The protests triggered by the recent murders of George Floyd and other black Americans have produced widespread demands to "defund the police." Those demands don't come out of nowhere. While "reform" programs undertaken in innumerable American cities over the course of many years have demonstrably enhanced police firepower, they have done little, if anything, to repair relations between police departments and communities of color.
As an aging middle-class white male, I don't fear cops. I respect the fact that theirs is a tough job, which I would not want. Yet I realize that my attitude is one more expression of white privilege, which black men, regardless of their age and economic status, can ill afford to indulge. So I fully accept the need for radical changes in policing -- that's what "defund" appears to imply -- if American cities are ever to have law enforcement agencies that are effective, humane, and themselves law-abiding.
What I can't fathom is why a similar logic doesn't apply to the armed forces that we employ to police huge chunks of the world beyond our borders. If Americans have reason to question the nation's increasingly militarized approach to law enforcement, then shouldn't they have equal reason to question this country's thoroughly militarized approach to statecraft?
Consider this: on an annual basis, police officers in the United States kill approximately 1,000 Americans, with blacks two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victimized. Those are appalling figures, indicative of basic policy gone fundamentally awry. So the outpouring of protest over the police and demands for change are understandable and justified.
Still, the question must be asked: Why have the nation's post-9/11 wars not prompted similar expressions of outrage? The unjustified killing of black Americans rightly finds thousands upon thousands of protesters flooding the streets of major cities. Yet the loss of thousands of American soldiers and the physical and psychological wounds sustained by tens of thousands more in foolhardy wars elicits, at best, shrugs. Throw in the hundreds of thousands of non-American lives taken in those military campaigns and the trillions of taxpayer dollars they have consumed and you have a catastrophe that easily exceeds in scale the myriad race-related protests and riots that have roiled American cities in the recent past.
With their eyes fixed on elections that are now just months away, politicians of all stripes spare no effort to show that they "get it" on the issue of race and policing. Race may well play a large role in determining who wins the White House this November and which party controls Congress. It should. Yet while the election's final outcome may be uncertain, this much is not: neither the American propensity for war, nor the bloated size of the Pentagon budget, nor the dubious habit of maintaining a sprawling network of military bases across much of the planet will receive serious scrutiny during the political season now underway. Militarism will escape unscathed.
At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then, except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to "defund" the Pentagon?
King considered the Vietnam War an abomination. At that time, more than a few Americans agreed with him and vigorously demonstrated against the conflict's continuation. That today's demonstrators have seemingly chosen to file away our post-9/11 military misadventures under the heading of regrettable but forgettable is itself an abomination. While their sensitivity to racism is admirable, their indifference to war is nothing short of disheartening.
In 1967, Dr. King warned that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." During the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness.
America's National Signature
Given their size and duration, the protests occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have been remarkably peaceful. That said, some of them did, early on, include rioters who resorted to looting. Smashing windows and ransacking stores, they walked off not with milk and bread for the hungry, but with shopping bags filled with high-end swag -- designer shoes and sneakers, purses, clothing, and jewelry lifted from stores like Prada and Alexander McQueen. Also stolen were smart phones, handguns, even automobiles. In-store surveillance systems recorded scenes reminiscent of Black Friday doorbuster sales, though without anyone bothering to pass through a checkout counter. Some looters quickly attempted to monetize their hauls by offering to sell purloined items online.
Certain right-wing commentators wasted no time in using the looting to tar the protest movement as little more than an expression of nihilism. Tucker Carlson of Fox News was particularly emphatic on this point. Americans taking to the streets in response to George Floyd's murder, he said, "reject society itself."
"Reason and process and precedent mean nothing to them. They use violence to get what they want immediately. People like this don't bother to work. They don't volunteer or pay taxes to help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing... On television, hour by hour, we watch these people -- criminal mobs -- destroy what the rest of us have built..."
To explain such selfish and destructive misconduct, Carlson had an answer readily at hand:
"The ideologues will tell you that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it's far darker. What you're watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don't, and seek to destroy it."
This is vile, hateful stuff, and entirely wrong -- except perhaps on one point. In attributing the looting to a deeper cause, Carlson was onto something, even if his effort to pinpoint that cause was wildly off the mark.
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