15 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Will Democrats finally stop defending protesters who turn to thuggery?
This weekend marks the next step in a likely long hot summer of protest and the latest opportunity for Gavin Newsom and other Democrats to stop reflexively defending the 'peaceful protests' that have been occurring in Los Angeles and elsewhere without acknowledging that the rest of the country doesn't see them as entirely peaceful.
If Democrats don't acknowledge the full picture of what's going on, the crew with trust issues with voters and a 38% approval rating, 5 points lower than the GOP — stands little chance of checking Donald Trump's fascistic rise.
'This is anarchy and true chaos,' Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., posted on X above an image of a burning car in Los Angeles. 'My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.'
'One of the great lessons of 2024,' Biden-Harris campaign strategist David Plouffe told the authors of the new bestselling book, 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again' is that 'never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they're seeing is not true.' (Even though Trump does that daily.)
But Democrats risk doing it again if protest-adjacent vandalism continues unchecked over the critical next few months. And that will hurt Democrats' chances of rallying Americans outside their shrinking tent against Trump.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter 'Letters from an American,' said this summer's protests will be a 'fight for public opinion' with the goal being to persuade 3.5% of Americans to oppose Trump's agenda. There is little margin for error — or for protest interlopers to hijack the message that Trump is dangerously grabbing the power of a king and using it to punish immigrants and further enrich the wealthy.
'People sometimes mistake the idea that protests are designed to fight back against the system, and the people in the system,' Richardson said in an online video. 'In fact, the minute that you start to demonstrate violence, you lose all those people you need on your team, because they were kind of apathetic to begin with, and they just don't want to have any part of it.'
So Democrats can't tell America that, as Plouffe put it, 'what they're seeing is not true.'
But still some persist.
'The reality is we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles,' Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told NBC's 'Meet the Press' last week. 'And again, any violence against police officers should not be accepted.'
'Angelenos are standing up for their city in a peaceful way,' Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Los Angeles, told CNN last week, adding as an aside, 'There are some anarchists.'
Said Cox Richardson: 'Nonviolence is important, because that brings (supporters) on board. The minute they see violence, they don't want any part of it. So the protests on our side to take back American democracy must be nonviolent.'
During his nationally televised address last week calling out Trump's overreach in taking over the national guard, Newsom tried to broaden the tent saying, 'This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.'
For Americans in other states to resist Trump, Newsom and other Democrats will have to simultaneously support the peaceful grassroots protests and sideline the thugs. It's the only way the movement spreads beyond the blue state choir.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is trying by framing the 8 p.m. curfew she implemented as remaining in effect 'to curb bad actors who do not support the immigrant community.'
Demonstrations don't happen as often — or ever — in most of the U.S. Meanwhile, the Bay Area hosts demonstrations seven days a week. So for starters, the mere sight of thousands of people filling the streets is foreign, intimidating and a little bit scary to people who spent Saturday at Little League or cutting the grass in Kansas.
As he assumes a larger profile on the national stage during this latest public tussle with Trump, Newsom needs to better explain the nuance of protests. Democrats to the left of Fetterman often call a protest 'peaceful' even if there are images of protesters lighting cars on fire and breaking windows and vandalizing businesses and property. Those acts are dismissed off-handedly as 'property damage' and not violence. (Tell that to the family businesses that have to replace their windows the next morning.) Yes, the vandals doing that damage constitute only a small fraction of the demonstrators, but they receive a disproportionate amount of air time — and that only helps Trump. Their actions need to be acknowledged more forcibly, called out as unlawful and very publicly prosecuted.
Newsom understands this.
'If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop,' Newsom said in his nationally broadcast speech Tuesday, noting that 220 people had been arrested in Los Angeles and local law enforcement was reviewing video of the chaos 'to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.'
His challenge is that parsing those differences between protesters is difficult and rarely done. I first wrote about those differences while covering dozens of Iraq War protests two decades ago. Many mass demonstrations in the Bay and L.A. often follow a similar arc: Thousands of people will peacefully and boisterously march in the streets for hours without incident. Chanting, waving signs, talking smack about the government (all protected under the First Amendment, as is waving a Mexican flag.) Then, in their wake, usually as the first wave of peaceful demonstrators is headed home, a 'breakaway' contingent of demonstrators unaffiliated with the main organizers will start breaking windows, tagging buildings with graffiti and engaging in other random acts of vandalism that have nothing to do with the theme of the demonstration other than being a different expression of rage. Often, they self-identify as anti-capitalist 'anarchists.'
During the 2003 anti-war demonstrations, anarchists told me they were frustrated with conventional peace events and called for a breakaway march to 'bring some militancy' to the anti-war movement.
'What does (the main march) threaten? It can just be ignored like any other position people are taking,' said one anarchist, who asked not to be identified.
Yet organizers of the main demonstrations rarely called out the thugs piggybacking on their protest. Some told me they were threatened when they did. So instead, when pressed, many often exonerated the splinter groups and their actions to me by saying, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.' In other words, all kinds of protests are valid.
There has long been a reluctance among activists to criticize fellow travelers, even those whose vandalism devalues the message the main demonstration is trying to send. Unless protest organizers do something to self-police these demonstration hijackers, their powerful, existential message — Trump is becoming a fascistic autocrat before our eyes — will be diluted. Or worse, ignored.
It's time to pull the dandelions sprouting among the flowers.
And while I'm hesitant to jump on the blame-the-media bandwagon, we own some responsibility here, too. Television coverage of these mass demonstrations, which provides most of the protest images consumed on all platforms, is rarely nuanced enough to draw the distinctions between the main marchers and the unaffiliated vandals gravy-training on their earnest intentions. TV reports invariably focus on the broken windows in the wake of an otherwise peaceful march rather than the message that the marchers were making about Trump's budding fascism. If it bleeds — or is broken — it leads on TV news.
If Newsom and protest organizers don't mute the vandals this summer, then Trump wins the fight for public opinion. Those 'anarchists' will become Trump's best weapon as their behavior is contributing to the false narrative that American cities are out of control. Yeah, the anarchists are angry. A lot of us are angry. But burning and breaking stuff is damaging the common cause we share.
We are right — and constitutionally endowed — to take to the street on behalf of law-abiding immigrants. But you're not helping if you're busting up stuff, or not calling out those who do. See something? Say something. And that starts with Newsom, who has to remember that he's now talking to the rest of America. Not just California.
