My Twitter feed is telling me I missed a great victory last night, when the Antifa movement drove the Right’s favorite malevolent clown out of an auditorium where he would have faced 500 students, most hostile, into the television studios of Fox, CNN, and the BBC, all of whom interviewed him yesterday or this morning about his adventure in Berkeley. That would be somewhere between 5 and 10 million viewers, who also saw tapes of what untutored eyes would think were vandals, arsonists, and thugs with clubs.
I’m struggling with understanding this victory. Obviously, it didn’t keep Milo’s message from the world at large. Maybe breaking the windows and doors of the local Starbucks carries an anti-globalization message (wait, aren’t the alt-right the anti-globalists?) that I missed. Clubbing a Syrian Muslim because he was wearing a suit (reported by the apparently proto-fascist Daily Californian student paper) was a special touch.
I didn’t find some of the declarations of victory helpful to my education.
“It isn’t a question of free speech,” said [Berkeley teacher Yvette Felarca, just back from a suspension for a criminal act at an earlier violent protest]. “This is about our right to be free of intimidation.”
I find masked guys with clubs intimidating, much more so than one guy at a podium. And sometimes I wear a suit through Sproul Plaza, if there’s a classical music concert on campus. Problem.
The less sarcastic analysis is on the other side of the divider.
Some of my friends think that, perhaps because I’m in Berkeley, I’m overestimating how much of a problem the Black Bloc “anarchists” are. I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, they just like to scare designated victims—liberals they don’t like won’t be exempt—and break things. I have no doubt some are agents provocateurs. (It took 40 years for some of the informers in the Black Panthers to be identified. They included members who consistently recommended maximum violence.) If the country became a right-wing dictatorship, many would switch sides to have an opportunity to beat up others with near-impunity. We don’t have to guess, this is the life story of right-wing kook David Horowitz.
Trump and Milo were as over the moon as the Black Bloc today. That tells you that either one group is very wrong about whether they are closer to their objectives, or they have the same objective.
We outnumber the Trumpkins, and our demonstrations show that, but let us be blunt: they have a bigger arsenal. More Second Amendment types, more police, more military rank-and-file. If it comes down to who does better street fighting, we’re in deep trouble. And, for all that Black Bloc sympathizers babble about learning the history of fascism, it won’t be the first time. The Communist (and some Socialist) Left in 1930s Germany deserted parliamentary democracy for flipping a coin on whether they or the Nazis would come out top dictatorship dog. They lost. The early 1930s Spanish far left, lost. Likewise the far left of the Uruguayans, the Argentines, lost;—I may be overlooking an example that went our way, but we have a losing record that will not improve from the United States.
I also got tweets “explaining” that my refusal to let a radical put whatever note she wanted on my living room window was equivalent to her refusal to let Milo speak at Cal. No, I don’t really understand that either, and this is someone with 12,000 Twitter followers who aren’t offended by such complete failure of critical thinking. I never did get an explanation of why she had veto power over Cal’s established procedures for giving rooms out for student events. And needless to say, I didn’t get an explanation of why my conservative neighbor isn’t entitled to exercise a veto over Cal’s LGBTQ meetings. We know what the explanation would be, though. We’re right, they’re wrong. As if Trumpkins believe anything different about themselves.
While that won’t yield a democratic structure, it does explain that counterproductive political violence replaces movement towards a shared goal with the politics of personal empowerment and personal catharsis. Carrying a club is empowering. Carrying a gun will be more so. Finding someone to beat up after the humiliations of being non-white or unemployed or just disrespected makes some people feel better, including, of course, swaths of Rust Belt Trump voters. On the rare occasions that police arrest and identify anarchists, they tend to be underemployed Lost Boys from the suburbs, similar to the Quebec killer or many ISIS recruits. Hatred gives meaning to their lives. Publicity salves feelings of neglect.
Now the question is what to do about this problem, other than giving up on having effective protests in Berkeley, in my sense of effective, which is that they thwart Trump policies, and they get more voters for liberal Democrats next time. There’s nonviolence training offered here, and I think we should go through it. Veterans of earlier demonstrations suggest that you have protest marshals who surround the problematic group, then link arms and contain them when they begin their aggressive moves. Is that really going to work against 150 people with clubs and lighters? Any other suggestions?