A couple of quotes on official violence and "revolution by implosion"

"Does not right cease to be right whenever it is seized?" - Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History

"Law and Order": these words have always had an ominous sound; the entire necessity and the entire horror of legitimate force are condensed, and sanctioned, in this phrase. There can be no human association without law and order, enforceable law and order, but there are degrees of good and evil in human associations - measured in terms of the legitimate, organized violence required to protect the established society against the poor, the oppressed, the insane: the victims of its well-being. Over and above their legitimacy in constitutional terms, the extent to which established law and order can legitimately demand (and command) obedience and compliance largely depends (or ought to depend) on the extent to which this law and this order obey and comply with their own standards and values. These may first be ideological (like the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity advanced by the revolutionary bourgeoisie), but the ideology can become a material political force in the armor of the opposition as these values are betrayed, compromised, denied in the social reality. Then the betrayed promises are, as it were, "taken over" by the opposition, and with them the claim for legitimacy. In this situation, law and order become something to be established as against the established law and order: the existing society has become illegitimate, unlawful: it has invalidated its own law.

- Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (1969)

Genuinely unpopular regimes can suppress popular movements by force to a grimly effective extent. But the extent isn't infinite. Even strong states willing to use extensive violent repression, like East Germany in 1989-90 or Mubarak's Egypt, to take just two examples, found themselves unable to preserve power via force when the government had lost legitimacy to a sufficient extent.

This is a much more complex matter than simple popularity as might be expressed in an opinion poll, for instance. But it's an important part of understanding what Joschka Fischer called "revolution by implosion," which is how he characterized the post-1989 transitions in central and eastern Europe after the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

The more recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would also seem to fit into something like a "revolution by implosion" model, though there was violence in both cases, mostly from the official side. In Libya and Syria, something more in the direction of a civil war developed.

Marcuse in that passage talks about "standards and values" that are "[o]ver and above their legitimacy in constitutional terms." In many cases in the United States, such as the disgustingly routine use of tasers by local police and the far-reaching restriction of protest to confines which make them ineffective, the established order is trampling on standards and values that are very much part of "their legitimacy in constitutional terms." The same can be said about many manifestations of the unending "war on drugs" which in practice is often a war on minorities.

This is part of what disturbs me about hearing President Obama routinely say that protecting "the security of the American people" (or variations of that formula) is his first priority as President. Glenn Greenwald isn't just splitting legalistic hairs when he insists against such formulas that the President is pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States, not "security" as such.

Because there is really no such thing as "security as such." Security from street crime, from home burglaries and sexual assault, are one category of security. Security from seeing homeless beggars or security from embarrassing protests outside a corporate headquarters are in very different categories. Security of the public from violence has very different implications for what kind of Constitutional order in which we live than does the security of the super-rich from annoyance by their inferiors.

The Occupy movement in 2011 highlighted, if only for a brief moment in time in the United States, the ways in which the law-and-order that protects the comfort of the present order of things from the political manifestations of "the victims of its well-being" can actually violate the deeper and more important values of society. They, and the continuing protests of the indignados in the eurozone's periphery countries against the brutal austerity policies laying waste to the lives of millions of people there, are showing how the values of advanced democratic societies "are betrayed, compromised, denied in the social reality."

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, indignados, herbert marcuse, occupy movement, violence

Barry Goldwater and 2012 Republicanism (2)

Digby calls attention to a passage in Elias Isquith's article Paul Ryan's Debt to Barry Goldwater—Who'd Be Mortified by Paul Ryan 10/05/2012 that talks about the hawkishness that Goldwater 1964 and Paul Ryan 2012 both share. Isquith:

The Republican Party's antipathy toward the welfare state is well known. Less appreciated is the fact that what really defined Goldwater in the public's eye was his comfort with, or even celebration of, the violence of the state. Goldwater on foreign policy was more Bill Kristol than Ron Paul; as historian Thomas Sugrue put it, Goldwater wanted "a strong military ready not just to contain but to trample its Communist enemies."

I would argue that Papa Doc Paul's outlook also celebrates the violence of the state in both domestic and foreign policy. It's just couched in a superficial libertarian and Old Right isolationism notions. In one of the Republican Presidential debates, Papa Doc let it slip that he might not even cut the military budget if he were President, he would just pulls troops and base out of overseas locations.

And massive political violence in opposition to the civil rights movement was very much occurring in 1964. And there were two major issues in that Presidential campaign: the Vietnam War, in which Goldwater advocated immediate, radical escalation; and, civil rights, in which Goldwater sided clearly with the segregationists in the form of advocating "states rights", i.e., opposing action by the federal government to insure a "republican form of government" in the states. Goldwater's position was to let the anti-democratic voter suppression laws and the extralegal threats and violence of groups like the various Ku Klux Klan groups and the White Citizens' Council continue without federal interference. And it's well known that the police in many Southern states were willing to use violence, both technically "legitimate" and otherwise, to maintain the segregated "Suthun way of life."

This undated article from the Mississippi Civil Rights Project, The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, describes one of the most notorious incidents of violence during the year that Goldwater was running for President defending the segregationist position.

Today's Republican Party not only has made segregationist voter-suppression laws in the states a key part of their longterm strategy. They are also undisturbed by far-right loudmouths like, say, NRA board member Ted Nugent, mouthing off about the need for people to have weapons to fight tyranny - i.e., to shoot cops and soldiers with. And especially when it comes to the anti-abortion movement, one of the most potent contributors to violence-prone fanaticism today, they are especially indulgent of such rhetoric. The notion that aborting a fetus in the first two trimesters is taking a human life and therefore a form of murder has become a standard position for Republicans. As long as not only extremist activists but "respectable" politicians and ministers actively promote that notion, it's hard to see how the anti-abortion movement won't keep breeding political violence.

Tags: barry goldwater, radical right, violence

Barry Goldwater and 2012 Republicanism (1)

I've been puzzling over how to construct a post on political violence that addresses some current issues without using the proverbial "30,000 foot" clichees. Maybe it's just not a one-post concept.

Because Digby hits on one of the key points that has become increasingly central to our political life, as it has been for African-Americans for decades thanks largely to the "war on drugs": the legitimate and illegitimate violence of the state. Her post is Goldwater to Ryan to what? Hullabaloo 10/07/2012. She takes off from this thoughtful piece by Elias Isquith, Paul Ryan's Debt to Barry Goldwater—Who'd Be Mortified by Paul Ryan The Atlantic Online 10/05/2012.

But before I get to the violence issue, there's another point I want to deal with.

Isquith's piece touches on one of my pet peeves in political analysis and commentary of "movement conservatism" and the far right. That's the habit of going back 15 or 20 years or so and pointing out that some conservative hero of the earlier moment seemed to be far more enlightened, pragmatic and sensible than those occupying more-or-less the same political space in the present moment. I trace it to historian Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American History and Other Essays (1965). It appeared in book form in 1965 (link is to that essay only) after its publication as an essay in Harper's of November 1964. It's generally an excellent, insightful essay. But it appears to be the only remotely theoretical piece most of our Pod Pundits ever heard of - it would be to much to expect they had actually read it - dealing with the far right in American politics. As I wrote a couple of years ago,

In an essay in that book on the 1964 Goldwater campaign, Hofstadter compared Goldwater unfavorable to Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953), who was a leading Republican conservative circa 1950. (On Taft as isolationist, see my post Old Right isolationism, then and now 07/22/2007.) Since he claimed rhetorically to accept New Deal innovations like Social Security, Hofstadter set him up an a sensible conservative foil against Barry Goldwater's radical image.

Frank Annunziata made a similar argument in 1980 in "The Revolt against the Welfare State: Goldwater Conservatism and the Election of 1964" Presidential Studies Quarterly 10/2 (Spring 1980):

Barry Goldwater's critique of the welfare state deviated substantively from that of Dwight Eisenhower or Robert Taft. Both Eisenhower and Taft were advocates, if reluctant ones, of various aspects of the federal government's role in promoting social justice. The crucial difference is that they knew the welfare state could not be repealed. They attempted to halt, but not reverse America's drift to welfare state policies. Whatever their rhetorical similarities with Goldwater, Eisenhower and Taft never considered repealing the Sixteenth Amendment or the Social Security Act nor did they deny the federal government's role in education reform. Senator Taft conceded a federal role in securing every family housing, medical care, welfare payments and education subsidies. He successfully championed public housing legislation. He did not oppose minimum wage laws nor recommend abolition of farm price
supports. He wanted to expand the Social Security program and once informed President Eisenhower that the "best way" to stymie bureaucracy "and at the same time help people would be to have the federal government pay a flat fee to the states for every child in school, and automatically to send out a monthly pensi" Eisenhower characterized Taft as being "twice as liberal as I am" with views "miles away from those of some self-described 'Taft stalwarts'." Taft "did not shrink" from required governmental action to preserve liberty."

As Charlie Pierce might say to this whole be-nice-to-Robert-Taft theme: Honky, please! That would be the Sen. Robert Howard Taft to whose name we refer when the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is mentioned, one of the most notorious pieces of anti-labor federal legislation and one still on the books. He was a bitter opponent of the New Deal and a pre-Second World War isolationist. He bitterly criticized, even campaigned against, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, a truly dubious cause for which he was rather bizarrely celebrated by fellow Sen. John F. Kennedy in his famous Profiles in Courage (). It was to appeal to Taft supporters that Dwight Eisenhower shamefully softpedaled Joe McCarthy's attack on George Marshall. Time magazine's obituary for him, with the not very creative title "An American Politician" 62/6 08/10/1953, described his politics this way:

Taft was against the spread of federal power; his welfare bills gave jurisdiction to the states. He stood in the way of collectivists of all varieties,-from the creeping to the rampant. He was against their kind of progress.

"When I Say Liberty." Taft stood for individual liberty. "And when I say liberty," he wrote, "I do not mean simply what is referred to as 'free enterprise.' I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and live . . . liberty of a man to choose his own occupation, liberty of a man to run his own business as he thinks it ought to be run, as long as he does not interfere with the right of other people to do the same thing . . . Gradually this philosophy has been replaced by the idea that happiness can only be conferred upon the people by the grace of an efficient government. Only the government, it is said, has the expert knowledge necessary for the people's welfare."

Taft was known as "Mr. Republican," and he was the generally accepted leader of Republican conservatives and as such was Eisenhower's main rival for the 1952 Presidential nomination.

Taft's support for Social Security was along the lines parodied by Franklin Roosevelt and remembered by Jenifer Granholm in Granholm: ‘Get up, dig in and fight on!’ The War Room 10/04/2012. He didn't openly attack it directly because he knew it was way too popular, as President Obama is finding out in the current Presidential election.

As I wrote a couple of years ago (Richard Hofstadter, Broderized 03/01/2012), it was reasonable - though, I would add, dangerously superficial - in 1965 to think that an age of Broderian Centrism had arrived:

So it actually made sense in 1965 that Sacred Centrism had prevailed and that real reforms like the Great Society could happen because the Democrats and Republicans had respectively walled themselves off from the toxins of the fringes. Hofstadter's analysis was far more sophisticated than that, but that's pretty much what High Broderism assumes to this day.

But applying that model to today's politics makes about as much sense as saying that this snazzy new invention of color television is just as cool as the latest version of the iPhone. The Democrats today are almost as desperate to wall themselves off from New Deal/Great Society ideas as the Dems back then were to avoid Communist associations of any kind. While the Republicans have such a symbiotic relationship with the crackpot radical right of the Birchers and the Birthers and the Tea Partiers that it's hard to picture how they could cut the cord.

Isquith focuses on Goldwater's criticism of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s to say that Goldwater would have disapproved of Ryan. And it's true that Goldwater criticized Jerry Falwell and the Christian Right generally, and they returned the favor. But Goldwater's criticism was largely a faction fight among the far right. Goldwater was irritated by the idea of ministers mixing in politics in particular because of clerical activism against the Vietnam War. Goldwater's parents were also Jewish converts to Christianity, and a not-so-underground portion of Goldwater's quibbles with the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1964 surely owned something to the Birchers' suspicion of his "Jewish" background. Another reason for him to cast a skeptical eye on the rise of the Christian Right. But, as Kurt Schuaparra pointed on in an article on the Goldwater campaign in southern California, "The JBS, ... while clearly supporting the Senator, did him the favor of foregoing a formal endorsement; but members discreetly worked hard for him during the campaign." ("Barry Goldwater and Southern California Conservatism: Ideology, Image and Myth in the 1964 California Republican Presidential Primary" Southern California Quarterly 74/3; Fall 1992)

Barry Goldwater had some aspects that were attractive for liberals, like his disgust with the Christian Right. But he's no model to be holding up today as a foil to show how silly today's "Goldwaters" are.

Tags: barry goldwater, radical right, violence

Violence in pursuit of political and social causes

After my earlier posts on rightwing violence, I found myself thinking more about this whole issue of social/political violence in today's context.

In the United States right now, we don't have much of what might be called leftwing violence. There was a recent incident in Berkeley that qualified as a "riot", albeit a very minor one. I've included several links about it at the end of this post. [Full disclosure: I currently have a business relationship with the University of California; these comments are strictly my own.]

The students at Berkeley and other UC campuses have been protesting the very large fee increases that have resulted from California's chronic budget problems. They and their families are understandably upset by them. There were a number of protests last year and continuing now into 2010 over the fees. Unions have also protested over job cuts.

The minor riot of last week, as I understand it from the news reports, came after students occupied a campus building under renovation for around an hour and a half. Afterwards, they left and there was an impromptu dance party held at the edge of the campus. At some point, someone lit the contents of a dumpster on fire and pushed it out into a city street. Afterward some people, presumably some of them at least beings protesters, broke some windows on the street and had a standoff and some pushing and shoving with city and campus cops for an hour or so, this in the early morning.

So far as I'm aware, small incidents like this on the campuses haven't yet become some rightwing obsession nationally. But I've been thinking about how I frame such occurences myself in trying to understand them. Because given the fixation of our "cultural warriors" on the Sixties and the decadent homewrecking hippies, I'm sure Rush or FOX or Mad Annie Coulter will start fixating on it eventually if they keep happening.

In this case, I certainly support the notion that the State of California should provide enough funding for the universities that students and their families aren't hit with drastic fee increases. Whether a particular type of protest or civil disobedience is appropriate always comes down to a particular judgment about a particular political situation. In the case of the Berkeley riot, it seems entirely pointless to me in any kind of political terms to break windows and get into clashes with police in the way that occurred in that case. It just angers and irritates authorities and the public. Plus it gets participants into legal trouble for no good reason and can wind up with people getting physically injured, also with no good reason.

And anyone who has had experience or otherwise knows the history of the domestic espionage programs in the 1960s and 1970s in the US will recognize that provocateurs will try to promote dumb or useless or self-destructive violence in order to discredit a group or movement.

But should an incident like this discredit the very legitimate concern about fee increases? Not at all. Even the most senior university officials are complaining publicly about the funding crunch, even though they defend the fee increases in the particular circumstances.

I don't see that as implying any kind of double standard with my attitude toward rightwing political violence. I don't assume that the convicted Christian terrorist murderer Scott Roeder represents all anti-abortion activists. But I can certainly distinguish someone straightforwardly condemning what he did from someone making a ritual statement that they oppose what Roeder did and then in the next breath talking about all the "innocent babies" that Roeder's victim supposedly killed by performing abortions.

And maybe this is to obvious to say, but a few drunk young guys getting high on adrenalin and alcohol and whatever and then committing some stupid vandalism is a radically different level of violence than walking up to a doctor in his church on Sunday morning and shooting him in the head the way Scott Roeder did.

There has been genuine leftwing violence in the past in the US in pursuit of some political or social goal. I'm sure there will be at some point again, though there's not much sign of it now.

Militants in "the Sixties" in the US and Germany and presumably plenty other places used to point out that violence against property is not the same as violence against people. True. More-or-less. But vandalism can escalate over time into stiffer stuff. Scott Roeder's first act of protest was not his murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009.

In another twist on the topic, I saw a PBS documentary not long ago about the general strike in San Francisco in 1934, in which the longshore workers finally won a union, the International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU). They were facing violence, largely by the police who weren't exactly following all the niceties of the law in dealing with strikers, and they organized squads of their own goons to fight back. The got former boxers and football players, people with some experience in fighting, and they were well organized. Were they wrong to fight back? I'm not going to say they were.

Could they have achieved their aims without their defensive squads? No one can say. But the use of not only cops and National Guard but hired goons, often real gangland mobster types, to attack workers in the open and in private was common as dirt for employers in the 1920s and 1930s. Even most people on the union side involved with those actions probably wouldn't want to spin any great principles out of it. They fought - physically fought, fought with weapons - when they had to. And no doubt at times when they didn't have to. But their unions couldn't have succeeded in many of those conflicts without doing so.

Today, companies rarely use gun thugs for such work. Instead they get union-busting consultants and attorneys to do it.

I'm not trying to make any kind of broad moral or philosophical point here. What I am saying is that we need to be plain realistic in looking at instances of violence in connection with political or social causes. In the present and in past history. Both individual motivations and the context in which individuals operate are relevant to understanding those acts. Pretending that it's all a matter of innate evil (as Bush always said about The Terrorists) or "bad choices" or the "lone wolf"/deranged individual/crazy person (which our press seems to always label rightwing terrorists) is not realistic if part of their motivation is linked to a particular social/political cause or religious movement or group. And the fact that someone committing an act of violence claims to be acting in a larger cause doesn't negate the moral and legal responsibility of the individuals directly involved.

Links:

This story is not about the Berkeley riot but related.

Students Lobbying In Capitol Arrested by Javier Panzar Daily Californian 03/02/10

The Berkeley riot stories:

Beyond The Riot:Looking Toward March 4 By John Stehlin Daily Californian 03/02/10

Police Departments Learn from Riot in Preparation for Protests by Chris Carrassi and Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/02/10

Police Response Limited as Occupiers Avoid Arrest, Take to Streets by Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/01/10

Rioters Clash with Police in Streets South of UC Berkeley by Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/01/10

This interview is the Chancellor of UC-Berkeley discussing the budget situation dated the day before the riot:

The Battle for Berkeley's Future Bear in Mind (UC-Berkeley Web site)

Transcript of Bear in Mind February 25, 2010: The Battle for Berkeley's Future

Tags: violence

"The sixties": urban riots 1964-68

The scope of urban violence in the United States in the form of riots during the 1960s is pretty amazing. Here's a partial chronology (sources at the end of this post):

• 1964: July, Harlem riot; followed by similar disorderly protests that same summer in Brooklyn, Rochester NY, Paterson NJ, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

• 1965: Watts riot, Los Angeles; Chicago riot

• 1966: Rioting in 20 cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha

• 1967: Newark and Detroit riots; riots of less intensity in over 20 cities including Toledo OH, Grand Rapids MI, Plainfield NJ, Milwaukee WI; riots spread to Southern cities of Jackson, Nashville and Houston

• Feb, 1968: Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, in which police and National Guard open fire on black students, killing three and wounding 27.

• April, 1968: James Earl Ray assassinates Martin Luther King, Jr.; hell breaks loose, with riots in over 100 cities constituting the largest urban uprising in American history

Part of what gets lost in a superficial look at these events is that they are many-dimensional. I'm not making some stock "this side says, the other side says" filler comment here. Three distinct kinds of views formed about the riots: a mainstream liberal view, more-or-less represented by the Kerner Commission's recommendations that (in stereotypical "liberal" fashion) emphasized the diverse aspects of the phenomena; law-and-order conservatives viewed it as irresponsibile crime and violence and overwhelmingly emphasized a law-enforcement, punitive response, or "repression" to phrase it differently; and, both integrationist civil rights groups and Black Power/black-nationalist groups focused heavily on the community grievances involved. More on this below. But it's important to keep in mind that in 1968, "liberal" and "conservative" weren't so closely aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, as they are today.

Joseph Boskin quotes the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 as listing the following as the leading grievances among African-Americans. It was in African-American communities that most of these disorders occurred. (If anyone knows somewhere online where the entire text of the Kerner Commission Report is available, please let me know.) They were:

First Level of Intensity:
1. Police practices
2. Unemployment and underemployment
3. Inadequate housing

Second Level of Intensity:
1. Inadequate education
2. Poor recreational facilities and programs
3. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms

Third Level of Intensity:
1. Disrespectful white attitudes
2. Discriminatory administration of justice
3. Inadequacy of federal programs
4. Inadequacy of municipal services
5. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices
6. Inadequate welfare programs

It's notable that "police practices" heads the list of grievances. In many cases, such as the Newark riot of 1967, it was some instance of police brutality that set off the riot. In almost all cases, that was a factor. (The disorders after the King assassination were a special case triggered by his murder, though long-standing grievances clearly played a role there, too.)

We can back into the issue of police brutality from today's perspective. For more affluent whites, their most common antagonistic encounter with the police would be getting pulled over for a traffic violation. For non-whites, even that kind of encounter triggers more apprehension, because minorities more often have the experience of encountering police misconduct of some kind.

But this doesn't imply some general hostility to police. In Oakland this year, for instance, Mayor Ron Dellums recently announced a program to increase the police force in response to a rise in deadly violence, most of it drug- and gang-related. Low-income communities are where such violence often occurs, and the residents demand beter police protection. They want good police service where it's needed, not to be rid of the police. And people who live in or near neighborhoods where drive-by shootings and fights between gangs with firearms are a daily risk have a much more realistic, practical and urgent sense of what the need for law and order is. "Law-and-order" becomes more of a symbolic slogan for people less confronted with the daily reality of violent crime.

But even in Oakland, the police don't always handle things appropriately, e.g., Police Violence Shocks Activists, Others at Port of Oakland Protest by Dana Hull San Jose Mercury News 04/07/03 (link is to the copy at CommonDreams.org). Philadelphia police were just a few weeks ago caught on camera beating the crap out of a restrained suspect (Video shows police beating restrained suspects CNN.com 05/07/08). For anybody with half-sense, police who feel free to ignore the law and beat somebody up is always a real problem.

In Newark in 1967, the riot of several days there was touched off when an African-American cab driver named John Smith was arrested for allegedly tailgating and driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Here was how Smith described it in court at his bail hearing:

There was no resistance on my part. That was a cover story by the police. They caved in my ribs, busted a hernia, and put a hole in my head. ... After I got into the precinct six or seven other officers along with the two who arrested me kicked and stomped me in the ribs and back. They then took me to a cell and put my head over the toilet bowl. While my head was over the toilet bowl, I was struck on the back of the head with a revolver. I was also being cursed while they were beating me. An arresting officer in the cell block said, "This baby is mine."

Unlike many other cases of this kind, local civil rights leaders saw him very soon after he was arrested and could confirm that he had been seriously beaten.

Tom Hayden wrote a detailed account of the 1967 Newark riot, published first as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, The Occupation of Newark 08/24/1967; as of this writing, the link does not appear to be behind subscription. At his Web site, the article is linked with an introduction that says:

The article was the first exposure of how 26 killings happened during that week. Hayden was responsible for recommending a troop pullout to Governor Richard Hughes after an all night meeting. The Governor agreed to withdraw the troops, and Hayden was dragged before a grand jury demanding his notes. He refused, fearing that the Newark police would intimidate community eyewitnesses to the murders of unarmed people. The grand jury did not indict Hayden, but the Pentagon's special forces used his book in riot control training centers.

As Hayden describes the event:

What was unusual about John Smith's case was the fact that the police were forced to let respected civil-rights leaders see his condition less than two hours after the beating. The police were trapped and nervous because they had been caught by civil-rights leaders whose account could not be discredited. A neighborhood resident had called several of these leaders - including activists from CORE, the United Freedom Party, and the Newark Community Union Project - minutes after Smith was brought in.

After they had a heated argument about Smith with officers in the precinct, an inspector arrived from central police headquarters and agreed to let the group see the prisoner in his cell. "Don't listen to what he says. He's obviously upset and nervous as you might expect," the inspector told the group. The group was incensed after seeing Smith's condition. They demanded that he be sent immediately to the hospital. The police complied, while others searched for witnesses, lawyers, and members of Smith's family.

It was at this point that witnesses who were in the precinct house say the police began putting on riot helmets. None of the activists felt there was going to be an explosion, and none remembers a crowd of more than a hundred in the street at this point. (my emphasis)

A crowd gathered outside the police station that same evening, and local black leaders urged them to remain peaceful. But some people were in a different mood:

A local man took the police bullhorn [that one of the community leaders was using] and simply said, "Come down the street, we got some shit." In the darkness across from the precinct young men from the neighborhood were picking up bricks and bottles, and looking for some gasoline.

Missiles started to fly at the precinct, where 110 windows would eventually be broken. A friend pulled Curvin away from the front of the station, and the rest of the assembled crowd moved back in anticipation of the police. The police came out with helmets and clubs but were driven back inside by a torrent of bricks and bottles. People were starting to move across the street as the front of the precinct became a battle zone.

Just after midnight, two Molotov cocktails exploded high on the western wall of the precinct. A stream of fire curled fifty feet down the wall, flared for ten seconds, and died. The people, now numbering at least 500 on the street, let out a gasp of excitement. Fear, or at least caution, was apparent also: many people retreated into the darkness or behind cars in the Hayes parking lot.

I suppose it's worth saying at this point what should be obvious but often isn't, that explaining something is not the same as justifying it, understanding is not the same as approving. These are distinctions the "culture warriors" still find it convenient to forget.

Part of the problem in policing was that urban police departments at the time were often all-white, or nearly so. And some of them had distinctly hostile attitudes toward blacks. Hayden explains that in Newark at the time:

Much of the community viewed the police as the tool of more direct intimidation, harassment, and violence. Dominated by the Italians who run Newark politics, tainted by alleged underworld connections, and with a token of only 250 blacks among 1400 members, the Police Department was seen as the spearhead of organized hostility to Negro action, an armed unit protecting the privileges of the shrinking white community of the city. A year of federally sponsored workshop meetings of police and neighborhood people apparently was not enough to modify "police-community relations." On the wall of Headquarters there are two signs which hint at the police world view: "BOMB HANOI" and "GO TO COLLEGE AND LEARN TO RIOT."

Police departments were often not trained on methods of dealing with riot situations or even unruly crowds. So even when acting in good faith they sometimes needlessly inflamed situations that could have been defused. And when the National Guard was called in to help in riot situations, which happened in Newark in 1967, they were often not trained in regular policing, much less riot control.

Hayden again:

"An obvious open rebellion," asserted [Democratic] Governor [Richard] Hughes after his tour of Newark at 5 A.M. Friday. From that announcement until Monday afternoon, the black community was under military occupation. More than 3000 National Guardsmen were called up Friday morning from the surrounding white suburbs and southern Jersey towns. Five hundred white state troopers arrived at the same time. By mid-afternoon Friday they were moving in small convoys throughout the city, both clockwise and counter-clockwise, circling around seven parts of the ghetto. Guardsmen were moving in jeeps or small open trucks, usually led or followed by carloads of troopers or Newark police. Bayonets were attached to the Guard's 30-caliber M-1 rifles or 30-caliber carbines, which they carried in addition to 45-caliber pistols. Personnel carriers weighing as much as eleven tons, and trucks mounted with machine guns, appeared here and there among the jeeps and police cars. The presence of these vehicles was designed, according to Governor Hughes, to build the confidence of the Negro community.

Confidence in what? Hughes defined the issues over and over in television, radio, and press interviews, as well as in meetings with community leaders. "The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America," he announced shortly after arriving in Newark. On Saturday he talked again of the line between society and the jungle, adding that the Negroes "had better choose sides" becauses the "side of law and order has joined this to the finish." (my emphasis)

Conservatives may claim now that it was "condescending" of liberals in the 1960s to suggest that "law and order" was sometimes used as a racial code word. Condescending to whom? To blacks in Newark who found their neighborhood under bascially all-white military occupation justified with that kind of rhetoric?

Boskin makes a useful distinction between the riots immediately following King's assassination and other such occurrences earlier in the decade. Those were more in the nature of an outburst of anger. While the other riots were more in the nature of spontaneous political action. Boskin writes:

Despite the disparity of distance, there was a consensus of attitudes and a similarity of actions among those urban blacks who revolted and those who supported the violent protest. Signficantly, the riots were largely unplanned, unorganized and unscheduled. ...

Taken together, the riots were the actions of a people, poor and disposessed and crushed in huge numbers into large slum ghettos, who reose up in wrath against a society committed to democratic ideals. Their outburst was an expression of class antagonism, resentment against racial prejudice, anger at the unreachable affluence around them, and frustration at their sociopolitical powerlessness. "What are these people riotin' about in other cities?" exclaimed Efelka Brown, of the "Sons of Watts," an organization set up to train young males in trade skills. "They want recognition and the only way they goin' get it is to riot. We don't want to overthrow the country - we just want what we ain't got." ...

To strike out against the visible symbols of white society became a sign of brotherhood. ... Many residents of ghetto areas who did not participate in the actions should their approval to those on the streets.

That a general approval, a collective behavior, pervaded the ghettos can be borne out by analysis of the actions of blacks. The two groups singled out for attack were the police and Caucasian-owned businesses.

Recognizing this aspect of those events does not mean that they were a good way to proceed. And even though our "culture warriors" may associate riots with the Black Panthers, neither they nor any other significant group actually organized and promoted riots. Boskin also observes:

The nature of the rioting which marked the mid-1960's appeared to undergo serious change by the end of the decade. Two indications of this change were, firstly, the Detroit riot of 1967 in which a sizable proportion of Caucasians joined with the Negroes in burning and looting, thus indicating a meshing of an economic underclass; and, secondly, the development and intensity of the Black Power movement. The activists have been concerned with developing cultural, economic, and political programs within the community. These activist organizations have, on more than one occasion, prevented violent outbreaks by ghetto residents who were angered by representatives of the power structure, particularly the police. (my emphasis)

This doesn't mean that Black Power groups all counseled non-violence. On the contrary, the Black Panthers and others exclicitly rejected the notion of restricting their activism to nonviolence and encouraged African-Americans to arm and train themselves for violent self-defense.

And apart from that famous "white backlash", the negative impact of riots and the police reaction on the affected communities was great, no matter what constructive developments may have followed. In the riots following King's assassination, 39 people were killed, 35 of them African-American. Boskin notes of the riots prior to that time:

The toll of the rioting over the four-year period was devastating. Between 1964 and 1967, approximately 130 civilians, mainly Negroes, and 12 civil personnel, mainly Caucasian, were killed. Approximately 4,700 Negroes and civil personnel were injured. Over 20,000 persons were arrested during the melees; property damages mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars; many cities resembled the hollowed remnants of war-torn cities.

In "culture war" mythology, these riots were the results of liberal "permissiveness". Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote about how that played in the 1968 Presidential election:

As for racial justice, the Wallace movement may have had the useful effect of making many voters think about the consequences of their prejudices. Wallace tempted them for a while; but then in the end they drew back, and Wallace's appeal contracted rather swiftly to the lower Confederacy. Probably Mr. [Samuel] Lubell is also right in suggesting that "the strength of Wallace's backing ... shocked many liberals and Negroes into realizing that excesses on the Negro side have to be curbed." In any case, I would agree with his conclusion that "the preponderant part of the electorate, in most of the South as well as in the North, is prepared to support a 'middle course' policy that would curb racial violence while still continuing Negro progress." (my emphasis)

A middle course between what? Between those politicians who were in favor of riots and those opposed to them? And the politicians in favor would be, uh, not a single one I can think of. Schlesinger wrote that he "would agree" with such a middle approach. But he doesn't cite any politicians who advocated urban riots as a "permissable" alternative. What he doesn't say is that some voters were at least willing to regard alleged Democratic "permissiveness" as responsible for the riots.

But that impression, promoted by Richard Nixon and George Wallace, was in large part a accident of Presidential politics. There was a Democratic administration in power during 1964-68 and the urban riots were one big reason many voters were discontented with the way things were. But Lyndon Johnson scarcely took a "permissive" attitude toward riots. Many of the cities where riots occurred had Democratic mayors. The New Jersey Governor who used such scare-talk in 1967 in calling out the National Guard was a Democrat. Bobby Kennedy, who had very highly credibility among black voters, was emphatic about the need for effective law-enforcement action against rioters. The "culture war" view of liberal "permissiveness" on urban riots is little more than vapid ideology.

Sources used in this post:

Joseph Boskin, "The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964-1967", The Annals 382 March 1969

Tom Hayden The Occupation of Newark New York Review of Books 08/24/1967

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Vilence in America (1969)

Howard Zinn, Postwar America: 1945-1971 (1973).

Tags: 1968, african-american history, culture war, violence

"The sixties" prehistory: urban riots before 1964

In the course of my eclectic research into the collective phenomenon we call "The sixties", I came across the March 1969 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (382), a issue organized around the theme, "Protest in the Sixties". I'm sure I'll be using it in more than one post.

One of the most disturbing aspect of "the sixties" were the urban riots. Two of the articles from The Annals address that question, "The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964-1967" by Joseph Boskin and "Black Nationalism" by J. Herman Blake. Howard Zinn, one of the most influential thinkers for the New Left, addresses it in his 1973 book Postwar America: 1945-1971. So did the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to some extent in The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Violence in America (1969). One of the major themes of the politics of the day was the causes of violence and how to respond.

The conservative answer is very familiar: bad people make bad choices and they deserve to go to jail for a long time. (One of Mike Huckabee's good buddies, Bill Gothard, argues that even schizophrenia results from making bad character choices.) The conservative reaction against the increasing violence during the 1960s also involved a conceptual and rhetorical trick, which was to treat any attempt to understand the various causes of violence, both the violence of rioting and of ordinary crime, was accused of making excuses for violence and letting perpetrators off easy or even encouraging it.

Schlesinger describes the Nixonian approach, which now appears as the forerunner of the Cheney-Bush police-state mentality:

The right tells us that we are a violent society because of what Mr. Nixon called in his campaign the "fog of permissiveness" in American life — a weakening of the national moral fiber expressed, among other ways, in judicial decisions strengthening the rights of arrested persons. The Supreme Court, Mr. Nixon said, had given the "green light" to "the criminal elements." More third degrees, more wire-tapping, longer jail sentences, a tougher Attorney General, a conservative Supreme Court and presumably the suppression of the child-rearing treatises of Dr. Spock: these would comprise the distinctive elements of the right-wing program for law and order. Yet careful studies by the National Crime Commission fail to bear out the contention that Supreme Court decisions have been a significant factor in the increase in violence; and, while the enlargement and modernization of our police forces (including the payment of better salaries) are an unquestioned necessity, the establishment of a police state would seem another of those cases where the cure would be, in the end, worse than the disease. "We might then have to choose," as [liberal Republican] Mayor [John] Lindsay [of New York] has put it, "between the random terror of the criminal and the official terror of the state." (my emphasis)

Leaders like George Wallace of Alabama and Ronald Reagan of California were even more strident than Nixon in their rhetoric at the time.

From today's perspective, it does appear to be a challenging question why riots broke out in black ghettos just at the time of unprecedented peacetime prosperity (at least semi-peacetime), real advances in civil rights legislation and enforcement, and an expansion of social services and federal programs aimed at expanding opportunities for the urban poor, that such social explosions would occur.

Or maybe I should say that for many whites, then and now, it appeared hard to understand. For some raw contemporary examples of how many whites reacted to large-scale urban disorders in the mid-1960s, see The Meaning of Box 722 by Rick Perlstein, The Big Con blog 06/05/08. His selections include examples of people making an argument along the lines of, "these blacks have gotten so much, and now they're being ungrateful by rioting."

African-Americans and other minorities in urban ghettos faced racial discrimination, real misconduct from often all-white local police forces, and much tougher daily living situations than most whites experienced. There were certainly significant numbers of poor whites then as today. But the conditions faced by urban blacks were different in many ways to those faced by whites. And the racial separation in society meant that whites were in many ways genuinely unaware of the realities that African-Americans lived.

There were riots in the predominantly black Harlem section of New York in 1935 and 1943 which resembled in many ways the urban riots of the 1960s in their nature. But, as Boskin observes, those two incidents were exceptions. The other urban "riots of the past two centuries were initiated by Caucasians and were motivated by racist attitudes."

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., give some examples in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition; 2003). The summer of 1919, they write, "ushered in the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed." Major riots occurred in Longview, Texas, and in Chicago, both touched off by whites attacking a black target:

Although rioting continued for the next few years, few outbreaks equaled in proportion those of 1919. Two years later, in June 1921, the blacks and whites of Tulsa, Oklahoma, engaged in fighting - which Buck C. Franklin, a local black attorney, and some others preferred to call a "race war" - in which nine whites and twenty-one blacks were known to have been killed and several hundred were injured. On hearing that a black had been accused of assaulting a young white woman, blacks took arms to the jail to protect the accused person, who, it was rumored, would be lynched. Altercations between whites and blacks at the jail spread to other parts of the city, and general rioting, looting, and house burning began. Four companies of the National Guard were called out, but by the time order was restored more than $1 million worth of property had been destroyed or damaged. The young black man was subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing. ...

The predominantly black town of Rosewood, Florida, was annihilated in January 1923 by a white mob from a neighboring village. The destruction resulted from a white woman's false accusation that a black male assaulted her. Rosewood was burned to the ground, many of its residents were murdered, and the survivors were driven into exile. Those who escaped "lived in fear that if they talked of what they saw . . . members of the mob would track them down and resume the bloodletting." Not until the early 1980s did some residents break silence. As a result of the publicity, investigations followed that produced a book, a scholarly study, a television special, and a feature film on the "Rosewood Massacre." In 1994 the Florida legislature provided reparations of $150,000 to each of the survivors of the violence.

In 1925 Detroit joined the ranks by seeking to prevent an African-American physician, O. H. Sweet, from living in a house he had purchased in a white neighborhood. When a mob gathered around his home and threw stones, a white man was killed by gunfire coming from the house. Sweet, his brother, and friends in the house were brought to trial. The NAACP came to their defense, employing Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays as defense attorneys. All were finally acquitted, but irreparable harm had been done not only to the Sweet family but also to race relations in Detroit.

The periods around both world wars saw notable racial violence, in major part related to the influx to Northern and Western cities of large numbers of African-Americans from the South looking for work and greater freedom.

Detroit was the scene of another riot during the Second World War. Franklin and Moss:

On June 20, 1943, the most serious race riot of the war period broke out in Detroit. The months of tension reached a climax after a fistfight occurred between a black man and a white man. The altercation rapidly spread to involve several hundred people of both races. Wild rumors, as usual, swept through the town. Within a few hours blacks and whites were fighting throughout most or Detroit. When the governor hesitated to declare martial law and call out troops, whites began to roam the streets, burning blacks' cars and beating large numbers of black people. Nothing effective was done to bring order out of the chaos until President Roosevelt proclaimed a state of emergency and sent 6,000 soldiers to patrol the city. At the end of more than thirty hours of rioting, twenty-five African Americans and nine whites had been killed, and property valued at several hundred thousand dollars had been destroyed.

Boskin draws a qualitative distinction between the pre-1960s riots and those that followed, presumably based on the growth of more cohesive black communities in urban ghettos by the 1960s. But it's not entirely clear why he draws a qualitative distinction for the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943, likening them more to those of the 1960s.

After the Second World War, Boskin finds that the riots prior to the 1960s largely involved white reaction to some move by blacks to challenge the color line, which existed in the North though not in the Jim Crow form found in Southern segregation:

The most intense violence occurred when minority groups attempted to change residential patterns or when a number of Caucasians defined the situation as one in which such an attempt was being made.

The volatility of these situations was constantly reflected in the years following the termination of the war. Resentment against Negroes who moved into all-white neighborhoods resulted in more than a hundred incidents: the Airport Homes violence in Chicago in November 1945; the Fernwood Project violence, also in Chicago, August 1947; the Georgia house-bombings in May 1947; and the highly publicized violence of 1951 in Cicero, Illinois. Some of the weapons employed by white assaulters — bricks, guns, sniping, Molotov cocktails — were those which were utilized by blacks in the 1960's. Racial violence also occurred when Negroes attempted to use public recreational facilities traditionally reserved for Caucasians in northern and midwestern cities. In sum, the race riots which raged in American society from the turn of the century until the mid-1960's reflected extensions of white racism. The rebellions which began in 1964 represented a major response to that racism. (my emphasis)

The change to a more aggressive attitude of protest by urban African-American communities outside the South clearly had a generational aspect. The First World War marked the first major exodus of Southern blacks to the North. Blake writes that during that war:

... Northern industrialists began a campaign to induce blacks to leave the South and work in Northern factories. It is estimated that in one two-year period a half-million black people moved to the North.

The many blacks who made this journey found that though they were often openly recruited, they were seldom welcomed, for they were crowded into urban slums and faced a continual round of unemployment, depression, and indigence. Furthermore, they met the massive hostility of whites - many of them newly arrived in this country - who saw the black in-migrants as threats to their economic security and reacted against them with devastating riots.

He notes two major developments that produced a qualitative change in attitude by the 1960s:

Not a small proportion of the in-migrants to central cities are younger blacks who are generally better educated than those whites who remain in the cities. Furthermore, a new generation of black people is coming to maturity, young people who were born and raised in the urban black communities. They do not use a previous Southern pattern of living as the framework through which they assess their current situation, but use an urban, mainstream-America framework, usually learned from the mass media rather than experienced. These youth comprise a very large proportion of the urban residents and are less enchanted by the view that, although things are bad, they are better than they used to be. As such, they are very critical of attitudes of those blacks who see the situation of the black man as improving. A small but significant proportion of the new urbanites are young people who have graduated from first-rate colleges and hold white-collar positions in integrated firms. The subtle prejudices which they have encountered, along with the empty lives of the many middle-class whites whom they have met, have increased their awareness that there is a style and tone of life in the black community which gives much more satisfaction than that of the white middle class. The heightened interaction of black youth as a result of urban living, the coming-of-age of a generation of post-World War II youth, and the rejection of some white middle-class values in the attempt to articulate values which grow out of the black experience are some of the internal dynamics of black communities in the 1960's which are producing a new upsurge in [black] nationalism. (my emphasis)

Schlesinger also address the question, that for good culture warriors would be, "How can those people be so ungrateful when they're already getting so much?" He writes of "excluded groups" by which he means "the traditionally poor, the blacks, the Indians, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican-Americans":

The excluded groups today are mostly better off than they were a generation ago. They receive more attention, have more influence and exert more pressure on society than ever before. Yet they grow more drastic and importunate as their status improves. This should surprise no one. As Tocqueville observed of the discontent that led to the French Revolution, "Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated." So, while the failure to continue improving the objective situation will only make matters worse, we cannot rest in the comfortable supposition that continued improvement will solve our problems. The operative idea here is what the sociologists call "relative deprivation" — that is, a sense of frustration measured not against the past but against the future, not in terms of how little people once had but of how much they now expect. (my emphasis)

Tags: 1968, african-american history, culture war, violence

"The Sixties": King and urban disorders in the 1960s

(I drafted this in early April but failed to post it then.)

The nightmares of our "culture warriors" are still haunted by the urban riots of the 1960s. They're even more terrifying than their visions about gay sex or abortion. Even many people who weren't even around or too young to notice at the time have inherited the fear from their parents and political mentors. And there was a riot in Los Angeles in 1992 that reminded everyone of what had happened and maybe could happen again.

The period of those riots were kicked off by the Watts riot of 1965. The time line is important, because in the "culture war" view of the 1960s, including the somewhat more urbane version favored by the Bobos, the early 1960s were a time of respectable and respectful dissent by well-mannered Negroes (the normal term then), while the later 1960s was marked by wild-eyed radicals who were totally irresponsible and destructive and dangerous.

In this version, Martin Luther King, Jr. functions as an icon of respectability against which in practice virtually all activists black leaders of that time and this are seen as distinctly suspect. One currently popular shorthand for that view is "Jeremiah Wright", or "Obama's Wright problem".

Often this view is used to justify in effect shrugging off the current dilemmas facing African Americans and other ethnic minorities in majority-white America. The African American columnist Eugene Robinson is not a Bobo exactly. But he articulates one common aspect of this view in Two Black Americas Washington Post 04/08/08:

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed - mostly for the better - and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized. ...

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out - a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death - and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot; the gentrification of recent years has just shifted the pathology from one part of the city to another, or perhaps to a close-in suburb, sweeping it into a corner.

The African American poor are a smaller segment than they were 40 years ago, but arguably they are further from full participation in society than they were in King's era. It's not that they have no interest in climbing the ladder, it's that too many rungs are missing.
(my emphasis)

The situation of African Americans since 1968 has changed "mostly for the better", he writes soothingly (at least for white readers). Was this man vacationing on Mars during Hurricane Katrina?

But even Robinson's cautious mention of real, persistent, chronic problems for a large percentage of American blacks would be too much for good Christian Republican white folks these days. Although most of them won't be shaken too badly by the metaphorical idea that "too many rungs" are missing on the ladder leading to middle-class prosperity.

But start talking about more serious enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and spending considerably more money on the kinds of "middle class" basic services that black and other resident of our cities' poorest neighborhoods - effective law enforcement, top-quality schools, safe parks and playgrounds, well-stocked libraries, after-school programs for kids, drug treatment programs, job-training and even public-employment programs - that will send the Bobos to sputtering about the tax burden on our much-put-upon wealthy citizens. And the Christianists to war about how welfare subsidies "bad morals" among young women, whose whole sex is a source of much torment to them anyway. And the blowhards of OxyContin radio will blather endlessly about welfare queens and fraud and lazy poor people.

Certainly there has been progress in this area in the last 40 years. Many legal and practical barriers have been removed that blocked blacks from jobs and education. Despite the segregationist voter-suppression tactics that have now become standard operating procedure for the Republican Party, black voters in the South are enfranchised. The dismantling of the legal "de jure" segregation system in the South is a big achievement. The era of blacks being charged for crimes by all-white law enforcement, prosecuted by a white prosecutor before a white judge, and their fate being decided by an all-white juries is gone. Decades of anti-discrimination laws have persuaded most corporations to incorporate affirmative action hiring practices, more scrupulously practiced by some companies than by others.

The Bobos use their phony image of a tame Martin Luther King to justify ignoring the real problems around race that still exist. So do some liberals. But King's life and career as civil rights leader overlaps the period of 1960s riots by more than two years, if we take the Watts riot as a starting point. King was committed to addressing the issues facing urban black communities outside the South, as well.

Robinson's comment that the process of the decline of community institutions and common culture ties in black areas of big cities - I'm assuming that's what he means by hollowing-out - was "accelerated by the riots that followed King's death". While it's a sensible statement as far as it goes, the urban riots were a bigger phenomenon that an angry reaction to King's death.

It's also worth observing that urban blacks outside the South must have felt in some way that King represented their interests for there to be such a reaction after his murder. Those post-assassination riots were "overdetermined", as the psychologists say. But that was surely a significant factor, just as the event of his assassination became the flash-point that set off that historic round of disorders.

Tags: 1968, martin luther king jr., racism, violence

Learning from Virginia Tech? We can always hope

I haven't had much to say about the Virginia Tech shootings, although Wonky Muse and Tankwoman have shared some good thoughts and observations here. I'm working from a couple of notions. One is that the mass murdered problem of the guy (it's almost always a guy) who goes off the tracks and decides to kill a lot of people is to a large extent intractable. Another is that we have such daffy ideas about law enforcement and punishment in America that neither the public nor policymakers are able to focus very well on measures designed to minimize criminal violence.

But neither of those things are excuses for being complacent. Some things can be done. And a lot of them involve awareness by parents, teachers, police officers, medical professionals and others who may be influential in the life of a young person. And though not all such perpetrators are young, to really get a person so inclined on a different track, it has to be done while they are young, if it can really be done at all. Christy Hardin Smith of FireDogLake, who actually has some experienced working with violent youths as a prosecutor, wrote one of the more sensible pieces I've seen on the problem, Red Flags FireDogLake 04/17/07. She writes:

With years of experience in working with at risk kids, from very young childhood forward to dealing with the parents of these children, the thing which stands out in my mind is how little work we do with abused children at the front end of this cycle the way our criminal system is currently structured – and how much good early intervention can truly do for a child to keep them out of the juvenile and adult criminal system as time goes forward. ... This is a discussion that I desperately want to see happen in this country, because the costs of incarceration - and the horrible impact that violent crime has on the victims who must face it - cannot continue to rise without us examining more effective means to combat these crimes at their root.
In all honesty, there are some offenders who simply cannot be rehabilitated, for whom incarceration is the best means of ensuring safety for the community and for the defendant. But that is not true for all offenders, and that is especially true for younger juveniles for whom effective and immediate psych and educational intervention can make a world of difference. (Not in all cases, but in a lot of them.)

One of the sources of this kind of violence is a feeling of resentment and victimization. Emphasis on the feeling, which may or may not have some rational basis. Since pretty much everybody has some experience of feeling resentment at being badly treated, even if only not getting everything they wanted as a child, but only the tiniest minority become mass murderers, there's some special about the way resentment gets processed with a guy like the Virginia Tech shooter. But what pundit Pete Williams said on Meet the Press on Sunday 04/22/07 was one of the few worthwhile comments on the whole program:

Well, I think the first thing that comes through is that this was obviously a very disturbed young man. He - I think that’s thing one. Thing two is, you know, people sometimes say, “Well, he just snapped.” This is clearly not a person who just snapped. He started buying his first weapon in February. He bought the next one in March. He was practicing at a firing range near the campus. And you clearly see a lifetime of rage, resentment. And, and the other thing that comes through is he specifically refers to the two students who shot their fellow classmates at Columbine. I understand now why the profilers said that he reminded them so much of, of them. He’s someone who felt picked on, abused. It was him against the world. (my emphasis)

And I hate to say it [sound of teeth grinding], but David Brooks, who enjoys the very dubious distinction of having been a better pundit when he was at the Weekly Standard than since he joined the New York Times, was also more-or-less accurate in what he said on the PBS Newshour Friday (President Refutes Reid's Comments That Iraq War Is 'Lost' 04/19/07). Now, Brooks is a Party-line hack, so in the context what he was mainly saying was, NO GUN CONTROL! But still, you can sometimes be right for the wrong reasons:

Well, I'm thinking about the randomness of it. It's hard to hold this kid responsible for it. I mean, we want to say, you know, there's great forces of evil, Satan acted through him. But when you lack at that young man, he's someone who was mad, who was insane.

And who knows the trivial reason that caused it, whether there was a virus that affected his brain, whether there was isolation, a whole chain of events? But it's the absurdity of it all. Some virus affects his brain. He becomes schizophrenic, whatever he was, and then 32 people die.

And I think it's that absurdity between cause and effect and the sort of amorality of it that is undermining a lot of people's morale, who say there's nothing to be gained from this. Thirty-two people are dead because of who knows what. ...

... I mean, when you look at - we now know a lot about why madness is caused. And for schizophrenia, sometimes there's a virus that gets into a fetal brain, and then it leads to lifelong effects. Sometimes there's an injury to the frontal lobe that leads to hyper-aggression and depression. Sometimes it's inability to process serotonin.

It's all this stuff that can create these horrible effects, and it's trivial little biological and chemical stuff. It's not a great clash of morality or anything.

I have to admit I'm not up on the latest about the fetal schizophrenia virus that Brooks was talking about. But he does have a point. Some people are just screwed up. And while every human action has some biological component, some conditions are so heavily biological determined that it's difficult to do anything about them. Those are pretty rare. But then so are mass murders. (Unless you live in, say, Iraq, where they are a normal part of the day.)

But it's awfully easy to use that as an excuse to avoid action to deal with the problem, which Brooks was clearly doing. And one of the most annoying science stories is the one that pops up every now and then about how somebody says they've discovered a "genetic" basis for violent behavior. That often makes the front page, while the later follow-up studies that fail to replicate the results get buried in a small piece in the back of the paper. In fact, it's still very difficult to pin down the exact genetic basis for particular physical illnesses. It's effectively impossible at our state of knowledge to determine anything like a genetic basis for complex behaviors, all of which are inevitably affected by social dynamics of some kind.

Which brings us to the American attitudes about crime and violence. Obviously a huge subject. But there are a variety of common assumptions that make it difficult to focus on effective measures to minimize violent crimes. One of the biggest problems is that it became a deeply-embedded assumption of politics in the late 1960s that any talk about "root causes" of crime was automatically processed by many people as being "soft on crime". Which is basically nuts.

Another is the notion that longer jail sentences and more severe punishments are being "tough on crime". The result is that much of our approach to criminal justice is faith-based rather than reality-based.

It's been well known for a long time that the law can deter crimes. But the most important effect is not the type or severity of the penalty. It's the liklihood of getting caught. Failing to recognize this leads to some bizarre results.

Back in the 1990s, Calfornia passed a "three-strikes" law (by both legislative action and by statewide initiative) that mandated long prison sentences for third-time felong convictions, meaning that someone who had a record of two felonies and then got caught kiting a check would have a longer mandated sentence that a murdered whose killing was a first offense. The immediate event that gave it particular emotional appeal statewide was the well-publicized murder of a girl named Polly Klass, who was kidnapped from her home, sexually abused and murdered.

I thought at the time, and think even more so now, it just makes no sense to pass a law like that which isn't targeted toward violent crimes. My priority would be to reduce violent crime, in particular.

And two factors about the Polly Klass case stood out for me in the context of the three-strikes law. One was that the police actually pulled over the kidnapper on the night he snatched the girl on some traffice violation. At the time, she was probably alive and hidden nearby. But because the computer systems of the various police departments had a significant delay in communicating with each other, the officers that pulled him over hadn't gotten word about the kidnapping yet.

The other thing that struck me is that the capture rate for child kidnappings at the time was about 5%. Which means that the deterrent effect of the law was virtually non-existent.

To me, the obvious implications of that would be that investing in more efficient computer and communications systems for the police across the state, and maybe mandating that local governments establish standardized computer protocols, would be something that might actually make a difference in circumstances like that. Also, a more explicit focus on increasing the arrest rate for these types of crimes would increase the deterrent value of the law in a significant way.

Instead, we passed a three-strikes law that has helped fill the state prison system to the bursting point with drug-related and property-crime offenders. Gov. Schwarzenegger has been at least making a show of trying to find solutions for the problem, including sending some of California's prisoners to other states. Great. We're going to turn warehousing California's prison population into a valuable source of outsourcing revenue for other states. Brilliant.

Using our heads and not panicking and being stampeded into approving stupid and counterproductive laws would be a much better approach.

Then there's the advice of expert criminologists like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich: more guns! Now, it seems to me that anyone who ever spent five minutes on a college campus can see the flaw in this thinking. You've got a large population of people in a relatively small area, mostly in an age bracket of 18-23 or so, a time in life when most people feel immortal or at least have the notion that old age and death are almost unimaginably far away. Then give everybody a gun to carry around all the time. What happens at the drunken frat parties? Or when some guy decides his girlfriend is dong the Wild Thang with somebody else? Get real. You have to wonder if these people are consciously thinking, "I want to see mass violence and chaos." Or maybe they just like the idea of college kids getting shot all the time. Who knows?

But since there are a lot of gun-loving white folks who think this is at least a respectable option, it's a good thing that people like Cynthia Tucker are pointing out what a [Cheney]ing crazy idea this is. Speaking of Cheney, he's a walking, snarling, shooting-in-the-face advertisement for more effective gun laws. But I digress. In In Pushing guns for all students cartoonish idea Atlanta Journal-Costitution 04/22/07, Tucker writes that it's normal for kids to be fond of superhero stories:

But it's more than a little disconcerting to hear that so many adults also believe in superheroes. They must. Why else would they insist that the best way to prevent carnage of the sort that occurred last week at Virginia Tech is to put guns into every available hand? They're indulging their childhood fantasies, remembering the movies in which the Caped Crusader or John Wayne instantly dispatched the bad guy.

In real life, police officers - trained to fire in the heat of battle - hit their intended targets only about 40 percent of the time, according to University of South Carolina criminologist Geoffrey Alpert, an expert in police shootings.

"You can train all day in simulated situations ... and you think you can hit a target. But it comes right down to it and someone is pointing a gun at you, and it just doesn't happen," he said. (my emphasis)

The kinds of interventions that have the potential to minimize events like the Columbine or Virginia Tech killings are the kind of practical things that Hardin discusses in her blog post. Things like waiting periods on gun purchases, preventing online purchases of guns or ammo, more effective background checks for people with particular mental health records before selling them a gun, all those could help. The Columbine killings also drew attention to the seriousness of bullying in elementary, middle and high schools. This article from the Focus on Prevention Newsletter (CA Attorney General's Office) Spring 2003, hyperbolically titled, Bullying: Terrorist Threat That Most Frightens U.S. Teens:

Six out of ten American teenagers witness bullying in school once a day or even more frequently, reported the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC). The national group recently released findings from a survey conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide that show that bullying is the terrorist threat that most frightens America’s teenagers and interferes with their education.

The survey of 512 youth ages 12 to 17 revealed that young people are far less concerned about external terrorist attacks on their schools and communities than they are about the bully terrorizing them and their classmates in the hallways and classrooms of their schools. Just 34 percent of teens surveyed stated active concern over another terrorist attack in the U.S.

For several years, particularly since Columbine, educators and policy makers have been concerned about bullying as a contributor to youth violence in our schools. Their concern was well founded and it does not appear that things are improving. More than half of the teens polled said they could identify a student at school who they feel could cause harm to another student, an increase of six percentage points (a 15 percent increase) over last year’s response to the same question — from 46 percent to 52 percent. The increase here was accounted for by more boys reporting that they personally know a student who could harm others (from 48 percent in 2001 to 57 percent in 2002).

Parent involvement and strong policies at schools are key to getting the attention, commitment, and resources needed to reduce and prevent bullying and the fear and other problems it brings.

Not nearly as dramatic as teen-aged fantasies about gunning down the bad guys. But reality-based ideas have the advantages of having some effect in the real world.

Tags: crime, violence, virginia shooting