When people show you who they are, believe them – for this wisdom we have to thank the late poet Maya Angelou, and Oprah Winfrey, who popularized it. It seems useful when we look at the anarchist protesters in Portland, Oregon, who have been rioting nightly since George Floyd was killed in the fourth week of May; and we ask, after the withdrawal of federal troops, what do they want?
To smash the state. It need not be more subtle than that and sadly probably isn’t.
Most of the mainstream news coverage of the Black Lives Matter-related unrest in Portland as well as in Seattle, the two very blue and not very Black Pacific Northwest metropolises (Portland is about 6% Black; Seattle, about 7%; the U.S. overall, about 13.4%) has focused on what are said to be mostly peaceful protesters confronting violent police or federal agents – but not all of it.
The Washington Post had a more subtle and hair-raising report recently about disturbances in Portland on just another night this summer, Aug. 18, by staff reporter Katie Shepherd, formerly a writer for Portland’s alternative paper Willamette Week.
“A crowd of protesters marched to a county building ... where a handful of people in masks and all-black outfits threw rocks through windows and lit a small fire inside,” Shepherd began, “marking the 83rd night of protests in Portland that have led to millions of dollars in damage to city property.”
This followed by two days an attack in Portland that left a man unconscious “after people surrounded him near a protest and one kicked him in the head,” video of which lit up social media and stirred counter-BLM protesters, including the white nationalists who poured into Portland on Saturday for what devolved into a paint-ball war with antifa.
It is possible the black-clad Portland protesters on Aug. 18 targeted the Multnomah County building for the first time this summer because it has a sheriff’s office in it, although it and the building complex have been closed during the pandemic; or it may just be because it represents the state. It also has offices for county departments that provide social services that have no connection to the police, Shepherd reported. The fire the protesters set damaged important county resources, she said, “including the county’s Office of Community Involvement, which aims to engage historically marginalized communities in local political decisions about social services and the distribution of public resources.”
“The lobby where the first same-sex marriage in Oregon took place, and where millions of pieces of personal protective equipment are being distributed to help our community battle COVID-19, was damaged,” Multnomah County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury said in a statement.
After about 75 people started fires and injured a police officer in Denver on Saturday night during an “Abolish the Police” protest, in what The New York Times has called “destruction ... tied to calls for police reform,” Denver Director of Safety Murphy Robinson said, “What we experienced last night was ... anarchy.” Robinson, who is Black, added, “Stop using the color of my skin as an excuse to tear my city.”
In a 1919 lecture, amid sometimes violent political upheaval in Germany, the sociologist Max Weber passed into our politics a hard truth: The state is the human community that successfully “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.”
It may overpolice, as has happened in Minneapolis and countless other places in the U.S., and it may use violence to control Black lives, even if it does not recognize its motives. But Weber, who helped draft the Weimar Constitution, likely would have said the solution can only lie in the democratic reform of democratic institutions.
When you have anarchists on one side and white nationalists on the other, the legitimate state is the middle way. Smashing it, torching the good and bad alike, may sound exciting to the bored, the disaffected, the incurious and the poorly educated, when there is nothing to replace it. But it would have struck Weber as immature and dangerous 100 years ago – and it doesn’t get any better with time.
