“There’s something happening here,” Stephen Stills sang to an eerie guitar riff. Seen as an antiwar anthem, “For What It’s Worth” arose from long-haired, young people on Sunset Strip protesting a curfew in late 1966. Business owners grew annoyed that crowds of hippies gathering there at night were bad for business. The “Sunset Strip riots” blocked traffic and closed some clubs.
Stills told an interviewer in 1971, “A bunch of kids got together on a street corner and said we aren’t moving. About three busloads of Los Angeles police showed up, who looked very much like storm troopers. … And I looked at it and said, ‘Jesus, America is in great danger.’”
Half a century later, America is still in great danger. There’s still a man with a gun telling people young and old, black and white, they’ve got to beware. One of them is president of the United States.
The “Lafayette Park Photo-op Massacre,” as we might call it, happened because Donald Trump thinks what’s happening there is all about him. An outside White House adviser told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman that Trump is angry because the protests are hurting his reelection chances.
“He feels the blue-state governors are letting it burn because it hurts him. It’s a lot like how he sees coronavirus.”
Trump may be angry about the protests, burning and looting because it’s “the Archie Bunker in him,” sure. But the attention junkie in him is angry because nationwide protests take the media spotlight off him. He went from daily coverage of his coronavirus task force soliloquies to being a news-cycle footnote. Reports that he spent time hiding out last weekend in a West Wing bunker were worse than lowered ratings. They made him look weak. Something had to be done to get back his mojo. Then came the Lafayette Park Photo-op Massacre and Trumpish threats to unleash the U.S. military on American civilians.
Not even Trump’s coalition of the quisling want to own that:
What Trump doesn’t get and what America woke up to is that he’s irrelevant here. It’s not about him. What makes these protests different from others of the Trump period is an America wearied by stagnant wages, personal debt, financial meltdowns, and 100,000-plus, disproportionately black and brown COVID-19 deaths finally has had enough. Maybe. The killing of George Floyd and the unjustness and persistence of systemic racism is not new. What is different is Americans are angry enough, broke enough, and tired-of-it-all enough to take to the streets to protest not just Trump or police brutality but the whole stinking mess.
“The brokenness is centuries in the making,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. The anti-Trump signs and balloons are missing. Maybe this time is different:
Donald Trump didn’t create the problems of racialized policing or overincarceration or grotesque inequality or a media ecosystem that forgot to cover Joe Biden this weekend because #ratings. But he has benefited and profited and profiteered from all of it, each and every day, to the point that he now finds himself in the unique position of being in charge of it now. Perhaps it is just subconscious, but he might even realize that those exact things are being protested—these underlying life-and-death truths about life in America, and by that I do mean this nation’s foundation upon white supremacy—that made it possible for Donald Trump to become president in the first place. And he might be most threatened when the target is not him specifically, but the very world that makes him possible.
In a speech in Philadelphia Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden called for finally confronting and remediating America’s original sin.
“The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism,” Biden said. “To deal with the growing economic inequality in our nation. And to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation — to so many.”
“We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” he said.” Who we are. What we believe. And maybe most important — who we want to be.”
The problem at hand is quite a few of our neighbors believe America is a zero-sum proposition. For all of us to do better means making us more equal. Some at the top of the social ladder will do less well in terms of money and/or in cultural clout. Team Trump isn’t having that. They like the balance of power just as it is, with their God in heaven and everyone knowing his/her place.
They are willing to reduce this country to a third-world dictatorship to preserve that system. The rest of us have had enough of it.
Update: A nod to Arlo Guthrie in the title.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.