He’s Leaving Home

At Quillette Michael Totten profiles Portland, the city in which he’s lived for all of his adult life. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

In the early days, thousands of people took to the streets and demanded police accountability and reform. Most of the protesters were my middle class neighbors, and the vast majority of them were peaceful. A minuscule percentage broke windows, looted stores, and set fires. But as time went on, the mainstream protesters were more or less satisfied that their point had been made, and they had excellent reasons to believe this: the Oregon legislature enacted a comprehensive reform package with blazing speed, and Portland police drove around saying “Portland, we hear you” through loudspeakers. So nonviolent reform-minded protesters returned to their lives and to their jobs (if they still had jobs).

The black-clad criminal contingent didn’t stay home. They returned to the streets, night after night, throughout the entire summer and into the fall and even the winter, not to protest but to carry out what they call “direct action”—violent assaults against local businesses, police stations, the police union headquarters, the federal courthouse, and the private homes of local officials. They wore body armor. They threw bricks, frozen water bottles, and even Molotov cocktails at the cops. They returned night after night without letup as if brawling in the streets were their job. The recently passed police reforms were not even acknowledged. Most combatants were military-age white men.

Portland suddenly felt less like Amsterdam and more like perennially riot-stricken Paris during one of its bad months, as if Portland were experiencing something akin to an autoimmune disorder, where the body’s immune system attacks healthy tissue. Protests are not riots, and riots are not protests. Protests are constitutionally protected activities vital to any functioning liberal democracy. Riots are violent crimes punishable by imprisonment. Activists, journalists, and politicians alike have a terrible habit of using the terms interchangeably. They might as well use fire and ice as synonyms if they can’t keep these opposites straight.

Although he’s writing about Portland I suspect that many of the U. S.’s major cities are now too expensive, too violent, and, at least in Chicago’s case, too corrupt to hold onto their populations so they’re voting with their feet. Who leaves and who stays will be the next big questions.