The real anarchists

America continues to burn. Riots in the street, widespread looting, tear gas and flash-bangs. The Chinese virus continues its methodical creep, continuing to claim over a thousand lives per day in the country alone. Our president rails and rages from the pulpit, threatening to deploy the military to reclaim and dominate the streets. Pundits cry outrage and warn ominously of imminent dictatorship and fascism. Officials at the Pentagon look on nervously as politicians find recourse in the Nixonian refrain of law and order. The United States, it would appear, teeters on the brink of all out chaos.

And yet my mind refuses to wander from an incident that did not garner nearly as much attention as all this. On May 8th an elderly couple, Paul and Lydia Marino, made their ritual visit to a veteran's cemetery in Delaware to pay respects at their son's grave. While there, a 29 year old male shot and killed them both. He died later, though as far as I know it has yet to be ascertained whether the wound was self inflicted or via law enforcement. It doesn't really matter. Though you would think, given the outrage coursing through American cities today, that the details ought to garner some attention among protestors aggrieved at the demographics of death; for the Marinos were white and their executioner was black.

What does that mean, at the end of the day? Not much to the people who have had the doctrine of harmony, grace, universalism and egalitarianism drilled into their heads from an early age. These people already understand the world and what makes it move, they know what needs addressing and what does not. America is a white supremacist state, it is responsible for untold atrocity, the enslavement of an entire people, the delegitimization of their place in society, it turned the cheek to extrajudicial reprisals that took the lives of thousands, its greatest accomplishments were built on the back on slave labor not unlike the most brutal regimes to grace European history (never mind qualitative and quantitative comparison, broad strokes will do). The cause of the day must be directed against the oppressors and the oppressors are white. The Ku Klux Klan looms menacingly behind Donald Trump, always one step away from seizing power and turning the country into a racial dystopia. And coronavirus? The existential threat that threatened grandmas and grandpas everywhere, the plague in the name of whose defeat the experts demanded the closure of small businesses and the suspension of livelihoods? Second fiddle to the demands of the new day. Systemic injustice must be extinguished. 40 million unemployed is an acceptable price. One dead man is not.

One wonders if the response is proportional to the alleged crime. What is the alleged crime, exactly? Was it the death of George Floyd, which most Americans condemned as an egregious use of force and an outrageous display of incompetent maliciousness? Or is it an institutional crime, an expression of asymmetrical power imbalances and ugly sentiments that percolate, invidious and seemingly immovable, in the heart of the country's law enforcement agencies? Both? It doesn't seem to matter that the number of unarmed black men killed by law enforcement in 2019 did not rise above single digits. That's a number I can count on my hands. Never mind context or proportionality. The absolute numbers do not lend themselves to a narrative of systemic injustice. And whose institutions are unjust, exactly? What is the system? The buck neither begins nor ends with the president. America is not a unitary state. Sovereignty is diffused across a dizzying array of power structures: municipal, state, federal, never mind the informal powers of the bureaucracy and media. Federalism makes it difficult to point the finger and levy blame. If this were not the case, Minneapolis itself would not have just filed a civil rights charge against its own police department. But what does that matter when your cause is righteous and just, and when you could not possibly be wrong? 

Or do wrong. Pandemic-era concerns have been swept away in this new outburst of righteous indignation. The looting, robbery and killings have been dismissed as the inevitable consequence of an aggrieved and oppressed minority. Peaceful revolution impossible, violent revolution inevitable, and so on. The activist class finally has something to do, an excuse to go outside, all charges of hypocrisy be damned. Now they can live out their power-fantasies, toss strange liquids at statues of Christopher Columbus and spray-paint expletives on churches and the Lincoln Memorial. This is the intoxicating freedom that comes with revolution, hope and change. Dazed and befuddled public officials can merely stand by in astonishment, survey the wreckage when day breaks, and feebly shift the blame to nebulous fringe groups: white supremacists, anarchists, Russians. When asked to choose between the three, protestors will naturally choose anarchy first, white nationalism second and Russia third, for their enemy is their raison d'etre and it is the fate of all avant-garde leftists to face liquidation at the hands of rectification campaigns and zhdanovshchina.

The activists are happy to enlist the support of any who will bend the knee to their cause, whatever prior heresies they may have once promulgated or entertained. George Bush, Jim Mattis, Susan Rice, Joe Biden. The establishment pays its dues to the anarchy ravaging the streets, because it is their obligation to speak out for the cause of universal rights and dignity. Those were, after all, the causes they pursued whilst in power and to whose fulfillment they employed their own anarchies to great success. The Iraq War? Success. Material support to the Syrian opposition? Success. Ukrainian Euromaiden? Success. Color revolution? Astonishing success. Now, having been displaced by a reality television star, they can only look on at present discontent as just desserts.

Yet it was just that kind of sentiment, angry, indignant, leveling, alienated, that produced the anti-system forces with the creative and destructive energy needed to displace those people in the first place. It was, in essence, an anarchist sentiment that elevated the current president to his position. It was an unbridled desire for chaos, desire for the erosion of institutional norms widely seen as corrupt, stagnant and ossified, and destabilization of an unanswerable regime structure. His inflammatory remarks are a feature, not a bug. The clearing out of Lafayette Square, the denunciation from all quarters of the political spectrum, "when the looting starts the shooting starts", all of it is right on cue, right on message, and absolutely anarchistic in its defiance of traditional practice and in its invitation of chaos. The true anarchist is not smashing windows in the street, he sits in the Oval Office and tweets his unfiltered, honest thoughts to the masses every day. The true wreckers of the system go out to vote. Anarchy at the ballot box is far more effective at lashing the regime than a brick through Target's window ever will be. More importantly, it reveals these protests for the unprincipled facade they truly are. It is a testament to left-liberalism's unthinking reactionary stance that the national security bureaucracy it once derided is its new ally. It is never really about changing the system, but rather making it ever more answerable to them.