Oregon swung a national election Democrats should have won handily.
Democrats blew it.
Portland changed the context of Donald Trump's pugnaciousness and divisiveness. Instead of looking like an outlier, he looked like a counterweight.
Readers of this blog from around the country have inquired of me why Portland saw such prolonged civil unrest and what I thought were the consequences. Here is how I explained it to out-of-state people. I invite Portland-area readers to correct the record, if they think I erred.
Oregon is blue because Portland is dark blue. It has a Democratic mayor, its county has a very liberal District Attorney, the Oregon Governor and statewide officials are Democrats. At least one City Council member was openly critical of "police violence."
A group of people within the liberal-activist-progressive-social justice community voiced and acted on the idea that “violence is the language of the oppressed.” It created a moral gray area in the minds of some political activists, whose voices were heard by Democratic leadership. The idea was out there that, maybe, people throwing rocks and setting fires and destroying statues of George Washington had the same moral standing as did authorities in trying to stop them. We had seen how police used force on George Floyd, so force used to stop arson and looting was morally suspect. People were hyper-alert for misconduct by the police in their use of force against demonstrators and people associated with them. People who protested in George Floyd/BLM protests were joined by people I consider mostly nihilistic hooligans and vandals, some of whom branded themselves as "Antifa" and others as not Antifa, but anarchists. Those anarchist vandals hid out within the George Floyd and BLM protests, took advantage of the nighttime darkness and general unrest, and co-opted the protests. They stole the show.
The result was night after night of largely unchecked hooliganism, sometimes describing their actions as work to destroy a system of racial or economic oppression. It took place under the watch of Democratic officeholders who seemed unwilling or unable to do anything consequential. The fact that the vandals attacked the Democratic HQ along with courthouses and police stations, and were against all authority, didn’t change the story: It was Democratic failure to control their own partisan tribe. It looked terrible on state and national media, and Trump-oriented media focused on it before the election and still today. The vandals did not mind that it looked terrible for Democrats and gave Trump and Fox a rich target. They were doing a big F. U. to all authority and Democrats were in authority and no better than Republicans.
May, 2021
The violence shifted public opinion in Oregon and nationally. It gave energy to Trump’s attacks on Democrats and it changed the frame of Trump’s brutality and pugilism. Trump was unlovely, but in the context of Portland’s apparently uncontrollable violence it gave validity to the idea that maybe law-and-order brutality was necessary. After all, squishy Democratic permissiveness was the alternative and it wasn't working. Trump's divisiveness and pugnaciousness seemed like a plausible counter-weight to stop unrest in a violent world.Democrats did far worse in the 2020 election than people expected. Trump tried to link Biden with socialism, but my own sense is that this was a hard sell. After all, Biden was the centrist who defeated Bernie. He was the non-Bernie. Biden looks like an "old school" ethnic Catholic, not a firebrand. But Trump also said Biden and Democrats were weak and allowed social unrest. To my mind, that had political traction. Biden was bunkered down in Delaware because of COVID, and he looks slender and frail in comparison to Trump, and whatever he was doing to lead his party to stop urban unrest wasn't effective. The proof of that was that the Democratic city of Portland endured nightly violence.
The 2020 election should have been a slam dunk for Democrats. Four thousand people a day were dying from COVID on election day and the economy was in shambles and Trump’s approval rating was about 43%. Far more people disliked him than liked him, yet he still nearly won re-election. I consider this evidence of how thoroughly the public was rejecting Democrats, too.Trump was just one or two notches too abrasive for his own good, so Biden won, but Biden had no coattails in the House, Senate, and states. The public wanted rid of Trump, but did not want more of what they were seeing in Portland. The weakness in the states, combined with the Supreme Court deciding that partisan gerrymandering is a political decision to be resolved in elections, not by the courts, means partisan gerrymandering has legal permission to continue and get worse. In Florida, Texas, and Georgia, where Republicans have complete state control, lines will be drawn that will assure a few more Republican seats. Democrats already need to win some 53% of the Congressional vote to have a majority and this will get worse.
The Portland unrest set the stage for complicated optics on the January 6 insurrection and GOP willingness to use what Giuliani called "trial by combat" to replace democratic government. Republicans point to Portland and say Democrats closed their eyes to violence. Democrats want to show that Trump-led Republicans are minimizing insurrection and violent overthrow of an election, in contrast to themselves, who are defending laws of peaceful transfer of power. The Portland violence changes that frame, allowing people to view both parties having their own partisan hooligans they pretend to object to, while secretly allowing and protecting. It gives cover for Republicans to say they are just mirroring Democrats.Oregon is usually an inconsequential backwater in US politics. We have a late primary. But this time Oregon really made a difference. We were used as the poster child for Democratic incompetence to stop civic unrest. We helped swing an election from a landslide to a squeaker.
12 comments:
Republicans have inextricably linked themselves with the attempt by Trump and his goons to violently overthrow the government of the United States. The only thing that could make them seem less of a threat is for Democrats to become linked with the goons running rampant in Portland. Violence sucks.
As much as it pains me to agree with your elitist Ivy League diagnosis, you are correct. The Portland Punks certainly aided in the Dems inability to shellac the Republicans in Congress and more importantly in State Houses, and thus control the 2021 reapportionment. Angry BLM rioters in Kenosha and other cities didn’t help either. Middle America does not view these violences as symptomatic of underlying diseases of rampant inequality, racism.... nor as the result of an economy wherein most 20 and 30 year olds have a harder time making a living, supporting families, buying a home, than did their parents. They see spoiled Undisciplined white brats coddled by their woke leftie state and municipal governments, or ungrateful minorities looking for another handout.
It’s always easier to eschew bad behavior than it is to compassionately understand it as the symptom of an unjust and corrupt society.
Interesting opinion. I would point out that people become violent when they think they do not have an alternative. This is illustrated by both the Portland and DC riots. At the moment violent protesters represent a tiny minority of a larger unrest, the causes of which are complex, but as Art suggests, stem from fundamental economic disparities. I would add that BLM property damage and white supremacist terrorism, evidenced by summary police executions, are not equivalent and it's intellectually dishonest to attempt to make it so, not that this will deter FOX.
The underlying question is valid. Why wasn't there a Progressive wave in 2020?
Republicans are using every trick in the book to tilt elections, including fomenting insurrection. It almost worked in 2020, only a stimulated turnout in key states made enough of a difference to secure the electoral college, which prompted Republicans to try to invalidate it, an effort that continues. While they can't actually alter the results at this point, they will keep raising objections to confuse (OMG, these people are stupid!) voters and effect the midterms.
My point is that 2020 was the quinceañera of a Republican party revealing itself as representatives of an anti-democratic white supremacist movement, funded in part by corporate America.
At least we won't be insulted by drivel like "trickle down" any more.
Long before the killing of George Floyd, Portland was uneasy. Homelessness and the inability to handle the situation, brought by a court decision that homeless could not be evicted or excluded from public spaces IF there wasn't a place for them to find shelter. These were the hot embers that caught fire when the events of May 25th provoked a reaction to a police murder of a Black suspect on video went viral. Many big cities were facing similar problems - Seattle, San Francisco, LA, New York, Boston, Chicago to name just a few. The social fabric and safety net was coming apart or failed. The reaction and the reason for each individual to act they did was personal. Notwithstanding Peter is correct in saying the city governments failed to condemn and contain the violence. The optics of that were horrible. Throw in purposeful goading by Federal Protective Service and INS personnel called in to "protect" Federal property allowed to roam the streets making snatch and grab detentions within the city, compounded the problems facing the city. Roger Stone couldn't have dreamed up any better mischievous disruption of the Democrat's social narrative going into the 2020 election.
Both Ted Wheeler and Governor Brown managed look dithering and incompetent during the violence in Portland last year, by wringing their hands and bleating about "violence is not the answer" while the City was being held hostage by mobs of both ideological stripes. Antifa mobs are still mobs, just as bad as Oathkeepers, 3 Percenters etc. And the obvious lack of control the Mayor had, or has, over the Police was obvious, and needs rectifying now !
Big deal. How many died? Two, one right wingnut by a left wingnut who was executed by gun trial by government hit men. 64 died in the Rodney King riot. 43 dead in the Detroit riots. 34 in the Watts riots. 19 in Black Lives Matter marches. 5 at the capital insurrection. Tempest in a tea pot.
Punks, scum, hooligans, runaways everywhere. What are middle class citizens to do?
Shoot on sight. Arm police with stun grenades , flash bangs, rubber bullets, dogs, tear gas, cameras, skunk water,shields, machine guns,snipers, body armor, tanks, kettle and beat heads, arrest and hold without bail. That’ll teach’em. And the homeless drunks and drug freaks still sleep in their tents peeking out for another day in the big city.
I live in a close-in suburb of Portland. Most of my friends live in Portland. Here's what I hear from those friends lately:
Portland is out of control. Homelessness is out of control. Crime is out of control.
I know people who feel that they can't go on vacation because the homeless population on their block would notice and take over their house. Given the what has happened in Portland at The Red House, it is entirely possible that the authorities in Portland would be incapable of evicting the squatters, and these folks would never get their house back, to say nothing of how trashed their house would be if they ever finally did get it back.
Things in Portland are getting as bad as they were during the crime wave in New York City in the 1970s-1990s. That crime wave got so bad by the 1990s, that even liberals on the Upper West Side couldn't take it anymore, and that is how Rudy Giuliani got elected mayor with his tough on crime agenda.
It may take some time yet, but I see something like that coming for Portland. If Portland doesn't end up going the way of New York City, it may end up going the way of Detroit, where, after riots and social disorder, the middle class abandoned the city for the surrounding suburbs, leaving a vacant wasteland behind.
Given the cuts to police funding in Portland, the bad attitude of the Portland left and the city government towards its police, and the large number of resignations by police officers, Portland is becoming less and less capable of maintaining order. I can't imagine anyone wanting to become a Portland police officer; the quality of any recruits they do manage to get will be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I thank God every day that by sheer random good luck, my wife and I found a house we liked that was just outside the Portland city boundaries.
Regarding the politics of all this, I think it's possible that a backlash against wokeness is brewing that will become a tidal wave by the time of the 2022 elections.
If that turns out to be true, what happened to the Democrats in 2020 will turn out to have been just the beginning, and wokeness in all of its dysfunctionality will be the reason why.
POSTED ON BEHALF OF JOHN FLENNIKEN. John is a former Portland school teacher and former manager at Pacific Power. He lives just over the line, just outside the city limits of Portland.
"Our city government dwells on ridiculous, counter productive “wow look at me I’m liberal” trading off the hard work of long ago. Listening too closely to the cancel culture and turning a blind eye to the chaos that was the summer of 2020. Taking money from water and roads and diverting it to window dressing. Increasing taxes and fees without providing an increase in timely and efficient service. Roads, waterworks, police, emergency services, sanitation all took a back seat owing to the belief Portland was already a great place and we should now focus on aesthetics and touchups - what they got wasn’t pretty or aesthetic. nor functional."
Antifa did not attack the Capitol on January 6th, nor has it driven into crowds of people, leaving mayhem and death in its wake. Oathkeepers and 3 Percenters and Proud Boys are not an equivalent phenomenon to those who would take them on in the streets--they are just the latest in a long line of white supremacists who seem to have way too much free time. Mental Health crisis + George Floyd + entitled wasps = madness. And the police have a tough job, but need more training and education: otherwise, we all look like nails while they finger their hammers.
We can make all the excuses we want for those poor, misunderstood thugs wreaking havoc in our cities, but whether they call themselves Proud Boys or Antifa, the only thing their wanton violence does is harm the innocent, not to mention any cause they supposedly represent. Real progress has always been made through the legislature, the courts and peaceful, organized demonstrations by the masses.
As MLK, Jr. said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it always bends toward justice.” He also pointed out that “violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.”
Portland is out of control. Homelessness is out of control. Crime is out of control.
It started in Seattle and worked its way South. Look for the video “Seattle is Dying” and believe what you will. Then consider Medford and think of how many tent cities you have seen on the Greenway from I-5 between Ashland and Medford. The fires, the filth, the drugs, crime and murders. No longer illegal to possess a gram or two of Heroin.
Then ask yourself. Would you rather live in Calcutta or stop the progress of the rot by amputation?
Post a Comment