Why Armed Right-wingers Were Able to Shut Down Michigan’s Legislature

I recall MLK Jr was considering resorting to violence if the movement’s non-violent tactics didn’t work, yet he is remembered as being only non-violent. But his goal wasn’t to be peaceful, his goal was to win. I’m curious how many lefties in America got certified to own handguns in 2016, thinking there might be civil unrest should Trump lose and the Trumpers rise up.

Hell the hell yes, good sir.

Of course they should just ban guns in the state capitol period. So it still makes a very strong case for gun control, if one was on the fence about it before.

One of the reasons that the American Left turned from violence as a legitimate tactic is that it well learned the lesson that ‘the first one to suggest violence is always the undercover cop’ (and I suspect this is also a large part of the edgelord Antifa nonsense).

I think it also took to heart that the success of the civil rights and anti-war movements succeeded largely on the back of peaceful protest. Despite the large amount of attention they receive in popular culture, as far as I can tell Malcolm X was never more than a fringe weirdo in a silly cult, and the Black Panthers were an interesting anomaly in a number of locales, but nothing more. They were completely dwarfed by the non-violent movement. I suppose the argument would be that they loomed large in the nightmares of moderate Liberals, exerting a political influence completely out of proportion to their actual size and power, but I’m not really convinced by that argument.

I just want to distinguish between the concept of legitimate political violence and the historical American context specifically. Because there absolutely are scenarios where it’s justified. The October Revolution against the Russian Provisional Government immediately springs to mind.

Imagine the different reaction (of everyone) if the people showing up heavily armed at the capitol were black.

@GlassHammer, that happened at UC Davis.

@S Brennan, Vietnam happened before I was born, so I’m too young to relate, but isn’t that really a class argument, not left vs. right? Upper middle class and rich corporate Democrats love sacrificing the working class, sure, but I consider Dems to be center-right. A lot of young lefties are working class themselves, or whatever you call the bs gig economy, stringing together freelance contracts to scrape by, etc. They are what Ian would call the precariat, which is why they feel no loyalty to the dems. I stand to the left of Bernie, for example, and consider Obama to be center-right.

Also, I wonder how many of us on the left are armed and just know to keep quiet about it among our liberal peers. My ex-boyfriend worked with Klanwatch and he is absolutely well-armed even now.

None of which is the same as having the level of combat training one gets in the military. Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station did a long post on militias once. He pointed out that people with serious military training deplore them because they break and run when faced with actual combat conditions. Wright explained that it takes all the training in the world to get any normal person to run toward people who are shooting at you instead of running away.

Not long guns. However useful, they are really only good for getting yourself zip-tied, doxxed and locked away on terrorism charges, if you aren’t a “Patriot” with a buddy in the Oath Keepers. You might manage to twig out some NYC based journalists before you are disappeared.

Long guns, right now, mean “right wing”. Those feckos won that contest of signs and symbols.

Rather:

The French Doctor’s Remedy. Mr. Tepes’ Reply. Red Emma’s Whip. Ernesto’s Assembly. Momma Jones’ Axe. The Longshoreman’s Midnight Burnout. The Hillside Tribunal.

And, it should go without saying, the utter willingness to use them.

The cops are not usually the ones installing cameras, manufacturing barricades or riot gear, or any of the tools of the carceral panopticon. Cops are just a network of licensed gangs with EULAs and budgets. Their job is to protect property, and when they cannot do that, people lose faith very quickly.

Private companies with CEOs, board members, identifiable mgmt teams and distribution networks control the production. And benefit from the protection racket. In real time, with real addresses, and subject to, well, unplanned disruptions.

Joan the fact that you thought that “class” has no place in a leftist thought shows how successful the propaganda is.

Without “class” their is no basis for a left/liberal/progressive label…Issues that the working class care about are adamantly opposed by the commenters here. And that is why “left”/”liberal”/”progressive’s” who show up here during an election cycle to proselytize are just wanking themselves.

Yes: the Left’s default to non-violence is fundamentally naive. But, no: the simple recourse to violence won’t provide an effective solution in the U.S.; to think it will is equally naive.

In the real world, yes, there *was* a recourse to violence in the U.S. at the end of the 1960s after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and any number of lesser lights in the Black Panther party, alongside the 1968 Democratic convention, had made clear that no hope of peaceful change existed.

In the real world, again, over 2,500 bombings occurred in one eighteen month period in an eighteen-month in, IIRC, in 1972-73. For those interested, a decent book on the period is DAYS OF RAGE: AMERICA’S RADICAL UNDERGROUND, THE FBI, AND THE FORGOTTEN AGE OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE by Bryan Burrough (2015).

And in the real world, finally, this violence continued for more than a decade and accomplished essentially nothing. From this two essential points suggest themselves to realists —

[1.] Since indiscriminate violence accomplished nothing, intelligently targeted violence would first of all be necessary. Target the essential weak points in the system’s functioning and the psychopaths at the top. It could be done relatively cheaply, were one seriously motivated.

*I hereby testify I am NOT so motivated. I repeat: I am NOT so motivated.*

But *just hypothetically* for an easy instance, a sufficiently motivated actor could obtain the sort of radioactive materials existing in hospitals, turn them into pellets for a BB gun, go up on a roof overlooking Wall Street, and fire them off, thereby creating an expanded version of the kind of incident that Chechen leader Shamil Basayev created in Ismailova Park in Moscow in 1995 —
Chechen Rebel Claims He Planted Radioactive Container in Moscow Park
https://apnews.com/1addd3dc2393664aa5419e8aa798682a

Such an act would shut down Wall Street at the least, if the responsible actor(s) announced it; if unannounced, then it would have the long-term effects it would have. Where access to critical institutions isn’t so easy, such as to the HVAC vents on the headquarters buildings of certain organizations, drones will provide that and will, besides, carry all sorts of things. K Street could be a target zone. And so on.

*And LE reading this, don’t take these concepts up with me; take them up with the Sandia Labs government scientists who discussed these and other such possibilities with me. Because they’re all perfectly obvious to anybody who applies critical intelligence to risk/security analysis of technical and civic instrastructure.*

Fundamentally, as Taleb points out and as COVID19 is revealing, the institutions and structure of the system currently running the U.S. aren’t robust. No surprise: psychopaths mostly don’t do long-term planning. However ….

[2.] Unfortunately, you also face the reality that in the U.S.the problem’s scope and scale is far more intractable that just a few psychopaths currently at the top.

Take a look here ….

Michelle Malkin
@michellemalkin
I will not take the Gates Vaccine. I will not bow down to jack-booted globalists. I will question the corrupted public health industrial complex & its financial conflicts of interest. I will use my platforms to share silenced views of whistleblowers & dissidents. #FightTheCensors
https://twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/1259171624164577282

Or here —
https://nbc25news.com/news/local/suspects-in-deadly-shooting-over-flint-store-face-mask-policy-in-custody

Or here —
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/dollar-tree-wiping-face-trnd/index.html

Or here. Worth watching the minute long vidclip on the link’s other side and notice that at least 75 percent of the crowd are at least mildly obese and therefore at risk for COV19 —
Nick Puckett
@nick__puckett
Happy Mother’s Day from C& C in Castle Rock, where the owner said this is almost double a normal Mother’s Day.
https://twitter.com/nick__puckett/status/1259541624389955584

And so on and on and on…

In short, Trump — or H. Clinton — or any the top dog American psychopaths didn’t come from nowhere, but rather *are* the U.S., or at the very least one central strand of its culture. It’s psychopaths and bullies and conmen all the way down in America, and it has been for 400 years.

For example, to state the obvious: the Founding Fathers instigated a ‘War of Independence’ in 1776, which fact cannot be entirely unconnected to the reality that they were almost to a man slave-owning oligarchs and in 1772, four years before, the British empire had made clear with the Somerset case that it would be winding down slavery in British imperial territories–
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart

So a central strand of U.S. culture is institutionally psychopathic and produces a substantial demographic who are *proudly* and utterly self-centered, crassly materialistic, uneducated and stupid. There’s plenty of data on this. So what then?

Well, let’s stay with the issue of slavery in the U.S. During the Civil War, Northern society ladies used to approach Sherman and ask, “General, when will this dreadful war end?” Sherman would answer very specifically: “When we’ve killed another 280,000 white Southern males.”

Sherman understood clear-headedly that this was the size of the population in the U.S.whose entire human identity was bound in the Southern male plantation lifestyle of dueling, fake Walter Scott-style chivalry, etc. and who would rather die than work for a living, Northern capitalist lifestyle.

And in the real world that’s what happened. They were killed; the Civil War ended.

And that’s the scale of the U.S. problem. A central strand of U.S. culture has produced a substantial demographic who remain historically and proudly what one might call — if one were inclined to be judgmental — human scum. Their entire human identity is bound up with being that and they would rather die than change.

Violence — at least, on any realistic scale — is not a solution to that.

Long-term, one ray of light is that this population is to some extent stupid and self-culling or, in the Right’s own charming phrase, a “self-cleaning oven.” As the U.S. federal state decoheres, COVID19 will be succeeded by other pathogens as the climate crisis proceeds. This population’s refusal (see Malkin above) to accept vaccines, contract tracing, etc. will tend to isolate — even quarantine — them in Red states.

And in the real world that’s as good as it gets.

Let’s not kid ourselves. These yay-hoos have killed people, are killing people, and will continue to as long as they are allowed to. Their threats of violence aren’t empty, though the threats are made by (mostly) cowards who would run away screaming if they were ever confronted by the police or civilians with equal firepower. When Antifa has gone medieval on their asses they whined and cried and fought like wusses. And yet in a fight at the California capitol a few years ago, the Antifa they stabbed were arrested and charged, not the yay-hoos. Charges I believed were dropped, but still. That just goes to show…

The tactics used are time worn and can be effective. After all, when the gunners assembled at capitols during the 2000 election recounts they were openly threatening civil war if GW wasn’t declared president forthwith. This threat was communicated to Scalia — who had accepted the Bush v Gore case for the Supremes — and he communicated it to the rest of the court, which oddly enough ruled (lawlessly) in favor of Bush. Tea Partiers have used similar tactics and very often got their way.

If there were an active Left and they used similar tactics, we don’t know whether they’d win or not. Antifa is anti-fascist which isn’t necessarily Left, but even if it were, they typically do not try to intimidate authorities in order to get their way. They intimidate and fight with fascists.

When the Black Panthers marched into the California Capitol with guns in 1967, it sent so many shock waves through the legislature and powers that be that gun control legislation was passed almost immediately. If they had been a white militia, though, I doubt there would have been more than minor huffing and puffing about it.

Race does matter in these confrontations as does class. The implicit threat from these yay-hoos is that if they don’t get their way pronto they go shoot something/someone up, which they do often enough to keep people on edge. There is nothing like that on the Left, not even Antifa, though there once was. The Weathermen were active terrorists during the upheavals of the ’60s, and there were others were not afraid of or dismissive of using violence.

Need to point out, though, that most were arrested or killed by police, many in ambush. These assassinations were certainly clarifying. So clarifying that the survivors mostly surrendered, and some of those are still in prison.

Once the leadership was eliminated, most of the more leftish rebel outfits evaporated and have never been reconstituted.

During Occupy, I got into an argument with Mark Rudd, one of those Weathermen who had surrendered, served brief time in prison and was released and who decried use of violence in pursuit of political goals. He was particularly upset by Antifa, and declared that even wearing a face covering bandana was “violence.” Now we’re all supposed to wear face coverings. I wonder what he thinks now.

He abjured his violent past, and like many others believed that nonviolence was the only path to durable political change. For a time, “Lambert” at NC made a fetish of nonviolence as defined by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in “Why Civil Resistance Works.” In fact, I believe they didn’t say quite what he thought they did, that nonviolence was always the only answer, but they were eloquent scholars of the topic.

The fact that legislatures, governors and yes, courts will often immediately yield to the demands of those with guns (if they’re white and male and yell enough rightist tropes) needs to be recognized, though.

I’m a life long left libertarian. I’m also a member of a Unitarian Church, and most of the members are part of the PMC. My church sponsored an event where an artist melted down guns and made them into garden tools.
Which means I was I was surprised as hell when many members of the church congratulated me when my daughter enlisted in the Marines. Maybe they weren’t sincere, but maybe they realize that the left needs people trained in violence.

On a conservative blog they presented Obama’s and Gores oceanside homes as proof of the inept corruption of the left.

I try to tell working class Republicans that those two are functionally, moderate corporate Republicans, in the grand scheme of things. And MSNBC, the “Communist News Network” and the New York Times are not leftist news outlets, and that they should instead recognize that Jimmy Dore or Robert Reich or Ian Welsh are closer to what’s actually “left”. Nobody is a Stalinist these days, anywhere.

It seems a simple task, but it’s harder than it seems. It’s hard to get an easily conditioned people to at least get their definitions correct. It seems they need to ‘feel’ what their forbearers apparently did when they called African Americans “niggers”, a feeling of false superiority.

What we are seeing are the spasms of a dying political fiction . Angry white men are already a minority. All this flailing about–Trump, AR-15s–are signs of weakness. They never really called the shots. With their declining living standards, it is getting increasingly hard for them to even pretend they ever did. They are reduced to cheap, stupid theatrics. They talk about rights, always their rights, but in any straight up democratic process, minus voter suppression, gerrymandering, a stacked judiciary, they lose. The future is against them. The numbers are against them. Reality is against them. Covid-19 doesn’t care about their hurt feelings or their anger. They are setting themselves and a lot of us up to get sick and die because, far from being stand tall Marlboro men, they are too selfish and childish to do otherwise. They’d rather gnaw on the bones of old grudges than do the hard work of actually making a better life for themselves, –and making a better life for others? that their well-being is tied to the well-being of the rest of us? That hasn’t entered their darkest dreams.

“Yet one way of recognizing the dead is taking place all around us, even under our strange and isolated conditions. In the search for plague literature these last few weeks—the welcome if grim resurgence of interest in Albert Camus and Daniel Defoe, Boccaccio and Thucydides—we have perhaps overlooked its simplest form. The obituary is an ancient genre, sometimes arranged into verse but more often written in prose, originally carved into stone, then recorded on scrolls, and lately printed in newspapers or hosted on Web sites”

Casey Cep, New Yorker, May 14, 2020

“Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.”

Sandburg, 1918

The end of the draft (and the end of raising taxes to pay for endless wars) has had serious consequences, some of which have been alluded to in the comments above.

Yes, a number of the “proud boy” types have purposely joined the all volunteer military and after discharge the police force. I don’t have an opinion on their military service but I sense, without data although I’d like to see some, that they make terrible policemen. My interactions with the uniformed police have given me the idea that, on the whole, they are not very bright. How many proud boy types have made detective rank? I don’t know and I wouldn’t know where to begin to find out.

As a Vietnam veteran, progressive, from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, third generation Union I’ll have to get by with far less weaponry than I had in Vietnam. My various (mostly inherited) rifles, shotguns, and pistols will have to do. They’ll have to be clutched in my arthritic hands as I march with my 70 year old bad hips and knees and back to what? The defense of the state capital? Sorry, my dancing days are done.

I guess the problem, as I see it, is that the hoped for rebellion has not come to pass. As time flits by in their lives and they have to pay rent, mortgages, utilities, etc., basically live a life of unassuming mediocrity very similar to mine, their insurrection instincts heat up the fragile pressure cooker in their brains. They want that race war, the war against the libs to start. Start now. Some act on it. I fear that the proud boy police act on it at the slightest prevarication.

Don’t know who said it but… The IQ of a mob is the lowest IQ in the mob divided by the number of people in the mob. When they mob together, stupidity reigns.

The key phrase is that violence (from ordinary citizens) can succeed when it is thought to be legitimate (among ordinary citizens).

If it is not, it can not. The state has always recourse to more violence than any group of citizens – except during a revolution.

Hugh:

I agree with you. Perhaps the fact that I live in one of the reddest counties in one of the reddest states clouds my judgment. What’s clear, however, is that a cornered animal will always fight.
And as Jim Morrison said:

“The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We’re takin’ over
Come on!”

It may be 5 to 1. But if the 5’s are so fractured in their response to the 1’s with the guns, the 1’s will win every time. Can there be any doubt how fractured the 5’s are? “Crawling across the floor with a flower in their hand. Trying to tell me know one, understands.” Trading in the hours for a handful of dimes? And, still not making it in their prime?

Given these circumstances, the 1’s have the potential to do tremendous damage. That’s what I was alluding to in Ian’s last post. Come election time, heads are going to explode. Either: (1) the changing of the guard, (2) the struggle to remove the current guard if he resists, or (3) the backlash to the protests if the current guard wins, will get messy.

I think we all knew as soon as Trump was elected he wouldn’t go peacefully.
I predict only violence will remove him if he loses.

Frankly, I don’t care what voters think. These people are, as a rule, perfectly willing to tolerate – no, embrace – endless war, mass incarceration, toxic pollution, data mining, a sprawling kleptocracy operating in name and with complete exposure, police militarization, institutional racism, concentration camps, planned disequity, criminalized labor, gangster banking, the continuing exploitation of first nations, Christian nationalist patriarchy, Bezos, Musk, Buffet, the Waltons, and the gleeful emiseration of non-white people – all in exchange for “good schools”, corn byproducts, cheap meat and wi-fi.

That’s why we’re on the cusp of actual fascism, in the midst of a pandemic, the majority of its deaths avoidable, still provoking Iran to war, picking unwinnable fights with Beijing, banned from travel to most of the world, with cascading ecosystem collapses all around, and our actual working class literally dying to make the repulsively rich richer.

The electorate? Feckem. It’s fight or die, now.

“It’s good to remember that what we think of as “Wall Street” is theatre. The real action takes place well out of sight, electronically, and “shutting down” Wall Street requires monkey wrenching or pulling the plug on that operation, which no one has quite figured out how to do — or if they know how, they haven’t done it. Blowing up the Stock Exchange building tomorrow would have almost no effect on Wall Street besides making more theatre and thereby feeding the media maw with… fluff. Dramatic fluff to be sure, but… fluff.”

Agreed, fundamentally.

But. The futures, stocks, margins and dividends are in/from real goods, products and commodities, which require real world production, distribution, and management.

The supply chains and nodes are soft. The management hierarchies are very, very soft.

Gandhi’s non-violence was also related to his attempting to gain independence from Britain without changing the structure of Indian society. He was trying to maintain control by the Brahmans and not let any control pass to warrior types. This also included maintaining the caste system, which might well have exploded and been transformed in a violent independence movement.

Bruce,
I rely on Dr. Ambedkar for his critique of Gandhi’s policies on caste.
“Annihilation of Caste: An Undelivered Speech 1936”
I believe that Dalits themselves to this day consider Dr. Ambedkar one of their foremost historical leaders.
The India to which Gandhi helped deliver independence was very dominated by the same upper castes that dominated it before independence. The price for that is being paid now.

Jessica

I think you should make greater allowance for the possibility that Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was, as we might say, “talking his book” as a leader strongly identified with a socially-distinguished but also diffuse minority, and at odds with the Forward Castes of the Congress Party over a constitutional issue introduced by the British and doing what he could to gain concessions to those he represented and to his own base of political power.

If you want Gandhi’s views, you must at least consider what Gandhi said and did, and in context.

Also, I would recommend extreme modesty with regard to anyone’s ability to fathom or judge the cultural politics of varna and Jāti and the complex system of reservation that has arisen from it.