Neutered police officers and Nazi fighters

In National Review, Madeleine Kearns interviews Kevin Williamson, the National Review's roving reporter, about his recent experiences in Portland, Oregon. Here are some of Kevin's observations that stood out to me.

The thing about places like Portland and San Francisco is that they aren’t nice. They have a reputation for being wooly and hippieish and silly, but they are in fact very angry places, full of very angry people. They are also highly segregated places in ways that the South and Southwest really aren’t. Angry white people with money make the world go ’round, apparently.

...I think you get bad behavior where bad behavior is tolerated. In Portland, the blackshirts aren’t a tiny schismatic fashion. There were Democratic-campaign staffers standing out in front of Democratic-campaign events on Election Night chanting along with them.

Madeleine Kearns: You describe the police officers present as being “neutered.” How so?

Kevin D. Williamson: They watched crimes being committed and did nothing.

Madeleine Kearns: How do the police balance peacekeeping with First Amendment rights?

Kevin D. Williamson: There isn’t anything unpeaceable about the exercise of First Amendment rights. I don’t care for mass protests myself — a large crowd of people all facing one direction and chanting seems to me more properly part of a religious exercise than a political one. But if that’s your thing, then by all means go and bark at the moon. But when people start blocking traffic, pounding on the hoods of cars, damaging property, committing assaults, that’s a different thing. And I don’t think there’s really much of a First Amendment issue presented by policing ordinary crime when that crime happens in the course of a political action.

Madeleine Kearns: In what way were the anti-fascist protesters you saw fascists?

Kevin D. Williamson: They are the American Left’s answer to the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, down to the penchant for black shirts. They perform the same function: using violence and intimidation to silence political opposition and to terrorize the political opposition. “Fascist” is a notoriously difficult word to define, but they are as close to a textbook case as you are going to find.

Madeleine Kearns: You write that their “idol is the proletariat rather than the nation.” Could you please unpack that?

Kevin D. Williamson: Utopian political movements — and all totalitarian movements are basically utopian — love the world, except for all the people in it. They all are antiliberal and they all seek to degrade the individual and individualism. Their liturgy requires an object of adoration, and it’s usually the same object: the People, or, as American populists like to put it, We the People. For traditional nationalists, it’s the Nation in abstract and idealized form; for socialists, it’s always been the proletariat, who apparently are the only people included in the People. If you’re acting in the name of the People, you can brutalize persons. The interests of the People require a gulag, the interests of the People require a death camp, and if the people have to suffer for the People, then so be it.

...The people suffering under that particular boot-heel don’t realize that they are wearing the boot, and that they have the power to take it off of their own necks at any time they want, that they can take a little freedom out for a spin and see if they like it. They don’t need a revolution. They need Jesus.

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