There *is* a violence problem in Portland

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor. "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west."

It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But.

I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task.

Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did was wrong. I think it's fair, even, to call that terrorism. Certainly, we would have if the building had burned. Maybe we'll found out this was an act of right-wing provocateurs -- and I'm willing to correct and clarify if that's the case -- but at this point that's not what it looks like. 

I'm keeping this in perspective: Right-wing violence is the biggest danger we face at the moment. Listen to Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS official under President Trump:

When Trump finally started using the term "domestic extremism" himself in the summer of 2020, it was in reference to the violence and looting that occurred during the protests across the country against police brutality targeting Black Americans, which the president attributed to "antifa." For Neumann, this was an obvious red herring. She says that the numbers don't bear out the idea that left-wing violence is as much of a problem as right-wing violence, and arrests during the summer's protests demonstrate that.

"If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa." She's unequivocal about this: "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

That's the bigger picture. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. Threatening lives -- especially innocent lives -- is wrong. It's evil.

'I am not a racist.' Jimmy Fallon - and me

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it.

Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw:

“I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained.

I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person.

And honestly, who cares?

Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasured. Rightfully and understandably nobody cared if I thought of myself as a good person. They only cared what I had done. 

It's possible that if you search, you might find that younger version of me online somewhere telling people I'm not a racist. I remember making a conscious attempt not to defend myself in such a fashion, but the the temptation not to be a bad person -- and we see racism, rightly, as an indictment of the character of its practitioners -- that it can overwhelm the desire to simply apologize, to take your punishment, and to realize that in some people's minds you are forever tainted. 

Shame is not fun, but it is also much less pain than a lot of black Americans have to live with, dealing with oppressive and even deadly policing in their communities. So the best thing to do, in my mind, is to offer an unqualified apology, then put your head down and do the work of being better, and making it better. And do it quietly, instead of performatively -- because that is simply another way of letting everybody know that, no really, you're a good person.

Other people can't see our hearts. They can only see our deeds. So we white folks need to stop boasting about the content of our character and instead live it in everything we do. "I am not racist," isn't an apology. It's self-affirmation.

The president's "dominance" ideology

The president is talking a lot about "dominance" today.

It would be one thing if he was talking about "restoring order" in the wake of protests that have -- to some extent -- morphed into violence. (Some of it is real rebellion, some of it is simple looting, and some of it instigators trying to create disaster. I don't know how much of each go into the mix.) If the president simply was trying to bring about calm, that might be welcome.

Instead, he is talking about dominance.

That's different. It is undemocratic and authoritarian. But it reflects Donald Trump's truest ideology. More than appointing conservative judges, more than stopping immigration, his real goal is dominance -- those other goals simply help him achieve the thing he desires most of all.

We can no longer save democracy. But we can reclaim it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote for THE WEEK that democracy was slipping away, and I wondered if we would notice if and when we hit the tipping point.

Many Americans understand that Trump and his allies have given the country's norms and institutions quite a beating, but they may not realize how close our democracy is to outright failure. The breakdown will not come all at once, in a single moment. Instead, constitutional governance might die a death by a thousand cuts. The shutdown of the Michigan legislature is a warning sign: American democracy is still alive, for now, but the end could be nearer than we think.

That was before George Floyd.

Tonight, the president threatened to send the military into American cities if protests over Floyd's death continue. He seemed to offer praise to peaceful protesters -- "we cannot allow ... peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob" -- but his words were immediately belied by his actions.

Simply put, the president of the United States unleashed state violence against peaceful demonstrators outside the White House.

And he did so ... for a photo op.

Moments earlier, just outside the White House, federal authorities used rubber bullets, flash bangs and gas to clear peaceful protesters from the area.

Trump then walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, where a fire was set Sunday evening. The president held up a Bible and nodded to media cameras, before being joined by Attorney General Bill Barr and others to pose for photos.

I would submit to you that the tipping point has been reached. The rule of law -- of a Constitution that guarantees the freedom of expression, and to peacefully assemble -- has been replaced, for now, by the rule of dominance. That is not democracy. 

So I believe we can no longer save democracy.

But I do believe we can reclaim it. Or, at the very least, we should make every effort to do so.

How? Uh, that's where I come up short. I think there are some dark days ahead. I think it will be easier to go along to get along because the costs of not going along may be high indeed. All I'm left with, really, is the final words from Anne Applebaum's new piece in The Atlantic:

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

Just try to be decent.

The War on Terror comes home

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman:

And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday.

The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent.

One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's administration, citing a need to "look forward." Admittedly, I thought that was the right approach at the time.

Now, though, the chickens are coming home to roost. Some leading American conservatives don't want to merely unleash the worst techniques of the war on terror against foreign terrorists -- they're ready to bring those techniques home.

Who's gonna stop them?