Politics

Prediction: 2024 Will See Deadly Political Violence in the Streets

And there's still time left in 2023, the way things are going lately in New York.

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NYPD officer tries to break up clash between Israel-Hamas protesters | John Marshall Mantel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
New York City, Dec. 21, 2023. (John Marshall Mantel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

Several hundred pro-Palestinian street demonstrators in midtown Manhattan Sunday afternoon attempted to "cancel Christmas" by massing in front of Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Fox News, hoisting a Nativity Scene marred with fake blood, and carrying signs with messages such as, "From NY to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada."

In videos shared widely online, ceasefire advocates scuffled physically with police, reportedly injuring at least one NYPD officer, and sustaining some injuries themselves.

The New York Post reports "at least six" arrests have been made, and none of the injuries appear life-threatening. So far.

The United States, as it stumbles into another cursed presidential election year, is lurching toward deadly political violence in the streets without appearing to give the matter much in the way of organized thought. Protesters in big Democratic cities routinely block bridges, freeways, and transit hubs, with cops often standing idly by while normie commuters reach the boiling point. Angry crowds are targeting government officials' homes, including those of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Christmas morning. There has been violence outside of Democratic Party headquarters, violence outside the Museum of Tolerance, and at least one death resulting from a street clash, for which an allegedly counter-protesting assailant has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and battery causing serious injury.

Republicans, meanwhile, are backing by more than 50 percentage points in national polls a presidential candidate who in his Christmas message said that no world leaders "are as evil and 'sick' as the THUGS we have inside our Country…looking to destroy our once great USA." ("MAY THEY ROT IN HELL," he added.) Nearly three years after egging on a chaotic and deadly Capitol Hill riot on election-certification day via conspiracy-fantasia and political scapegoating, the former president has not changed his tune, even while facing two criminal prosecutions tied to his shabby conduct on January 6, 2021. So far, 884 of his supporters have been convicted of crimes (with often over-zealous sentencing, in my view) for their actions connected with that foul day.

This is a sickly state of public affairs, and there's still three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses.

Though rumors of our incipient civil war are routinely exaggerated, Americans do tend to get excitable during the presidential season. With a journalistic establishment, however waning, already in full hyperbole-production mode; with the biggest third-party challenger in three decades strafing conspiracy theories in every direction; and—always underrated!—with a Democratic Party from the president on down mimicking Trump about the opposition seeking to "destroy" the country, we would be facing a grisly 44 weeks even without the unenforced errors of our most consequentially lousy political year, 2020.

It's been largely memory-holed now, but the same parts of Manhattan that have suffered street clashes this fall were, in November 2020, pre-emptively boarded up. Not because people feared a re-elected Trump might go all Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) on Gotham, but rather the contrary—that the Biden+70 island of Manhattan might greet a second term the way so many reacted to unpleasant news that spring and summer: by rioting.

We will likely never fully understand the granular details of George Floyd's adjudged murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, let alone wrap our heads around the subsequent decompression-explosions in policing, protest, race relations, media, COVID-19 policy, and much else besides. What we do know is that for tens of millions of Americans, the streets went from eerily quiet to angrily boisterous nearly overnight; that police staffing and crowd-management latitude were curtailed sharply; that violent crime in several cities spiked; and that Trump went from a candidate campaigning on the FIRST STEP Act to threatening to unleash on protesters "the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests."

It was an awful lot, in a short period of time already deranged incalculably by COVID and the response thereof. On the other side of it were a reported 19 deaths, 14,000 arrests, more than $1 billion in property damage, and lasting damage to the phrase "mostly peaceful." Whatever policy reforms and rollbacks, and results thereof, that tumbled forth, there was nothing resembling a shared national understanding about the dangers of political violence and physical vandalism, or what exactly law enforcement (or other government authority) should do in the face of public disorder.

And now we are here. Is there, to flog a dog-eared term, some hard-to-visualize path toward de-escalation? Can we keep the public square free of both citizen violence and law-enforcement abuse? Is the whole country destined to end up like Portland, Oregon, just waiting until the next straight-up street murder? Gloomy thoughts for a murky year.

Right and left, stretching back years, and in different matters of degree, have both succumbed to an apocalyptic populism that almost demands rhetorical escalation whenever conditions worsen or appear to. If your starting point is that Gaza pre-October 6 was an open-air concentration camp, that immigrants pre-2024 were "poisoning the blood of our country," that Trump pre-primary season is deliberately mining Hitler for speechwriting tips, then painting your hands a symbolic blood-red before screaming in the face of baby-murderers almost begins to make sense.

But it shouldn't. That's where those of us on the sidelines may have a role. Just because the political class sneezes doesn't mean the rest of us are obliged to catch a cold. We can insist on factual journalism and fair-minded analysis despite the worst efforts of "misinformation reporters." We can encourage loved ones to maybe not go scream slogans in politicians' driveways, or make blanket disparaging statements in public based on the group characteristics of strangers. And, unless we actually enjoy watching certain confrontational behaviors get repeated, we can gently suggest that no ragbag group of 500 protesters be given the potency to shut a great city down.

As worrying as these past months have felt, they've still got nothing on the 1970s when it comes to political violence, let alone violence-violence. Those of us old enough to remember those days are generally in no hurry to get back. The fever will break, eventually, I swear. No time better than the present.