Brinksmanship, Bigotry, and Loose Cannons

On Saturday April 17, California Congressional Rep. Maxine Waters called for protestors to “stay on the street” and “get more confrontational” were former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to be acquitted. Some complained that the statements were inciting violence which Congresswoman Waters subsequently denied. To my eye that was not inciting to riot under 18 U.S. Code § 2102. It may have been an incitement to violence which is also illegal under federal law but that would be hard to prove. IMO it is brinksmanship.

If you’re not familiar with that term, “brinksmanship” means trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The term may have been coined in the 1950s by Adlai Stevenson. I believe the concept derives from Stephen Potter. In the late 1940s he wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating followed up the following years by a number of other books, One-Upmanship, and Lifemanship.

In my view Rep. Waters remarks were reckless and brinksmanship but not actually illegal and the House should have censured her for them.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger declaims:

When Rep. Maxine Waters of California (Los Angeles) was asked whether she was inciting violence by telling the demonstrators arrayed around her in Brooklyn Center, Minn., to “get more confrontational,” she responded with the politician’s user-key response that she isn’t “about violence.”

Don’t bother looking, Ms. Waters, but you—like all the rest of us today in the United States—are engulfed in violence: the political violence of street protests, the violence of rising urban crime, the violence of cops either shooting suspects or getting shot by suspects, and the violence committed routinely by homicidal shooters.

[…]

It might seem like a stretch to conflate political riots, violent inner-city crime and individual shooters, but I’m not so sure they aren’t related. Obviously something is spinning out of control in the U.S. Whatever status quo exists to mitigate each of these forms of violence, it isn’t working anymore. It is failing.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

[…]

How could the postelection Washington mob that invaded the Capitol think that was no different than attending a rally on the Mall?

Whatever happened to the thought, “Maybe I don’t want to do this?” Or shouldn’t do this.

[…]

There is a pattern here of misgovernance and misjudgments. Black Lives Matter and its advocates argue, correctly, that the criminal-justice system arrests and jails too many young black men. Their solution is de minimis policing and prosecution, explicitly to repair “systemic racism.”

This is a consequentially dangerous error of judgment. They are absolving young men of personal responsibility for acts of violence against their neighbors.

The reality across the U.S.—on the streets of protest, in the toughest neighborhoods or in the minds of the homicidally deranged—is that the simple and utilitarian concept of behavioral “pushback” has lost consensus support.

Without pushback’s demarcation of limits—whether with accepted norms of behavior, a basic police function, or the credible defense of limits by public officials (not least U.S. presidents)—the future will bring more crude violence. Which no one will condone.

This was the original meaning behind the idea of maintaining social guardrails. They’ve been taken down—again.

I have one explanation to Mr. Henninger’s implied question and one that should be disquieting. I think we are transmogrifying from a guilt society to a shame society, from a society regulated by internalize guilt to one only regulated by externalized shame. Some of that is inevitable and should have been expected, as we import an increasing number of people inculcated into shame societies. Why should it be disquieting? Because shame societies require a lot more policing to regulate behavior than guilt societies do. Another reason is that for some reason public shaming is now off limits. It’s not nice.

It is not bigotry to point out that most homicides in the U. S. are young black men killing one another. And it is not bigotry to point out that public officials need to regulate their own speech and behavior more rigorously. I said that of President Trump although I didn’t perseverate on it and I think the same is true of members of Congress. It is consistent. That is the meaning of “coequal branches of government”.

I have complained about Rep. Waters’s statements and behavior in the past. The woman is pretty obviously a loose cannon and a loose cannon that, while what she says and does may be appealing to her constituents, is inconsistent with how we should want public officials to behave, particularly in the present context. Congress’s failure to admonish her is a scandalous dereliction of duty on the part of the Congressional Democratic leadership. She cannot merely be dismissed as a back-bencher or unimportant because she is a part of that leadership, the House Chief Majority Whip and a past chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. For Democrats it may be worse than a crime; it may prove a mistake.