Riots in the Streets

BooMan:

America… [does] have a left-wing. It's just a left-wing designed to kill the seductive power of communism and to build a bulwark against anarchism. Different countries chose different ways of responding to the economic catastrophes of the 1920's and 1930's. The Russians became totalitarian. Europe succumbed to fascism. We chose a New Deal. It was a middle road. It provided a safety net and tolerable working conditions. It created a huge middle class. It didn't arouse the far right or far left instincts of the nation, but put them into sleep mode. Now we're back to 1920's level of income disparity. Conservatives are attacking every aspect of the New Deal. What rich people seem to be forgetting is that the opposite of the New Deal is not some idyllic paradise of free-market bliss. The opposite is rampaging mobs who light shit on fire just to show you that they can do whatever they want… And it's not just income disparity that's a problem. Consider how this all started. A bunch of ["]smart["] people set up a kind of scam using complex financial instruments that no one can understand. They got rich beyond all imagination, while the rest of us lost our jobs, lost our retirement money, lost, in some cases, our homes. And then we were told that there was no money for our cops, no money for our firefighters, our nurses, our teachers. And next we'll be told that our Social Security check will be smaller and we'll have to wait another year or two to get our Medicare. Meanwhile, the rich, represented ably by the Republicans, refuse to pay one dime in extra taxes. With that kind of attitude and that lack of accountability, it's not hard to see why some people might start losing hope and might start losing respect for "the system." If the rich don't wise up quick, the scenes from England will be coming to America. Bet on it.

I think this is exactly right. I must admit that I'm a bit ambivalent about it (which is to admit that I am not only, just mostly, horrified by riots in the streets). I think it is important to understand that this sort of unrest usually facilitates right-wing politics by terrorizing timid middle-class people into supporting anti-intellectual law-and-order politics that divide them from their shared interests with working-class people (and usually also amplifying racial divisions that further stratify and undermine potentially powerful progressive coalitions). However, it is also true that should unrest grow sufficiently widespread or should it be sufficiently well-targeted at incumbent-elites it is the rich who are terrorized (also or even instead), and the effect then can be to open up a space for social democratic concessions and then strengthen middle-class working-class coalitions.

It is interesting that resentment against corporate kleptocracy is clearly fueling far more of the riots across Britain right now than it is figuring in media narratives and frames about the riots across Britain (quite a lot of this business about generational and ethnic tensions is beside the point unless one grasps how such tensions are inflected by neoliberal class warfare). One need only recall the mass-mediation that attached to Watts to catapult the Nixonian politics of reactionary resentment (Rick Perlstein's Nixonland opens up with a masterful telling of this tale) or, more recently and obviously, the collective lunacy in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the anti-intellectual war-mongering right-wing politics that followed upon their mass-mediation, to grasp how readily unrest is narrativized by elite-incumbent corporate media in the service of elite-incumbent ends.

I sense Republican Crazytown is already itching for a race war framing of 2012, horrifyingly enough, and if (when) unrest comes to America (actually, it is sporadically already here even now) you can be sure they will be ready for it with their ugly lies.

I do hope the radical types who like to whine about what a sell-out people like me are for urging reformist politics with the best available actually-existing tools at our disposal (imperfect Democrats, including our President) have the good sense to firebomb enough empty after-hours bank branches and vacant vacation homes of the rich to give the rest of us some good material to build a narrative with that scares the right people into coming to the table to do something useful for a change.

Hey, all you bullshit Dem-GOP equivalency thesis peddlers who like to throw demoralizing darts at reformers in the Moot -- "Thanatz" and "RadicalCoolDude" and so on -- here's your chance to prove you aren't just right-wing plants and back up that radical cred you endlessly sanctimoniously claim to have, go blow up some box stores and posh financial services offices when there's nobody inside to get hurt and provide some headlines reformers can put to good use in pressuring these assholes to re-regulate international banking and implement single-payer healthcare over here.

I guess I have to actually make it clear that I certainly don't endorse such strategies myself -- I think they are dangerous to innocent people and profoundly unpredictable in their consequences, and so I advocate slow, frustrating reform in the direction of sustainable social democracy with more, and better, Democrats together with non-violent civil resistance as my own big picture stance -- but such radical-left organized unrest makes more sense at any rate than these councils of triumphalist acquiescence and blanket cynicism that pass for "radicalism" in too much of my comments section.