James A. McClure

When angry mobs of protesters stormed the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011, their rallying cry was: “This is what democracy looks like.” That’s ridiculous, I thought. Democracy is delivered at the ballot box, not in the streets.

I was wrong. Angry protests have increased in the last few years, from broken windows following President Trump’s election to the permanent siege of Portland, Oregon. At this point we have to consider violent protest part of the political process. When the Middle East was in turmoil the Arab Street was considered a potent political force. Will the American Street follow the same trajectory?

Mobs are not going away because they are working. Traditional democratic processes are slow, and seeking the consent of the governed may not produce the desired outcome. If you want to remove a statue, for instance, you can circulate petitions or get the city council to pass an ordinance. That would take months and citizens might vote to keep the statue.

Mobs are more efficient. Just bring in a bunch of people to vandalize the statue and the mayor will cave every time. If the vandals claim they’re fighting racism, local officials are likely to take their side and restrain the police. Protesters who are arrested will be quickly released by a compliant prosecutor and a well-funded nonprofit will spring for their bail. This has been a winning formula in city after city. Some cities even are removing statues preemptively to avoid vandalism.

It works at the national level, too. It took years of peaceful civil rights marches to pass civil rights laws in the 1960s, but Black Lives Matter was able to bring members of Congress to their knees in a matter of weeks once cities began burning. (Okay, they didn’t pass a law, but Congress no longer does that sort of thing.) And corporations are giving them money.

It’s not that the government is powerless. American governments have been preserving order ever since George Washington led federal troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion in 1794. Local police and the National Guard have stepped in on innumerable occasions when peaceful demonstrations became riots. Most recently, Seattle police easily cleared out the “autonomous protest zone” once the mayor allowed them to do so.

Local officials have choices. Most have chosen to favor the mobs because politicians find them useful and are afraid of being accused of racism. They have political cover because the angry mobs that opposed President Trump in 2016 were legitimized when the Democrats declared themselves a resistance movement. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa can count on Democrat politicians and news media to dismiss arson and looting and characterize all protests as mostly peaceful.

Republicans are behind the curve here. They can’t use “racism” as a magic word and Tea Party-style peaceful protests don’t cut it. It’s a dilemma because most Republicans balk at destroying property or attacking police officers. Not to mention wearing masks. And lose the guns, guys. Everybody knows you’re not going to use them and they give people an excuse to freak out.

As mobs have become emboldened political support for them is becoming a challenge. We’ve seen TV reporters describe protests as “mostly peaceful” as buildings burn in the background. Video shots of violence the TV networks refuse to air are widely available on the Internet. Politicians claim Antifa does not exist. In a Congressional hearing not one Democrat criticized attempts to burn down a federal courthouse but instead blamed the violence on federal law enforcement. It’s getting harder for the national news media to ignore events like a mob attack on a Ronald McDonald House. We’ve accepted politics as an irony-free zone, but this is dark comedy.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the presidential campaign. Democrats continue to deny that the mobs they have tacitly supported are a problem. There was no mention of rising violence during a national convention in which speakers urged their supporters to keep fighting. Yet they are making an implied promise that once Donald Trump is defeated everything will be calm once more.

How, exactly, will this work? Will a Presidential commitment to end systemic racism (whatever that is) convince Black Lives Matter to shut down its protests, or will BLM continue to press its demands to abolish the police, prisons, immigration enforcement and capitalism? Can anyone believe the activists calling for the overthrow of the entire American system will put down their Molotov cocktails if Joe Biden is elected?

Republicans are going to promise that re-electing President Trump will end the violence, but that will only stiffen the resolve of Democratic politicians to oppose any federal action to restore order. This may be an untenable position because mobs are difficult to control once they’re unleashed. Remember that the French Revolution ended in dictatorship after the Jacobins began sending their own leaders to the guillotine.

Some public officials are discovering that mobs lack political loyalty. Angry protesters are showing up at the homes of mayors who had backed the protests. That wasn’t part of the deal. The mayor of Chicago recently declared that looting is criminal and not part of political protest — in direct opposition to a BLM leader who argued that looting is reparations. Even the mayor of Portland dared to criticize the rioters (if only because they help President Trump score political points).

The good news is that many Americans do not support unimpeded protests as much as their politicians do. Rallies in support of the police are taking place across the country. In Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, local residents drove off a group of outside protesters. Growing public opposition to mob excesses may be why some mayors are discovering their spines, especially when discontented residents and businesses are filing lawsuits and leaving town.

If mob rule is going to be checked, it’s up to ordinary Americans. The riots will stop once mayors and governors decide to take back their streets, enforce the law and put lawbreakers in jail. They will not do this until their constituents convince them that voters, not protesters, will keep them in office. It’s that pesky consent of the governed thing, inefficient as it may be. Let’s hope we still have that.

Mobs have declared open season on every aspect of American’s history.  Confederates and abolitionists, Christopher Columbus, Founding Fathers, and the occasional saint are being erased from memory. What an opportunity! 

This is the perfect time to deepen our understanding of the country’s history by erecting a bunch of new statues while creating a context to preserve the old ones. The jihad against historic statues suggests that Americans need some lessons in history that our educational system failed to teach them.

For starters, correcting the way we memorialize the Civil War is long overdue. Most of the Confederate statuary is the result of the “Lost Cause” propaganda campaign, which successfully whitewashed the South until well into the 20th century and perpetrated historical inacccuracy.  So there’s a massive bas-relief in Atlanta of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — who never set foot in Georgia during the Civil War — instead of John Bell Hood, who actually lost the Battle of Atlanta. And then there’s Gone With The Wind. We know better now, thanks to a growing body of historical work such as the Ken Burns TV series. But the statues remain, frozen in time.

Communities erect monuments to reflect the sentiment of their citizens. It made sense to put Confederate statues in the courthouse squares of Southern towns when the families of Civil War veterans were still alive, but those communities moved on decades ago. So it’s time to move statues and monuments that reflect local history (rather than a transplanted Lee or Jackson) to a less prominent location and erect a statue of a more contemporary hero in the middle of town. 

The Civil War demands more context. We need more statues of Ulysses S. Grant to correct decades of disparagement while the Lost Cause deified Lee. How about a statue of Lee surrrendering to Grant at Appomatox? We need more statues of William Tecumseh Sherman (perhaps ordering the return of Navajos to their homeland in 1868 rather than burning Georgia in 1864). Perhaps the Emancipation Memorial in Washington can be expanded with a freed slave standing tall and a statue of Frederick Douglass nearby. 

Nor should we erase the Confederates. Let’s move their statues to historical parks with explanatory plaques that will more fully explain who they were, what they did and why. Include guys like Patrick Cleburne, the general who was passed over for promotion when he advocated for freeing the slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate army. 

Let’s expand the pantheon of heroes by adding statues of forgotten ancients and more contemporary heroes. There is room to enhance Revolutionary War history with statues of some of the African-Americans who participated, for example. Practically every town in America boasts a 20th Century scientist, builder, astronaut, civil rights leader or Medal of Honor recipient who merits a statue in front of City Hall. 

President Trump missed an opportunity to add to the celebration of history when he spoke about the Presidents on Mount Rushmore but failed to mention the Crazy Horse Memorial a few miles away. 

There’s an even bigger opportunity for state and local leaders. Instead of just eliminating statues in deference to the mob, mayors and governors have an opportunity to re-evaluate how best to memorialize history now that people are paying attention. Set up an orderly, democratic process for creating new statues and relocating old ones. Appoint a commission. Hold a referendum. Do New Orleans residents really want to take down the statue of Andrew Jackson? Put it on the ballot. Set up a sculpture competition. Re-define a more inclusive sense of civic pride. 

So far nobody is doing this. Elected officials are being intimidated into subtracting history and removing statues without the consent of their citizens. This is an opportunity for them to lead (instead of pandering) and reassure their constituents that the voters, and not the mob, are still in charge of our history. Will they?

It’s probably a healthy sign that people are beginning to talk about what will change once the coronavirus has run its course. There’s a lot of speculation about how things will work now that people are concerned about social distancing and have acquired the habit of washing their hands.

One characteristic of this virus is that it is most deadly to people who have co-morbidities such as immune deficiencies, diabetes, obesity and respiratory ailments. The same effect applies to institutions: businesses and organizations that were ailing before the virus hit will face a reckoning and may not survive. The pandemic’s wake-up call is an opportunity to reform dying institutions and re-think some common assumptions. Here are some possibilities:

Retailers — It’s not surprising to see chain stores like Macy’s and Nieman-Marcus closing. Brick-and-mortar stores have been teetering for years. The pandemic is giving them a final nudge while stimulating even more hiring by Amazon and Walmart. Supermarkets and big-box stores have adapted to social distancing. Smaller businesses easily can do so if they survive until the politicians allow them to reopen. The pandemic is forcing consumers to use low-contact services such as online ordering, delivery and drive-up grocery pickup and some of this behavior will be permanent.

Higher education — Colleges and universities are rife with co-morbidities. With the pool of 18-year-old freshpersons declining, their shaky economic model has been artificially propped up by Chinese oligarchs and easy-money student loans. Soaring costs, political conflict, admission scandals and worthless degrees have diminished the value proposition of a college education. Colleges were beginning to close before the virus hit. States now are cutting funding to public colleges and we are going to see a shakeout.

It’s an opportunity to re-think higher education. Institutions that embrace and integrate online learning, as Purdue University is doing, will thrive. Many others will close and some ought to. Can colleges re-purpose themselves from merely indoctrinating the young to lifelong learning and career development? And will college sports accelerate its transition to a fully professional enterprise?

K-12 education — Elementary schools have stepped up during the pandemic to continue feeding children who depend on subsidized meals. Educating them, not so much. Some public schools have put lessons online and obtained laptops for needy kids, others have not. The pandemic has forced millions of kids and parents to sample online learning and home schooling. Some of them may like it, and we are likely to see greater demand for online charter schools and home schooling. Public schools will have an opportunity to integrate more online learning into their classrooms and offer distance-learning options, but teachers’ unions are likely to checkmate such reforms.

Urban planning — For decades, city planners and the politicians who hire them have tried to shame us into abandoning our wasteful suburban homes and SUVs for virtuous high-rise apartments and public transportation. We now know that the high-density lifestyle these experts were pushing was a petri dish of contagion in cities like New York and Wuhan. Big cities were losing population before the pandemic hit and this trend is likely to accelerate. Will anybody listen to urban planners in the future, or will they be forced to seek honest work?

The Postal Service — The post office is an employee-benefit organization that delivers mail as a sideline. It’s been a financial sinkhole for decades and now is asking for a federal bailout because — wait for it — the pandemic has cut its revenues. I’m getting hysterical emails from a Senatorial candidate claiming that MY local post office will close NEXT MONTH unless we somehow remove Sen. Mitch McConnell from office. The Postal Service is a mess because Congress has thwarted attempts to streamline its operation and control costs. The pandemic has made the mess worse and probably merits at least a short-term bailout. This gives Congress an opportunity to combine an aid package with long-needed reforms. Don’t hold your breath.

News Media — While local news coverage of the pandemic has been generally responsible, the national news media have stepped-up their political activism. Most of the rumors and panicky predictions that dominated the headlines — firing of public health officials and the big ventilator shortage — have proven false. The White House press corps is putting on a good show at the daily coronavirus briefings, especially when President Trump plays into their hands, but the media’s already low credibility is taking another hit.

State and local government — Decades of unsustainable employee pensions and out-of-control spending have made many states and cities financially precarious. Unprecedented demand for state unemployment assistance has exposed the frailty of bureaucracy and outdated computer systems. States certainly need federal help to cope with the pandemic, but some states also want federal taxpayers to bail out their pension plans and have shown no willingness to curb spending.

At the same time citizens are pushing back against governors and mayors who have been shutting down the economy and society, sometimes with fascist zeal. Taxpayers whose elected officials have put them out of work may be less willing than in the past to fuel the government spending machine, especially if they must subsidize states that are more irresponsible than their own. Calls for accountability are being met with the usual political outrage, but maybe things will be different this time. Maybe.

Lots of things will be different when the pandemic has run its course and so will we. Americans who are cheering first responders and volunteering to make masks may emerge from the pandemic with a renewed sense of values, a little more healthy skepticism and a willingness to reform or replace the institutions that have failed them. We can hope, anyway.