The Trump Administration Is Eroding The Case For Keeping Protests Nonviolent

It was distressing, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, to watch a significant number of progressive journalists, intellectuals, and others downplay the very real destruction that was going on alongside the peaceful protests. The rioting and looting that scarred a number of major cities amounted to billions of dollars in damage (by one estimate) — translating, of course, to real hardship experienced by real humans — and killed a handful of people as well.

Some outright argued that this wave of destruction was righteous. Others walked a slightly trickier path, not quite arguing that it was righteous but instead yelling at anyone who criticized it — they basically argued that it was uncouth to talk about. The arguments of those in the anti-anti-rioting camp generally centered on the idea that the system was so broken that rioting was the only meaningful choice available to protesters. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote about riots being “the language of the unheard” was referenced, selectively, its broader context ignored. If they can kill black people with impunity, the thinking went, then what choice did protesters have but to respond in a less than “respectable” way?

This wasn’t, and isn’t, a compelling argument. First, it doesn’t come close to addressing why the response to a failed system would be to burn down random city blocks rather than to direct destructive energy against the system’s own instruments. Second, as much as certain commentators raced to one-up themselves in describing America’s rottenness, it just isn’t the case, by any reasonable historical standard, that 2020 America was so broken that nonviolent protest and other normal political actions should have been seen as obsolete.

To take the most salient example: What happened after Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine horrific minutes, killing him? There was a wave of outrage and protest, which was, in the vast majority of cases, allowed by the authorities to proceed (in some cases, the authorities pulled back rather than respond harshly to actual rioting). Chauvin was arrested and taken into custody and tried and convicted. In other words, the killing of George Floyd itself was horrible but it would be hard to look at the response and conclude that the U.S. was now some sort of fascist dictatorship unwilling to punish police abuses. That’s obviously not to deny the existence of both abusive policing and