The Squeaky Wheel

I sincerely believe that the conclusion that Jason L. Riley reaches in his latest Wall Street Journal column is correct:

The question is whether Joe Biden and the Democrats will rescue Mr. Trump by allowing violent protesters to become the face of their party and by indulging the increasingly absurd demands of radical progressives. Mr. Trump may be unpopular, but so are looting, toppling statues, defunding the police, and allowing armed radicals to take over sections of major cities.

Nor should the political left assume that the black voters they need to turn out in large numbers five months from now will thrill to this agenda. In a 1970 memo to President Nixon, adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that there “is a silent black majority as well as a white one” and that “it shares most of the concerns of its white counterpart.”

That was true 50 years ago and remains true today. Most black people know that George Floyd is no more representative of blacks than Derek Chauvin is of police officers. They know that the frequency of black encounters with law enforcement has far more to do with black crime rates than with racially biased policing. They know that young black men have far more to fear from their peers than from the cops. And they know that the rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries.

There’s nothing wrong with having a national conversation about better policing, but this one has turned into a conversation about blaming law enforcement for social inequality, which is not only illogical but dangerous. Unsafe neighborhoods retard upward mobility, and poorly policed neighborhoods are less safe. A conversation that doesn’t acknowledge that reality is hardly worth having.

and I would urge the reform-minded to take note of this:

You don’t need to read an academic paper to understand that peaceful civil-rights demonstrations have had more success than violent protests, but a Princeton scholar just published one that is well worth your time. Writing last month in the American Political Science Review, Omar Wasow, a professor of politics, described the results of a 15-year research project on the political consequences of protests.

Mr. Wasow, who is black, focused on black-led demonstrations between 1960 and 1972, and he found that the “types of protest tactics employed” can make all the difference in advancing a social cause. “Nonviolent black-led protests played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda toward civil rights,” he concluded, while “black-led resistance that included protester-initiated violence contributed to outcomes directly in opposition to the policy preferences of the protesters.”

I guess we’ll need to wait to learn what the “policy preferences of the protesters” are. As of this writing the only clear goal that has emerged is “defund the police” and that is far from clear with some believing it means overall greater public spending with a stronger emphasis on social workers and psychologists, some believing it means cutting the number of police on the streets and using the money that would otherwise have been spent paying police officers for other purposes, and still others believing it means eliminating police forces entirely.

Otherwise I would only remind people that the areas of Los Angeles ravaged by the riots following the Rodney King incident 30 years ago have still not recovered or been rebuilt.

I do want to correct one thing in Mr. Riley’s column:

The methods championed most famously by Martin Luther King Jr. culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the most consequential laws in U.S. history. By contrast, the Black Power movement that followed eventually imploded, and its most prominent leaders wound up exiled, imprisoned or victims of murderous rivalries.

I know of one exception to that. Just this week I was treated to a press conference by our mayor and one of those “prominent leaders”, Bobby Rush. He’s still anti-police but what, otherwise, has he accomplished with his nearly 30 years as a member of Congress? When he can be troubled actually to vote, he has generally voted the straight party line. And he is widely believed to have not paid his bills, paid family members illegally, and shaken companies down for contributions to his pet charities.