Déjà vu All Over Again

“I want to assure you that we’re going to employ every force of law…because federal property was burned and destroyed…And these people [who did it]…will be turned over to the federal government…We’re going to put a stop to this…the [protestors] only have one thing in mind, that is to destroy…to set fires to buildings… And when they start taking over communities, this is when we’re going to use every part of the law enforcement [and] we were very fortunate we had the National Guard in this area…Had they not been here, there would’ve been fourteen or fifteen other burnouts of…buildings….They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America…I’ll be right behind the National Guard, giving our full support….to use any force that’s necessary.”

You probably think that was Donald Trump or Tom Homan, director of ICE, speaking about the protests in Los Angeles. It was Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio explaining why he was sending the National Guard to Kent State University on May 3, 1970. The next day, the Guard opened fire on student protestors and killed four students.

Or take this quotation about campus unrest: “The ringleaders should have… been thrown off of the campus—permanently… What does academic freedom have to do with rioting, with anarchy, with attempts to destroy the primary purpose of the University, which is to educate our young people?” Sounds like any number of law-and-order Republicans last year and this, and yet it was then-Governor Ronald Reagan of California decrying student protests in 1966.

There is a long history of not just denouncing but violently suppressing speech and protests in the American past. The ugliness of busting strikes in the 1890s is a distant memory, but that was a period marked by chronic violence and death as workers attempted to stand up and wrench basic rights from corporations. At the height of the Great Depression in 1932, President Hoover called on General Douglas MacArthur to clear out encampments of homeless war veterans—the “Bonus Army”—who were protesting in Washington for the war bonus they’d been promised and then denied. Thousands of troops attacked and dispersed the veterans, and one was killed.

Today’s reaction to the federal militarization of law enforcement against protests in Los Angeles is portrayed as a classic first step in a fascist playbook. And indeed, it can be that—as we’ve seen in country after country, where domestic disturbances become a pretext for suppressing rights and suspending habeas corpus or its equivalents. That’s certainly what President Erdogan has done multiple times in Turkey over the past decade, and he is one of many examples worldwide.

And yet, the same actions can—as American history, both distant and recent, shows—not be a prelude to anything per se. They can instead be simply a manifestation of federal and state power used abusively and violently to silence, dissent, and restore “calm” to the streets, even at the cost of human life. The violence that met civil rights protestors across the South; the violence against protestors outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; the violence in response to the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict in 1992 (which left thousands injured and 60 dead)—are just a few of the many, many examples.

Opinion by Zachary Karabell | 06/01/2020

What the present maelstrom tends to miss is the widespread prevalence of past maelstroms. What the heated and often hysterical rhetoric of the present obscures is the heated and hysterical rhetoric of the past. American history is replete with government-sanctioned violence against protestors—peaceful and not so peaceful. It is replete with ugly, dehumanizing words hurled at those protestors, making today’s dehumanizing rhetoric less an exception than the norm.

The constant forgetting—of who we are and who we have been—is a major impediment to meeting the present with any degree of objectivity or balance. If you believe that the United States has honored the right of speech and protest in the past, then the heavy-handed reaction now seems aberrant and alarming. But if you recognize that today’s extreme reactions are fully—albeit sadly—American, and have been a consistent through line, then it becomes more complicated to conclude that the present represents a dangerous break or the precipice of democracy.

The sad irony here is that recognizing how ugly, violent, often anti-democratic and repressive the American past has been allows a less alarmist view of how violent and ugly the American present appears to be. Is there a possibility of civil war and widespread suppression of basic rights? Of course. There always has been. The anti-DEI intellectual pogroms in the name of antisemitism are eerily McCarthyite, but they’re not a break from the past—they’re part of a grim continuum, just as the DEI intellectual purity tests were. American democracy may be on the brink, but more likely—given our past—this is one of its many ebbs.

What we don’t know, of course, is whether this ebb will be followed by the flows that have always come eventually, or whether this time, it will continue to ebb and wither. The past tells us what is possible—but it doesn’t tell us what the future holds. For now, at least, the present feels more like a very bad recapitulation, which may be small comfort, but compared to our worst fears, is comfort indeed.