not to inflame the discussion. It is far from the kind of hyperbole we are getting from politicians on both sides of the aisle, as Trump and his acolytes among Republicans seek to use the protests as pretext for something darker, and Democrats toss the protesters under the proverbial bus as they try to manage the political implications.
The focus of both is on a few acts of violence or vandalism. Democrats nod to the protests’ causes but do little to address them, fearing a backlash on the immigration question.
Instead, we get a kind of moralizing history lesson that misreads our own past and the ways in which the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and antiwar movements and the Puerto Rican and Chicano liberation movements, were marked by violence, usually from the state.
I posted this the other day to a Facebook thread that offered one of those “White Liberal” responses, the kind in which people like me who are comfortable and think we are on the right side of history tell those on the front lines how they should act.
I don’t condone violence, but it is understandable in the circumstances. Liberal condemnations in this case will ring hollow because few ever condemn state violence. The state has a monopoly and in this case is run by a corrupt racist using it — in the form of ICE and the National Guard (with its history of overreaction) — against vulnerable people, mostly of color. What we also know is Trump makes no distinction between peaceful and violent protest. Both, in his mind, violate order, and should be punished with violence.
This, to me, sums up what we’ve been watching, and I think it is consistent with the history of nonviolent movements in the United States and abroad. We are fond of quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arguments in favor of nonviolence, but we elide the context. We reduce King to the caricature — civil, passive, almost inert — ignoring that his theory of nonviolence was based on direct action and an aggressive disruption of the status quo.
The lunch-counter sit-ins were far from non-violent. Activists like John Lewis put their bodies in the direct path of violent and racist thugs, forcing integration of segregated restaurants and buses knowing their actions would be provocative. The activists were trained not to respond, but to call their protests non-violent is to rewrite history — which is what the defenders of state authority and the status quo are doing.
Tressie McMillan Cottom makes this point during a discussion on The New York Times Opinion podcast:
You know, we love the civil rights movement as the paradigmatic case of civil disobedience in this country. There was a lot of violence during the civil rights movement. This sort of romanticization that we have of it as being peaceful — this was not a strategy about moral will. Being peaceful was used to highlight how much state violence was being enacted against people.
I think it’s important to keep that in mind in part because there’s no equation in my mind between throwing rocks, while you may think it is distasteful, and just the sheer amount of violent power that exists on the other side — not just in sheer weaponry, but the legal power and the legal violence that the state can use against protesters. Having said all of that, even accepting, I think, the framing of this as being a violence happening on both sides, concedes a point that ultimately fuels Donald Trump’s position that force demands force.
Her point is important. Reacting to largely peaceful protests with the excesses of state power is usually what turns peaceful protests into pitched battles. The violence flares from the anger, and from the sense that they have no choice. To quote King: “Riot is the language of the unheard.”
In this case, it is the language of defense. As Natasha Leonard writes in The Intercept:
In reality, the protesters throwing rocks at heavily armed security forces or attempting to damage the vehicles used to kidnap their immigrant neighbors did not introduce violence. They are instead acting in militant community defense.
During the unrest in Baltimore in 2015 after the police murder of Freddie Gray, we heard quite a lot from the purveyors of state power asking protesters to stand down. City and state officials — “Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a column for The Atlantic at the time — suddenly were advocates for nonviolence.
“When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality,” Coates said,
it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.
Again, I think violence is ultimately counterproductive and morally questionable. But, as Coates says, it is not unexpected. It is, as Marc Cooper writes, “a product of RAGE.”
A rage that has been building for months and years against an addled dictatorial President who if I remember correctly pardoned 1600 criminals from January 6th, many of whom committed ghastly acts of violence against uniformed police and engaged in horrific property destruction around and inside the U.S. Capitol. The Trump administration lacks all moral credibility in condemning the violence it is being met with.
The refusal to see this — and I have to admit that, in the past, I have missed this point — is what Cottom rightly calls “equivocation.” Who is to blame if “you lead protesters to a space where they have no choice but to enact what I would consider the violence of protecting themselves as they try to enact civil disobedience”? And why do Democrats and liberals instinctively rally to the side of the state? This is not just a question about Trump. Trump’s actions here — both his immigration crackdown and his decision to federalize the response to the protests and literally call in the Marines over the objections of state leaders— goes beyond anything we have witnessed in recent decades. But the abuses of state power are not Trump’s alone.
This failed border regime is one that “Democrats helped build for over three decades," Leonard points out. Much of the blame falls on the Republicans, to be sure, for refusing any compromise, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about where Democrats have stood and continue to stand. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for N.J. governor, offered a typical response when asked earlier this year about NJ Immigrant Trust Act, which wold codify a state attorney general directive that prevents cooperation between local and county law enforcement — including corrections facilities — with federal immigration authorities.
Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor, noted that the directive has already withstood judicial review (a federal appeals court rejected a challenge to it in 2021). She said she worries that taking additional action would allow for a new challenge that could make it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I also share concerns raised by a wide range of people that the bill must be clear about criminal consequences for those who commit violent offenses,” she said in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.
This is what Cottom means by equivocation, and it tracks with the party’s approach over the last three decades.
Just review the language used by every Democratic president since at least Bill Clinton. It is softer than what you hear from Trump, but not demonstrably different in intent. Clinton, Obama, and Biden all focused on border security and did little to open real pathways to entry or to legal status. Obama’s DACA program — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was put in place alongside a massive increase in border security and deportations.
Too many comfortable liberals sit at home twisting their knickers and doing nothing, not even bothering to nod at the existential threat being faced by the workers being rounded up and treated like animals. Most are more concerned with image than with the morality of what is happening — it’s about how the TV images will play among swing voters and what it will mean for the mid-terms (not unimportant), with seemingly no understanding that none of what is happening right now fits the previous scripts.
Trump has been writing a new narrative for the United States since he came down the escalator in 2015 and announced what too many dismissed as a vanity campaign. Over the last 10 years, he has grown bolder and more authoritarian in his views and approach to governing. This is causing real harm to real people, as well as significant damage to the structures and norms that have allowed our flawed democracy to function for 236 years.
Immigration enforcement is the tip of Trump’s authoritarian spear. We knew this would be the case, that he would ignore the courts and democratic norms, and turn his promised mass deportation into spectacle, using it to underscore a sense of us (real Americans) and them (immigrants, their defenders) and shatter whatever norms are left. What we are witnessing — his denigration of the courts, use of the military on American soil, and attacks on the administrative state, his glorification of strength and masculinity, and overt racism, sexism, and transphobia and homophobia — is Trump raising himself as savior not of a nation, not of a political entity, but of a people. It is blood and soil, a nascent fascism.
“Fascism,” Timothy Snyder writes in The Road to Unfreedom, “is about a sacred and eternal connection between the redeemer and his people. A fascist presents institutions and laws as the corrupt barriers between leader and folk that must be circumvented or destroyed.”
Elections are important, but they cannot save us if the political structure and norms have been razed. What we are witnessing in Los Angeles — and across the country, even in places like Omaha, Neb. — is not some kind of immoral insurrection, but a more aggressive and necessary resistance.
