Culture War And Civil War

Hypothesis: Black Lives Matter riots, Antifa riots, Jan 6, and the Canadian trucker convoy — and all the European and Australian analogs to these — have something in common that we need to acknowledge if we don’t want to keep pushing people closer and closer to civil war.

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Peaceful protest is nothing new. These recent events, however, have taken on a character that I have spent the last two years telling my children: This is not normal for our country.

I’m old. Born near the end of US engagement in Vietnam, reared in the post-segregation world, often-times oblivious to just how different, socially, the world of my boomer-parents’ youth was to my own. If you’re Gen X, you grew up with the Cold War as your defining paradigm, but not with a nation on fire.

And here is what I have to say, watching arson on the left and occupations on the right become far too normal: We need to stop creating whole classes of people who have nothing to lose.

I am not legitimizing lawlessness. I am saying: It doesn’t come from nowhere. We need to be honest with ourselves about that fact.

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Lately an awful lot of people have been experiencing extremes of marginalization.

Nothing left to lose economically.

Some examples:

The entire gig-economy, descendent of the part-time servant-class economy.
Insane student debt burden as the entry-fee to middle-class employment, and somehow it’s legal for an 18-year-old to take on six-figure loans in pursuit of that dream — same kid who reputedly lacks the decision-making capability to be trusted with a can of beer?
Housing market booms and busts that wreck family financial security, but for which reckless bankers get bailed out and subsidized.
And yes, blanket vaccine mandates that push people out of work, even those who risked their lives keeping the world running pre-vaccine, even when the established science doesn’t support the stated purpose of a given mandate.

There are more and more people every year, from more and more different walks of life, who are getting a clear message: There’s no room for people like you in this economy. You get to just be poor.

Nothing left to lose socially.

People care about their reputations and they care about their place in the world.

The rhetoric of “deplorables”? Branding as “white supremacists” a movement in Canada that was taken up by many, many non-white people? The French president openly taunting the vaccine-hesitant with his plans to f*ck with them?

I know people who’ve been told at corporate trainings that they can’t use the words “husband” or “wife” about their own opposite-sex spouse, because those words create a “hostile environment” — but it’s okay to use those words for your same-sex significant other. We aren’t talking about tolerating anti-gay bigotry. We’re speaking of real, documented cases where employees have been threatened with discrimination charges if they discuss basic facts about the existence of another human being.

Girls who want female-only sports competitions? No matter how otherwise indifferent or even supportive they are of transgender classmates, they are being branded as hateful, death-wishing bigots if they don’t give way to the males who want their spot on the team.

Women who want female-only prisons and locker rooms and rape-survivor support groups are being accused of death-wishing towards the men they don’t want to share intimate spaces with?

It has become normal to brand as hateful anyone who holds an opposing viewpoint . . . and to threaten those “haters” with loss of livelihood. This is now the media, academic, and political mainstream discourse.

Eventually people begin to the get message: There is no place for me in civil society anymore. I guess uncivil society is what they want?

Nothing left to lose physically.

When the police — and a whole swathe of society — think it’s just fine to murder a suspect?

When we just somehow can’t avoid judicially-sanctioned police home invasions that are highly likely to be a death sentence for occupants caught by surprise?

And then we make excuses for these killings of people who do anything, whatsoever, alarmed or defensive when they are awoken from a deep sleep by armed strangers breaking down their doors?

Anyone who can remotely identify with Amir Locke (or any of the long slew of prior victims of police brutality) has been informed: There is no innocence for you. You and your family are available for us to murder at any time.

It is the ultimate in nothing-left-to-lose.

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Are there criminal agitators behind this and that violent protest? We’ve certainly caught a few.

Some of the looting at my local 2020 BLM protest was carried out by agitators who were definitely not part of the BLM movement at any level, and we’ve seen frank criminals across the country use legitimate, much-needed protest as an excuse for vandalism, theft, and far worse.

It would be laughable to characterize Antifa as just a bunch of poor sweet zoomers and millennials trying to pay off their student loans by driving for Door Dash and turning Portland into a war zone. I am making no defense whatsoever of Jan 6. I’m not qualified to parse all the many strands of thought and action going on in Canada, but I do know I would personally go insane if people honked all day outside my window; it would not make me feel grateful that at least they weren’t pillaging burning. I am indeed, meanwhile, grateful in a general way for the civil rights movements in Europe, but I’m appalled and chilled to the core by the open anti-Semitism I’ve seen among a few of the reactionaries in that crowd.

Do not, for a moment, infer that I am supportive of hatred or violence. Just the opposite.

What I am saying is that otherwise-decent, non-criminal, non-agitating people are being drawn into increasingly powerful opposition events in part because they’ve been pushed to their limits by a society that openly disdains them.

This is not a left-right issue. It’s a cultural issue of accepting extreme marginalization as the ordinary business of the day.

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Even if you don’t care about right and wrong, maybe you do have something to lose. Maybe civil war does not mesh with your plans.

In that case, please:

Stop slandering people you think are wrong. When you resort to ostracizing and doxing, you are personally responsible for growing the outlaw class. In the long run it only sows violence.
Tread very, very carefully any time a policy position is in play that will cause someone to lose their home or livelihood. Is it truly the only option? There’s no other way? You sure about that? “But they deserve to lose everything” does not build up the bonds of civil society.
Consider it your duty to protect human lives, rather than making up excuses for why those people had it coming.

If you’re comfortable with the level of “mostly peaceful” protest taking place over the past several years, there’s not much I can say to you. But if you’ve decried this or that spree of lawlessness, this message is for you.

I’m not selling nonsense idealism. Treating strangers and opponents with respect doesn’t do anything about criminal agitators who just want to stir things up. But simple civility and decency towards other members of society is indeed very effective at denying the agitators a crowd to do their bidding.