Anarchy in America

The protests over the death of George Floyd are continuing for a third week and by now most of the looters and rioters have moved on to their next shiny object. Only protesters and anarchists remain. The protesters are doing what Americans know how to do; express frustration with government by peacefully demonstrating. They want police violence against black people brought under control. The anarchists are also acting out their role, tearing down statues of famous people.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize the irrational nature of anarchist behavior. It started with the removal of Confederate statues, as a statement against the continuing repression of black people. It then moved on to statues of individuals who were not members of the Confederacy. Any one who had a link to slavery was now included; even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were pulled down. Actually, the anarchist’s efforts are only partially irrational because there is also a strategy at work; the purposeful intent to destroy our political system.

Anarchism is a branch of the collectivist model of government, which was introduced by Rousseau in the late 1700s. Collectivists believe that political systems should be built around society as a whole and not individuals, which makes them strongly opposed to democracy. Anarchists believe that human society can exist without government. In their model, everyone would participate on a voluntary basis, without rules. Since this model can’t work in practice, anarchists spend their time engaged in revolutionary activities that accomplish nothing.

There are two problems with the anarchist activities happening now. First, they go beyond the intentions of the protestors, who want the government to address a serious issue and are expressing their feelings about that issue. The work of the anarchists is peripheral to those protests, being no more than the expression of mob behavior designed to remove symbols of democracy.

To improve the lives of black people, the country has to come together and take action as a whole. It takes, intellectuals, politicians, and citizens to unite for the common cause of equal and fair treatment by police. This issue extends to white people as well, demonstrating that the problems with police go beyond race. So far, in 2020, there have been 88 black men killed by police and 172 white men killed by police.

People must pressure the government to enact laws that will address the problem because a solution can’t be achieved through anarchy.

The second problem with anarchist efforts is the refocus of media attention onto themselves and the government’s response to them, away from the problems that caused the protests in the first place. Conservatives and others who believe in the rule of law, build their own anger narrative against the anarchy, wasting energy that should have been directed at fixing the original problem.

Do we really want to end this period of legitimate protest with torn down statues and nothing else to show for it?

There is also another issue: the lessons of history. A solid argument can be made for the value of understanding history, both bad and good. Immoral behaviors in history remind us of where we don’t want to be; they recall the behaviors we rejected in the past to make the world a better place. The list is long: slavery, exploitation of women and children, discrimination based on sexual preference, and more. Recognizing that those conditions existed, and were corrected, is the accomplishment, not the immoral behaviors themselves. Discard history and we discard knowledge of our sins.

The “cancel culture” thought process uses false logic; believing that behaviors that are now abhorrent must be used as clubs against those who participated in those behaviors in the past. George Washington had slaves so let’s cancel George Washington. This logic can be negated by examining its end point, which is an absurdity. As an example, we go back 150,000 years to the early human tribes in Africa. There are two tribes living in close proximity. One tribe kills the other in order to steal their food. By the cancel culture logic, we must cancel the killer tribe because they didn’t adhere to the current morality of the United States. Every society between then and now must be cancelled because, at some point, every society has exhibited immoral behaviors as judged by 21^st Century morality.

Morality and laws change as society decides they must, in order to respect the lives of human beings. Without the knowledge of what was bad, we can’t turn that knowledge into something good.