American Democracy and Disconsent 9781032679341, 9781032661742, 9781032679365

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AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND DISCONSENT

This volume is a thorough re-examination of civil unrest and discontent in the United States, particularly the intersection of democracy and violence. The work argues that unrest and violence are embedded rituals of social and political “disconsent” and are constitutive features of citizen-based democracy. As such, they are part of how democratic life works: unrest is the eruptive, visible grammar of citizens in a democratic society. Democracy and citizen unrest and violence in the United States are set within a deeper history. The author traces the roots of American democracy – and the rituals of disconsent – to their sources in ancient Mediterranean political society, demonstrating that early democratic theory and practice understood unrest and revolt as morally grounded. Featuring case studies of recent episodes of political and social “disconsent” in the United States, the volume contextualizes the Black Lives Matter protests, unrest around police and institutional violence, and the Capitol insurrection on January 6. Through this, the book provides an important social theoretical lens through which to understand American discontent around racial injustice, political suppression, and citizen disillusionment. Daniel J. Monti is a professor of sociology at Saint Louis University. A ­former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he is the author of over 50 scholarly articles and the author or editor of eight books on subjects ranging from educational reform and inner-city redevelopment to youth gangs, and American urban history.

“Daniel Monti’s American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection is a fresh, deeply original interpretation of violence in America. It stands on a strongly argued foundation of social learning about the exigencies of living together in a multiethnic, multireligious society.” – Donald L. Horowitz, author of The Deadly Ethnic Riot “This lively and engaging book about civil unrest and ‘disconsent’ in America today is timely. When most of us across the world are pessimistic about the stability of American democracy, Daniel Monti manages to discuss the competing forces of liberalism and illiberalism – in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and even the January 6 Capitol insurrection – and yet remain relatively optimistic. Let us hope he is right!” – Professor Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND DISCONSENT Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection

Daniel J. Monti

Designed cover image: © Shutterstock First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Daniel J. Monti The right of Daniel J. Monti to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-67934-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-66174-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-67936-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

To Susan, who saved my life, and Mary Jane, who is helping me reclaim it.

CONTENTS

Prologue 1 Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege

1 31

2 Democracy and Civil Unrest in America (and Elsewhere)52 3 The Moral Foundation of Social and Political Disconsent103 4 Crowds, Strangers, and City Life

127

5 The Other “Ferguson Effect”

145

6 Charlottesville

193

7 Black Lives Matter Protests (and Violence)

237

8 January 6

281

9 The Future of Civil Unrest and Violence in America (and Elsewhere)

305

Bibliography Index

329 342

PROLOGUE

Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge. William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Thoughtful people inside and outside of the United States share the same mix of concern and bewilderment over Americans’ willingness to use violence to settle old scores, take up new challenges, and act on our worst grievances and fantasies. Beyond the immediate threat and confusion occasioned by these events, we are left to wonder how a democratic society can be sustained in the face of so much violent rhetoric, mistrust, and animosity. Quite well, I think. And for a long time to come. In this book, I lay out the reasons why I think this and the evidence I used to reach that conclusion. Such a confident and rosy prediction comes with qualifications, of course. But not only because there are thoughtful people who, armed with compelling evidence of their own, have already come up with markedly less ­optimistic predictions about the future of democracy in the United States.1 My qualification builds on the obvious fact that Americans have lost none of the ­rambunctiousness for which they are well known and the seemingly bottomless pit of animosities and grudges they can dip into or invent. It is rather that the animosities Americans nurse, the concerns we are growing today, and the way we draw attention to them are decidedly less violence-inducing and vicious than the ones that bedeviled and inspired us not too many decades ago. There may be only small comfort to be taken from the fact that we used to be meaner and more destructive when we fought among ourselves or went after people who were authoritative figures or assaulted symbols of their DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-1

2 Prologue

dominion. But looking at such things over a long period of time measured in decades if not centuries, these changes need to be understood and assessed for what good or harm they have done to us as a people. I think they have been good for us. My optimism is based on a singular but unheralded accomplishment, which can be summarized easily but requires a great deal of information to back up. The kind of democracy Americans practice today is more open than ever to new groups and challenges, but unable or unwilling to treat all of them with the seriousness and intensity their fiercest advocates insist they deserve. Today’s silent majority isn’t immune to the impassioned appeals of homegrown ideologues. But we are increasingly turned off by their incessant noise. And, if we’re not turned off by it, then certainly not turned on long and hard enough to use social unrest to accomplish whatever it is every aspiring American revivalist thinks we need to be doing so we can become the kind of American people they have in mind to make. We give them space to make their case. At times, even someone like me who spends a lot of time watching people who work awfully hard to get our attention must wonder whether it’s worth all their effort. But that would miss the larger point to all their grievance making, petitioning, and attention grabbing. These are things only some Americans used to be able to do and today most any American or would-be American can do. Their objective back in the day and as recently as yesterday hasn’t changed. It is to make us think about what we may be missing or should be doing to make us better than we seem inclined to be. The unrest we make and the discomfort it brings for a little while is one of the prices we pay for living in a democracy. It also is the way we pay down the debt to the people who figured out that getting along with people who aren’t us or don’t always do right by us is a legacy worth passing on. High on the list of debt payments we are making these days is an item of particular interest and relevance here: the use of unrest that appeals to both progressive and reactionary civic virtues and customs. Our future as a liberal democracy, or an illiberal democracy does not hang in the balance of the unrest and violence I describe in this book. But the way Americans practice democracy invites people with strong liberal and illiberal feelings to a series of cultural reckonings we see played out in acts of popular unrest and violence. We have made space in our lives for both liberalism and illiberalism. Acts of popular unrest and violence show how the contest between them is going. For those among you who are understandably bored by endless academic pronouncements and longwinded arguments, I’ll cut to the chase. The kinds of unrest and violence Americans are practicing today reinforce a conclusion that has been centuries in the making. Reactionary unrest and civic virtues keep us honest with our past. Progressive unrest and civic virtues keep us optimistic about our future. Both help people define the moral boundary lines within which they carry on their everyday lives.2

Prologue  3

Illiberalism has its moments and appeals but fails to restore society to the inflated glories its most ardent supporters remember. Liberalism never achieves what its most ardent supporters hope for and its detractors fear but is robust enough to hold its own against illiberal assaults. That’s it. If you want to learn more about the way Americans juggle these seemingly irreconcilable political philosophies without dropping democracy on its head and us along with it read on. The last decade has given us all a lot to think about. Like previous decades that left us shaken and stirred to action, it has provided us with ­several dramatic moments that demanded serious public reflection on how we got here and the legacy we will be passing on to the next generation of ­Americans. I review four of them in this book: rioting in Ferguson, M ­ issouri after a white police officer killed a young black man; a white ­nationalist campaign to save Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia; Black Lives Matter protests in several thousand small towns and big cities after yet another killing of a black person by a white cop; and, of course, the Capitol insurrection. It is hard to imagine how these events, and especially the ones surrounding our country’s first attempted Presidential coup d’état, could offer us any uplifting message about the state of American democracy. But they do. Clues to the well-being of American democracy, not of its imminent demise, are embedded in the stories of what happened in these places. Allow me to begin my exploration with the cultural equivalent of a bank shot: comparing mass murders to mass unrest. I see no good news in the number of Americans who kill each other every year with guns. But one kind of life-taking, the mass murders of innocent children and adults by solitary gunmen armed with military-grade weapons, provides us with an important counterpoint to the comparative restraint shown by larger groups of upset Americans when they take their private grievances public.3 The takeoff point for this book is built around the incongruous juxtaposition of these mass murders with the near absence of deaths in civil unrest where many people bring deadly weapons, they don’t end up using. Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers don’t like the kind of people who support Antifa. Supporters of Antifa are happy to return the favor. The KKK still purports to hate blacks, Jews, probably immigrants and refugees, but maybe not Catholics so much anymore. Fear, loathing, and hatred may be a movable feast in America. Of late, however, some of our more fearful, loathing, and hate-filled groups have taken to pushing themselves away from the table well before finishing everything on their plates. We simply don’t see Americans going out of their way to leave as many badly beaten and dead bodies on the ground as they did in the past when they fought in public. Those among us who make the biggest deal

4 Prologue

about being aggrieved today do not appear as committed to working out our brand-new and recycled animosities as destructively as we used to be. That’s saying something, given the weapons many rightwing partisans like to carry and flourish when they meet whoever they have a mind to intimidate and beat up on the streets of American towns and cities these days. Popular unrest carried out by groups of upset people has become more restrained and less deadly than it was in the past. Compare this to the dozens of mass killings carried out by individuals with an immense ideological chip on their shoulders and a moral compass that points in only one direction. Many of the lives taken belonged to people whose only offense was that they were members of races, religions, and ethnic groups the shooter didn’t like.4 I do not pretend to know how to curb the murderous impulses of people who hate. But as a matter of historical fact, in the 19th century this kind of violence was carried out by groups of Americans and sometimes by organizations and political parties whose leaders thought this was a good thing to do. Taking out large numbers of people wasn’t something individual Americans were inclined to do or capable of doing on their own. They had to assemble a bunch of people to help them. Today, those bunches of people are harder to find and convince that killing people they don’t like is something they should do. I am struck by the restraint that groups of aggrieved Americans have shown when large numbers of them assemble to demonstrate, protest, and riot on the streets of American towns and cities, including those featured in this book. Yes, the violence they do can hurt and sometimes kill others and do a lot of damage. But the disjuncture between the murderous violence that individual Americans do, and the much greater restraint that groups of Americans show when make a big public show of how upset they are is striking. Understanding this and other odd juxtapositions in the use of popular unrest and collective violence in the United States today is what I aim to do in this book. Embedded in what happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection are important clues to the complex and contradictory ways Americans think of themselves as a united people. These occasional, unexpected, and dramatic intrusions of unrest and collective violence into our otherwise conventional lives also show us glimpses of the kind of people Americans are poised to become in the future. The violence we make tips us off to how long and hard we are going to make it on newcomers and outsiders before we figure out we can live together satisfactorily, if not always congenially. As I note several times throughout the manuscript, I am not the first person to try to make some bigger sense of one or another piece of Americans’ preternatural attraction to social unrest and collective violence. I am, however, the first to assemble so many of these pieces and connect them to a way of life or culture that all manner of Americans are equally committed to preserving.

Prologue  5

Here, by way of an abbreviated introduction, are five of the principal l­essons I take from contemporary unrest that make me think we are more committed to preserving our American way of life and each other’s place in it than we recognize or willing to acknowledge in public. I will draw on one or more of them in each of the chapters where I revisit what happened in the places and events considered here. I’ll bring all of them back for a summary review in the last chapter. That is where I will explore what they tell us about the future of American unrest and democracy in the United States and in the principal Western societies whose people first taught would-be Americans how to argue and fight in public. Lesson 1

Americans have a long and well-documented history of not treating new­ comers and outsiders well. Discouraging them from sticking around or, barring that, pushing them into out-of-the-way corners where we don’t have to deal with them used to be a common occurrence. Their membership in the communities to which they had moved was often contested violently. We see much less of this kind of community unrest and collective violence today. The custom of abusing and speaking ill of newcomers and outsiders has ­persisted but doesn’t play out as nastily and destructively as it once did. The kind of unrest and violence people use to accomplish such ends was and still is reactionary in character. Local people still use unrest to defend the community or their country from outsiders and newcomers who pose a threat to their way of life.5 Their aggression may be every bit as ill-tempered as it was in the past; but it has become less deadly and destructive. They have found less violent ways to show their displeasure with newcomers and outsiders. They also have found something else to fight about. Much more than in the past, all kinds of Americans – the ones who were already fixtures in their community as well as those who are still struggling to become a more permanent fixture – have taken to using unrest to fight about how seriously and respectfully they should be treated when they are in public. That used to be something long-term and better regarded Americans made very clear to people who weren’t as accomplished or well regarded. Today, all kinds of Americans, including the newer ones, are using unrest and making more modest kinds of violence over how accountable they need to be for the way they speak and treat each other when they are in public. The use of unrest and violence this way is rather more progressive in ­character. People have moved past arguing about who has a rightful claim for membership in the community. Today our fights are more about how widely different groups must share not just the rights and privileges of citizenship but also the duties and obligations that go along with being a full-fledged member of their community.

6 Prologue

Some of the earliest and more violent fights over such questions were between laborers and their bosses. Labor unrest became much less violent once bosses recognized the legitimacy of their workers to bargain with them. This kind of unrest also appeared in community disputes where newcomers and outsiders fought with local authorities, business leaders, and local people for the right to be taken seriously and have their concerns addressed in a more forthright way. A good illustration of how business owners and their now unionized workers are learning to understand and share each other’s rights, duties, privileges, and obligations recently came up in discussions about a possible United Auto Worker’s strike at a Chrysler plant in Detroit in 2023. In the run-up to their negotiations, a reporter observed that, “besides the usual haggling over wages, pensions and health care, the union set its sights on a more consequential goal: to secure a foothold in the joint-venture plants that will manufacture electric vehicle batteries.”6 The workers wanted more than a decent salary and benefits. They wanted a piece of the action. More importantly, perhaps, they were willing to talk about it and showed no interest in beating their bosses into a bloody pulp. Their bosses showed no interest in hiring people to beat the stuffing out of their employees. A century ago, such a bargain would have been unimaginable. Workers and owners were still battling and using violence to settle the question of whether workers could even sit at the same table as their employer. After they worked that out, labor unrest and violence became much less prevalent. They could sit across the table from each other and work out details about wages, hours to be worked, and factory conditions without all the rancor, bitterness, and violence that accompanied most labor disputes at the time. Much the same has happened in community disputes over who could be viewed as a legitimate member of the community. The principal accomplishment of progressive unrest and violence has been to affirm the credibility of newcomers and outsiders as full-fledged members of their community. As such, they would be treated with the kind of public regard that people who had been there a lot longer had long taken for granted. Notwithstanding these changes, both reactionary and progressive unrest and violence continue to play an important part in making our communities however socially inclusive and culturally accommodating we appear ready for them to be today. As the episodes of unrest and violence described in this book show, some kinds of Americans still express illiberal sentiments and push civic virtues that are not especially welcoming for people who aren’t like them. But there’s much less of this than there was in the past. It is the principal reason why the kinds of unrest Americans practice today have become more restrained and the violence we use less deadly and

Prologue  7

destructive than it was in the past. We are more at peace with the idea or perhaps just better practiced at accommodating ourselves to the hard reality that newcomers and outsiders can’t be killed off, are not likely to go away, and are much better at fitting in than the rest of us ever imagined they could be. The way this plays out, as I already suggested, is in fights over how accountable people from different groups must be for what they do and say when they’re out in public and having the equivalent of a school-yard stare-down. Americans may not be sure about a lot of things. But two of the things they appear certain about are that they are comfortable fighting with one hand tied behind their backs and for reasons that sometimes are more ­progressive and other times more reactionary in character. The unrest in Ferguson in 2014 and in Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 would qualify as being relatively progressive in its aims. It looked to make communities more inclusive and accommodating to groups long considered socially unattractive and politically marginal in American civic life. The unrest in Charlottesville in 2017 and in Washington, D.C., in 2021 was clearly different. It was instigated by groups whose members had more socially and politically reactionary ideas in mind about who should be taken seriously and who could be safely ignored, if not openly maligned and mistreated. It will surprise no one that white people and Christians would be at the top of the list of people many Americans still believe should be spoken to and treated better in public. By comparison, people who aren’t white or Christian would be treated and spoken of much less favorably. But there is something about the unrest that happened in Washington, D.C., and even more obviously in Charlottesville that put an unexpectedly progressive twist to the reactionary violence that white nationalist and other racist groups brought to both places. Reactionary unrest and violence have been used historically by people who were defending longstanding customs and civic ideals. Many of them were not at all welcoming to newer people and ideas about how their community should be run and who should have a turn at running it. Reactionary unrest reasserted older civic virtues that maintained a community’s traditional way of life and the privileged position of the people who were accustomed to mattering more. The thing is, in the case of Charlottesville’s unrest and what happened at the Capitol insurrection and failed Presidential coup d’état, the people ­being attacked were defending themselves against “outsiders” who wanted to r­ eimpose older civic virtues and customs that favored some Americans over others. Not surprisingly, the people who would have their favored ­position restored were overwhelmingly white and Christian. In both Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville, the people repelling armed and threatening outsiders were already committed to a way of life more tolerant and welcoming to people that racists, Nazis, other white nationalists wanted to insult and publicly shun. The “radical” outsiders wanted to

8 Prologue

resuscitate civic virtues that people in Charlottesville and our national government had already rejected. The people of Charlottesville and federal officials in Washington, D.C., dismissed the petitions and protests mounted by people pushing a much older set of civic virtues. The malcontented interlopers were sent packing. ­Hundreds will end up spending years in prison for pushing ideas the rest of us had already concluded didn’t fit the more inclusive and accommodating world we wanted to build and the kind of Americans we wanted to be. All that said, social historians and theorists were wrong about the way popular unrest and violence would change in Western societies like the United States. At least in the United States, people held onto a lot of their reactionary impulses and practices in the way they used unrest and violence. Their fights did not “evolve” into well-organized and more uniformly progressive forms of misbehavior that would undo every outdated American custom and civic virtue. Progressive unrest has indeed become more common, but it has not replaced reactionary unrest. What people have done instead is find a way to argue among themselves and make a community where both reactionary and progressive unrest are still practiced, and more liberal and conservative customs and civic virtues can both be embraced. Lesson 2

Civil unrest and violence are not wildly out-of-control outbursts engaged in by people who have temporarily lost their minds. They are messy. But they also bend to culturally prescribed rituals we draw on to reform our way into a new world, renew our commitment to changes we made in an older world, or restore parts of that older world that many of us miss and think need to be given new life. Political theorists have written a great deal about the way democracies bend or comply with the will of the people and the consent of the governed. A big piece of the “people’s” consent may be implied more by their quiescence than in their active compliance and have more fictional value than practical significance in their daily lives. Successful politicians count on it. The rest of us generally learn to live with it. This arrangement works well enough most of the time to keep people who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lot in life from making a lot of noise or trouble. There are times, though, when people do more with their dissatisfaction or unhappiness than swallow it. On those occasions, they join with others who disagree with things they may have ignored in the past but have become intolerable to them now. People will petition their local leaders or publicly grieve a decision their leaders have made. In either case, they make a show of how they do not concur with what is going on in their community by temporarily withdrawing their consent to be governed as they have in the past.7

Prologue  9

Acts of popular disconsent have a storied history in Western societies. How disruptive, violent, and destructive the acts turn out to be is dependent entirely on local customs and exigent circumstances. For a long time, historians have imagined that one of the key elements of disconsent in the United States was that people turn to violence only after they have exhausted readily available avenues of grievance redress.8 Unrest and violence aren’t the first things American people think of doing when they’re upset and aggrieved. They are among the last if not the last actions people take when they want to make a show of how out of sorts they are with the way their community is being run and for the lack of respect their leaders are showing them. As matters involving violence go, this is a reassuring idea. It makes violence look more reasonable, maybe even excusable under the right circumstances. Less powerful people or groups with less social standing, tired of being picked on by people and groups with more power and social standing, throw out all kinds of signs that they won’t put up with being mistreated or discounted much longer. It makes sense. Except this doesn’t account for all the times more powerful groups and people with more social standing use violence to maintain their position in the community. White people in the South, both before and after the Civil War, were not at all reluctant to injure and kill black people for committing the slightest offenses and not infrequently for committing no offense. Established ethnic groups in Northern cities used to be just as eager to beat up and push around people whose backgrounds and religions were different from their own. They didn’t wait for newcomers and outsiders to do something untoward. They just beat the hell out of them and sometimes killed them to prove who was there first and mattered more. I am going to have to come up with a better explanation that covers all the occasions when groups of people go after each other, not just the ones where the little guys must go out of their way to prove they deserve to be taken more seriously and be treated better. Lesson 3

Another feature of social and political disconsent is that it lasts only a short while. Such acts are not intended to turn the world upside down permanently. And whatever point people want to make can usually be made with sufficient force and drama so that they don’t have to continue being disruptive for long periods of time. Officials and leaders whose actions are being grieved usually get the message quickly, especially when violence is part of the deal. Importantly, the temporary withdrawal of people’s consent to the way they are being led and governed typically ends up reenforcing the legitimacy of whatever passes for the community’s normal order. Acts of disconsent are

10 Prologue

a test of the community’s resilience, not a display of its social, political, and economic insolvency. Whatever passes as a legitimate response to people’s expressed concerns enables them to return to their regular lives. Leaders and followers alike are chastened by the mistakes that were made and mindful of the importance of not repeating them. At the same time, they are cognizant of the fact that the world isn’t likely to become appreciably better, much less perfected overnight. Lesson 4

The reality that the world isn’t fair and is unlikely to ever satisfy everyone implies that some people are always going to be treated differently and better than others. Inequality is a constant feature of life in any community or society. But some kinds of inequality are longer lasting and less amenable to being changed than other kinds are. The late social historian Charles Tilly said some kinds of inequality are more “durable” than others.9 I think he was right. The most durable and difficult to undo inequality is economic inequality. The next most persistent and hard to address are differences in people’s political power. One would expect the most persistent and intractable forms of inequality would get the most attention and be challenged more than the less durable kinds. At least in the United States, however, just the opposite has proven to be the case. Americans have fought more often and hardest over their social and cultural differences and least often and violently over their economic differences. There has been a resurgence in the uses of unrest and violence for politically partisan purposes in the United States. But economic inequality has not become any more important in conflicts or where people use unrest and violence most when they want to take their private grievances public. The unequal way in which economic wealth is distributed has remained more durable than either social or political inequality. The reason why, as I make plain in the book, is that neither the Haves nor the Have-nots in America have shown much interest in making substantial changes in the way wealth is distributed. They make occasional noise about economic inequality. But outside of discussions about economic reparations for black Americans and small pilot projects to give cash payments to lowerincome black people, it is hard to find much excitement for taking lots of rich people’s money and sharing it with less well-off citizens. People certainly aren’t using unrest and violence to make the case that redistributing wealth is a big priority for them. Part of the reason why may be that enough people have made enough economic progress to satisfy themselves and keep the rest of us quiet. The occupational, educational, and income profiles of people from historically

Prologue  11

marginal populations have become more like those of white people in the last couple of decades. Even before these measures of current and future economic well-being were converging, however, Americans of all colors, genders, and social classes showed they were a great deal more tolerant of economic inequality than theorists like Karl Marx imagined they would be. When it comes to staging big, nasty fights about what bothers them most, Americans have spent much more time and energy fighting and killing each other over their social and cultural differences. This has been the case for the last 250 years, and we seem disinclined to stop fighting over them today. What is different are the ways we have elected to fight about our “cultural” differences. Our “culture wars” these days are more annoying and exhausting than they are brutally convincing. The calculated horror of all things “woke” that politicians couldn’t keep themselves from showing in recent years are good examples of the watered-down cultural “wars” I’m talking about. Even our seemingly intractable disagreements over immigration and refugees in America aren’t playing out as viciously as they did in the past.10 Incorporating these newest newcomers and outsiders has not been easy or agreeable. Stealing the children of would-be immigrants and locking them in cages for a time was as far as anti-immigrant partisans were willing to go. They seemed to like it. A great many more Americans were disgusted by it. There is nothing guaranteeing that Americans will continue their apparent march forward as a liberal democracy at the comparatively rapid pace it moved in the last half-century. Indeed, we may yet make a backward turn, which many observers already see happening. Given the more restrained ways in which Americans have come to fight each other, however, I do not expect to see a counter-reformation featuring widespread social unrest targeting newcomers and outsiders like we did in the past. We are more likely to see and are already seeing a slowdown in our development as a liberal democratic state. Annoying and gratifying as some Americans may find this turn of events, it is telling that neither side is using violence to make the case that we need to move forward or backward faster. Our two-steps-forward-one-step-backward way of fighting over immigration and a host of other problems we have with each other is a sign that our more restrained public battles will not leave us permanently at odds with each other, much less at each other’s throat for long. Lesson 5

The evidence to support this conclusion and the fifth clue to how contemporary unrest and mass violence figure into the kind of people Americans are on their way to becoming has not been hidden from view so much as it has been ignored by social historians and scientists. It is the non-event, or, as the late James Baldwin might have put it, “the evidence of things not seen.”11

12 Prologue

This idea requires a little clarification but is best summarized in something I say early in the book and return to often and in a variety of ways. What matters most in moments of popular unrest and violence isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. The “non-event” has immense cultural significance in moments of popular unrest and mass violence. The best way to show how this works out in practice is by way of an illustration. In this book, the most significant illustration of the importance of nonevents in contemporary unrest and violence is what didn’t happen during the Capitol insurrection. Contrary to what former President Donald Trump said and many of his supporters blindly repeated, black people and their Antifa defenders were not among the insurrectionists, rioters, and coup d’état supporters. Some black people were there. But they were among the men and women who protected the Capitol and the important work our elected representatives were doing. The importance of this non-event cannot be ignored and should be celebrated, if for no other reason than this. Black people have been the crash test dummies of American democracy for however long they have been here. What has happened to them and how they have responded to the ways they were treated figure prominently in the unrest and violence that happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and Black Lives Matter protests. Their absence as participants in the Capitol insurrection is the single most important clue to how far the process of democratization has come and how successfully black Americans have taken to it. As a people, black Americans have learned and practiced the art of what it means to be an effective citizen more than all the white people who showed up in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, and more than all the ­people who were sympathetic to the ones who stormed the Capitol. The white ­people who stormed the Capitol intimated that they were somehow more entitled to the privileges and rights of citizenship and less encumbered by its attendant duties and obligations than other Americans and especially nonwhite Americans. Black Americans made a compelling demonstration of their fidelity to those same rights, privileges, duties, and obligations by not showing up to riot on January 6, 2021. They certainly know how to riot. Black and brown people had become the principal users of violent unrest by the mid-1960s. They chose not to come to Washington, D.C., and try to stop the peaceful transfer of power because that would have invalidated rights of citizenship they had waited far too long and sacrificed more to acquire than any white person could ever imagine. The Capitol insurrection was a singularly important moment in the history of our republic. Black Americans showed they were more than equal to the challenge so many of the rest of us who are more privileged failed

Prologue  13

miserably and proudly. As morals go, this may be the most important one I can share with readers. In this book, I explain why Americans are making more unrest today than ever but are less inclined to hurt and kill each other when they do. As the four episodes of unrest and violence described here suggest, our unrest and violence have become more civil but remain an integral feature in our ­enthusiastic practice of social and political disconsent. My conclusion is based not just on my analysis of the four events I feature in the book but also on work done by social scientists and historians who have studied mass unrest and violence in this country and across Western Europe. Like them, I find the amount of unrest and violence declining. I also note as they have that unrest and violence have become better organized and politically inspired. Groups of neighbors and fellow townsmen still act out, but as all four of the events recalled here show, organizations have become more involved in their communal conflicts and fights. What was not anticipated is the mix of more and less organized kinds of popular unrest we see today along with a coincidental rise in both progressive and reactionary forms of collective violence. Such changes in the character of unrest and violence do not fit what social scientists and historians expected. They imagined a cleaner, if not especially smooth, transition from communally inspired unrest and violence to unrest and violence carried out by ­organizations with larger geographic and more progressive political ambitions. At least in the United States, the transition hasn’t been as complete as historians and social scientists imagined. More reactionary kinds of unrest and violence – the kind people make when they want to keep things the way they are or, even better, return them to the way they used to be – haven’t disappeared. More progressive unrest and violence – the kinds that people make when they want to address and undo past wrongs – hasn’t occurred nearly as often or, perhaps more accurately, hasn’t been nearly as successful as we imagined it would have been by now. Missing too from our theorizing and analyses is an explanation for why both progressive and reactionary unrest and violence would have become more restrained. Steven Pinker’s assertion that a “rights revolution” protected minority groups does not account for why people who would benefit most from such protections increased their use of violence in their own communities in the 1960s after federal protections were approved. Nor can it account for why whites reduced their use of violence before these federal protections became a fact of institutional life in communities where they were still very much in control. White and minority activists traded their most effective change promoting and resistance strategies at the very moment the “rights revolution” was taking off, not after it had taken hold, which is what Pinker was suggesting. As with so many things related to the history of popular unrest in the

14 Prologue

United States, our history doesn’t line up with our theories about how the world works or we thought it would work. The story is more complicated. Donald Horowitz, whose work on ethnic riots Pinker cites extensively, says the answer to this puzzle has something to do with cultural changes that were happening or had already taken hold before civil rights protections were in place. Otherwise, there is nothing in Pinker’s thesis that would account for why so many whites would make an abrupt move away from violence at the exact moment blacks were making more of it than at any time in their history. I agree with Horowitz. Something changed in America’s civic culture. Here I describe those cultural changes and show how they complemented customs and values that both the proponents and opponents of a “rights revolution” embraced and drew on to make their case to a restive American population. My alternative explanation for why this happened has three elements. First, all Americans were more committed to civic virtues and customs that make fights less destructive and accommodations easier with people we may not like. Second, both long-time citizens and cultural “insiders” on the one hand and newcomers and cultural “outsiders” on the other hand have become better practiced at flipping between making big public shows of getting along and making trouble for each other. Third, at the heart of their grudging commitment to sticking it out with each other and the art of making simulated rebellions are liberal and conservative values we all share and routinely practice in public. More surprising yet, perhaps, these shared values and the order they help sustain are practiced more often and better in the last place on Earth most of us would think to look for them: America’s cities. Observers and analysts of all political persuasions have long associated cities with unruly behavior and dismissed the people living there as incapable of grasping and practicing the finer points of democracy. In this book, I will argue even more strongly than I have in the past that social and political leaders and members of the theory class got this part of the story wrong.12 Only this time I focus on the more upsetting and disruptive aspects of modern urban life rather than all the ways in which urban people have shown they know how to get along better than anyone expected. I reaffirm what some historians have argued about social and political unrest in England and Western Europe. Popular unrest and mass violence do not make peoples’ lives materially better or make it necessarily easier to resolve the differences they have with each other. What popular unrest and collective violence accomplish is to make the dialogue conflicting groups have with each easier to carry on. This is how unrest and violence promote institutional stability rather than undermine it.

Prologue  15

This is not the first time Americans have been at odds with each other, tried each other’s patience and resolve, pushed each other around and their institutions to something resembling a breaking point, and lived to tell the tale. It is our time, however, and we may be excused for thinking we have never seen anything like this before, when we have seen worse, or that we cannot imagine how we will get through this time together, when we already are. Given its subject matter, this is a surprisingly optimistic book, but not foolishly so or one that is intended to make us feel good about ourselves and ignore the trouble we often make and the destruction we must clean up afterward. If the trouble we have been making lately seems unprecedented, it certainly is in some ways. After all, we had our first attempted Presidential coup d’état and most expansive protests and violence over race in our history within a half-year of each other. We are still working our way through what it all meant and how we might be spared from having to go through other convulsive moments like them in the future. But these events were not so unprecedented that we cannot look back in time for clues to why and how they happened, where we are today, or hints about where our clean-up efforts this time might take us. The most immediate clues to how we got here are found in the two much smaller community d ­ isturbances that happened in Ferguson, Missouri and Charlottesville, ­Virginia. These events made a much bigger impression on us and in other ­nations than their size would have predicted. How people in and around those communities have gone about cleaning up their respective messes ­provides useful clues to how the rest of us might move past the bigger disturbances we made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police officers in Minneapolis and Donald Trump’s failed attempt to hold onto an office he had not earned and power he was ill-equipped to use responsibly. The original plan for the book, as I imagined it in 2017, was for me to compare the 2014 unrest and violence in Ferguson, Missouri to the markedly different unrest and violence that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. There were precedents for both in American history. One, the unrest in Ferguson, was reminiscent of “protest riots” of the 1960s. The other, a public argument about the fate of Civil War statues and perceived threats to Southern customs and values, had ties to a much older tradition of disputes between elitist institutions and the communities surrounding them. Such “town-gown” disagreements sometimes turned contentious and nasty, but not with such far-reaching consequences and significance as did the one in Charlottesville. At the same time, what happened in both Ferguson and Charlottesville diverged rather dramatically from their closest historical antecedents in ways that were simultaneously mindful and dismissive of the customary ways in which people have used unrest and violence in the past. That these violent episodes occurred within three years of each other added a potentially

16 Prologue

interesting twist to the story about the kinds of trouble Americans are making today compared to the types we made in the past. If this were a work of fiction, one might think of the disruptions in these two places as a foreshadowing, a dry run, if you like, of bigger and more forbidding reckonings to come. And you would be right to imagine them in this way. That is precisely what they were. Americans were still working through the significance of Ferguson and Charlottesville even as we were thrust headlong into a national election and many thousands of fractured conversations about our past racial shortcomings and yet unfinished racial business. There were advantages to be had in these conversations for persons running for office no matter their party affiliation and for everyone who felt obliged or empowered to throw more than their two cents worth into the middle of this quadrennial scrum. The arguments over race in the run-up to these elections and afterward were every bit as enervating and upsetting as one might have hoped or feared. Left to more sober and thoughtful persons and absent the entirely avoidable but inescapable provocations made by reckless police officers and agitated ideologues on both sides of these conversations, we might have postponed the unrest and violence we made in 2020 and January of 2021. But in keeping with so much writing on these subjects, it is hard to imagine in retrospect that we could have avoided unrest and violence altogether. As we contemplate the impact of our actions and words during the runup to another Presidential election and possible rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, this much is uncontestably true. The unrest and violence comparatively few of us made and the rest of us witnessed in 2021 was every bit as threatening and destructive as it looked. Its potential to do even greater harm than it did was not overstated. But the unrest and violence in the Capitol that some people may still celebrate and most of us defame today was not nearly threatening and destructive enough to fulfill the fantasies and ambitions of the people and groups that sought to use it to their political advantage. Two additional points about the unrest, not as important as those I led with earlier in the prologue, perhaps, but still important enough to keep in mind, can be introduced now. First, physical attacks on persons and property carried out by groups of people, especially larger groups of people, are supposed to be upsetting, scary, and hurtful. There would be no reason to take them or the reasons behind the assaults seriously otherwise. This is particularly true of attacks against persons and pieces of property with a prominent or authoritative public face. Second, these attacks don’t happen all that often, but when they do, we are almost always surprised. There is great irony and no small amount of pain built into these revelations, for us as a people and for me as the author of this book.

Prologue  17

The book I first imagined and began writing in 2017 was put on hold for several years when my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which took her life in March of 2019. My return to the book and the consoling effects of writing were kickstarted by the Black Lives Matter protests and unrest following George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in 2020. The Capitol insurrection in early-2021, not a half-year after Black Lives Matter protests wound down, was an added inducement for me to finish the book. These last two pieces of unrest and the violence accompanying them were unprecedented in American history. Their scope and impact outdid anything Americans had witnessed and done in many decades, and perhaps ever. The comparative peacefulness of most but by no means all Black Lives Matter protests and dramatically staged but incompetently executed mugging of the most important ritual in American politics gave expression to the same culturally revealing truth about our history that I mentioned earlier. Americans are exceptionally good at using social unrest to test the resilience of their institutions and communities and in doing so reaffirm, not undermine, their value and legitimacy. Making short-term trouble for ourselves and each other is key to maintaining an otherwise orderly way of life and nudging it in directions we can imagine but are not yet prepared to go. Our inability or reluctance to acknowledge the importance of this piece of our cultural endowment is, ironically, crucial to our continuing efforts to reconcile our democratic principles with a history built around less-thandemocratically-inspired prejudices and practices. What Gunnar Myrdal imagined was a peculiarly American dilemma in the way its black citizens were treated is an animating tension in the way democratic societies work or, perhaps less generously, don’t work their way into achieving something we can think about and admire as a greater common good.13 The writing I did on these subjects between 2017 and 2020 was published as chapters in two edited volumes. One book dealt with campaigns to defund and otherwise limit the discretion of police in many countries in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.14 The other dealt more broadly with the way conflicts over race relations were being dealt with in a variety of countries.15 In this book, I have used some elements from both papers and added to the information presented in the edited volumes. By 2021, of course, the stark difference between events surrounding Black Lives Matter protests and the attempted Presidential coup d’état required yet another reformulation of the book I had intended to write. The new book, the one you are reading now, is built around these four important episodes of civil disorder. It shows how the much bigger events that played out across the country as Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the Capitol insurrection in 2021, as I already noted, were foreshadowed in the smaller disruptions in Ferguson in 2014 and Charlottesville in 2017.16

18 Prologue

This is a much more ambitious work than the one I first envisioned. And I was reminded of that fact by the juxtaposition of the personal challenges my late wife and I faced together and the ones our country went through every time I sat at my keyboard and tried to find some larger purpose in them. But it also has offered me an opportunity to reflect upon a lifetime of writing about how people from different backgrounds, social classes, races, and religions have struggled to become a version of an American the rest of us could live with amicably or at least reconcile ourselves to having around. A big part of this book and my previous writing has been to understand how people create a way of life – a culture, if you will – that enables them to deal with each other despite their obvious and sometimes annoying differences. The principal accomplishment of the four events featured in this book and in social unrest and violence generally is the way they raise serious questions about what matters to us and how we take up that challenge. Unrest and violence solve nothing but accomplish a lot. Specifically, they help us manage our strained relations and views of people who are different from us. In doing so, intermittent outbreaks of disorderly behavior help make life in the communities we share corrigible, if not particularly agreeable. This is especially true of life in American cities and metropolitan areas, places where people from different walks of life, religions, social classes, and ancestral backgrounds find it hard to avoid each other and eventually must find ways to manage their differences. Changing how groups act and address each other in public, not what their individual members privately believe or share with a pollster or people close to them, is key to making relations between them better. Changes in the way groups composed of persons from different backgrounds, races, and religions are described and treated in public are not kept a secret. They are shared and affect what some individuals or even a great many people may think or do. But imagining individuals as the principal architects and arbiters of what matters and ultimate target of our attempts to give the world a makeover is more distracting than it is revealing. That is not where the action is or how sustainable and resilient communities are made. Therefore, in this book you will see I pay little attention to what individuals think or believe about each other or how they make sense of the world. To be sure, consideration of such matters is unavoidable. It also is useful in a limited but important way for revealing how unsettled and contradictory our personal understanding is of why such events happen and the larger public good and ill served by them. I am much more interested in understanding how people use unrest and violence to make sense of their differences and deal with them. A much clearer view of what matters to people and how our beliefs and values are revealed in everyday life is shown by what larger collections of people and groups do and say in public. People’s values and beliefs are

Prologue  19

not fashioned in isolation, but in the way other collections of people and groups answer back. It is through these back-and-forth exchanges that groups take each other’s measure and come to some understanding about what matters to them and why. Individuals can learn to live with the consequences of these exchanges and understandings or not, and even make small contributions to their ­realization. Their opinions matter…to them. But it is the groups to which different people belong or in whose good name and shadow they act that make the biggest and most consequential changes affecting our individual lives and keep the rest of us in line. Creating a community that works even passably well most of the time is a collective enterprise and accomplishment. It is not an individual one. Don’t get me wrong. I like individuals. Some of my best friends are individuals. But when it comes to figuring out how to make the world more agreeable, especially when the figuring out part involves mass unrest and violence, how individuals act and what they think don’t take us very far or much closer to explaining what’s really going on in the places where unrest and collective violence occur. The tension between individual and collective ways of imagining and making a world that makes sense is clearly playing out today in what Americans call “identity politics” and “culture wars.” The issues driving identity politics and culture wars today have more to do with our privacy and personal lives than with large numbers of us being able to work together and live alongside each other. They include abortion, the right to own and bear firearms, how alert or “woke” one is to differences in peoples’ race and gender, and how much children should be exposed to the less ennobling parts of our own history. To be sure, such matters affect more of us than the women who have an abortion, the innocent people who are murdered in a mass shooting, and those who find mischief and magic in the personal pronouns people use and whether we capitalize the first letter of the words “black” and “white” when we write them down. But the manner of their resolution tells us nothing about how people from different races, religions, ancestries, and genders deal with each other in public. Decades ago, the issues of choice for culture warriors would have included affirmative action and “multicultural education.” The policy and identity questions raised by those matters affected a great many people and how they had to deal with each other in work sites and schools. The changes wrought by such policies didn’t make everyone happy or equal. But these changes had an immediate and marked impact on the way whole organizations and communities were organized and had to respond. They couldn’t be buried or dismissed as the result of one’s personal foibles or challenges. How “woke” or un-woke I am doesn’t matter. It can be buried and dismissed, and frankly should be. Contemporary unrest and violence don’t take

20 Prologue

their cue from what individual Americans say or think in private. They take their cue from what many people say and do in public. Common to both the early and more recent versions of identity politics and culture wars is a concern for whose vision of America is to be validated and enforced. Put much too simply, was it going to be the vision and version of America promoted by, say, white males and Christians? Or was it to be an America that also attended to the concerns and wishes of women, non-white people, and different faith traditions? The big questions a half-century ago, however, focused on the access people had to jobs, housing, education, and voting. Make no mistake, questions about peoples’ comparable and “equal access” to such important success markers still come up in public debates and can be hotly contested. All Americans still do not have the same access to these precious commodities and rights. Their access is appreciably better today than it was even a half-century ago, but it certainly isn’t identical, much less perfect. We still argue about such matters today, but not as much or as intensively as we did even a few decades ago. Today, our identity politics and culture wars are carried out on a much different terrain. Concerned as we still may be about questions of access and equality, we are paying much more attention these days to how individuals think of themselves and talk to each other. As I point out later in the book, this may be taken as a sign that the material circumstances of people from different races, religions, and genders are so much improved that we don’t have to squabble over them as we once did. Or it may mean we have tired of such fights and retreated to waging metaphorical wars over each other’s personal identity, feelings, and lifestyles. Either way, today we are seeing many more of what I refer to in the book as “Us Too” movements.17 The principal objective of these movements isn’t to equalize resources and smooth out differences in our life chances. It is to elevate the regard different kinds of people believe they deserve by insisting Americans who are not like them behave more circumspectly and speak less obnoxiously about them in public. Calling individuals out for their transgressions is supposed to inspire other people to change for the better, to become, in effect, more “civilized” one person at a time.18 Of course, teaching better manners to the masses is something Americans of a better sort have been trying to do for a long time. It was a compelling enough part of the American way of life already by the 1830s to have drawn the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great observer and commentator of American morals and manners. The bewildering number and array of “Us Too” movements today testify to the surprising staying power and success all the early training individuals got from books on etiquette and manners. They aim to teach more of us at once, faster, and in a more limited way about what it means to be a better

Prologue  21

person. These movements can succeed only to the extent they make it all but impossible for the rest of us to ignore all the people we might offend and all the ways we need to stop offending them. The unrest and social movements I describe in this book have loftier ambitions. They are not concerned with individuals learning how to be more accommodating and accepting of other people. It may eventually work out that way in Ferguson and all the communities that had Black Lives Matter protests. Their version of an “Us Too” movement would eventually have us more “woke” than not and less inclined to commit “microaggressions” or being accused of having unintentionally made one. But that was the last thing the people that instigated unrest and violence in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. had in mind to accomplish. They wanted to rekindle people’s support for civic virtues and everyday ways of getting along that were anything but inclusive or accommodating. Their “Us Too” movements make fun of anything smacking of “wokeness” and can be construed as making white people think ill of themselves simply because they were, uh, white. It didn’t work out that way in Charlottesville or Washington, D.C., if you ignore recent rulings by the Supreme Court about limiting a woman’s right to have an abortion or not plan weddings for gay people. But it hasn’t stopped rightwing versions of “Us Too” movements from taking off in the United States. People may be further emboldened collectively to do more with the victories and setbacks they experienced in how individuals can act. But if they don’t, then all they have left us with is principled noise and etiquette lessons many people happily shrug off. My point is simply that unrest and social movements work at both a collective and individual level. Here we are much more interested in what happens at the collective level when people try to make the world over in ways they think are more culturally edifying. I am happy to leave all the personally edifying stuff to individuals to figure out for themselves. For better and worse, then, I do not see “Us Too” movements making as big a difference as their supporters have in mind to make. Engaging as such movements are, they tell us much more about how far we have already come to changing the world in much bigger ways than how much further we must go before we can pat ourselves on the back or give each other a trophy to take home. The curative effect of campaigns to change the world one person at a time is much less impressive than their affective bites. In a way that is hard to see at first but obvious when we are forced to look at it, we have the luxury of worrying about anyone’s murder, pregnancy, personal pronoun, and capitalizing conventions today only because people from groups long singled out for mistreatment took to the streets and shook the complacency out of persons who were well-to-do and socially privileged.

22 Prologue

Less esteemed and well-off people still want to be taken seriously. And sometimes being taken seriously means they think they must shake things up. More importantly, given the subject and groups considered in this book, being taken seriously is every bit as relevant to members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as it is for Antifa supporters. When people in these groups take to the streets, however, they’re fighting for something more important than whether their race is capitalized in print, someone chafes at the personal pronoun they use to describe themselves or feels less than super about their gender or skin color. They’re fighting for their community and way of life, not their personal identity. Leftwing and rightwing cultural warriors who lead social movements today must deal with two possibly unresolvable problems. One is the way they treat stories of their own and other’s personal redemption as a substitute for doing much harder and less personally edifying pieces of institutional and corporate homework. (This is a huge turn-off for anyone old enough to remember a time when social activists challenged leaders to consider the broader public consequences of their private actions.) The other problem facing them generally and supporters of groups like Antifa, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers in particular, is that most of us are not fans of the unrest and violence they want to make. In the run-up to the 2020 election, then Presidential candidate Joe Biden made his position on the use of unrest and violence unconditionally clear. He didn’t think it had a place in American politics.19 After the Capitol insurrection, I wouldn’t be surprised if most Americans agree with him. I understand why he and many other Americans might hold this view. I also think they are wrong. The reality on the ground, as I try to show in this book, is more complex, compelling, and revealing. We are a better people because of the trouble we make for ourselves and each other, even when that trouble turns destructive and deadly. The social movements and other collective attempts to fix our communities and institutions I write about here are not so concerned with fixing the individuals who occupy them. As I said, they are much more ambitious than “Us Too” movements. Their aim is to address and change glaring shortcomings in how institutions and communities work and to reconcile our democratic pretensions with our less-than-democratic practices. “Us Too” movements are important, just not for the reasons their supporters think. The good they do is personal. It isn’t collective. In my last two books, I described how Americans accomplish something closer to a common good in their everyday lives. They do this through the ways they govern themselves, how they shop and invest, make businesspeople committed to making money and an orderly community, and belong to a particular religion or ethnic-like identity group.20 I argued these are the four principal ways people in this country use to define themselves as Americans

Prologue  23

and fill in the broad outline for how they make the communities they share work more amicably. These four ways of “doing community” are hardly revolutionary in their conception. Many other writers, not all of them aspiring academic types like me, have written about one or more of them. What set my formulation apart, I suggested, were two things previous writers had not done. I showed how these different ways of “doing community” were connected and complemented each other. I also argued Americans had used them successfully to create a meaningful, but sometimes difficult to decode, way of life in one of the last places on Earth one would expect to see orderliness elevated to a civic art form: cities. My rather more positive take on urban life put me much closer to the margins of scholarship on this subject than the center of it.21 This was largely because writers far better known and accomplished than I am had long ago given up trying to figure out how all the different pieces of an urban way of life could possibly fit together congenially. They displayed little interest in describing how ordinary people might have contributed to such an accomplishment or the greater good an urban way of life did for all the city’s residents and almost everyone who encountered it. Authors favorably disposed to cities and the persons who live and work there told us how big and obvious pieces of cities – the way they were laid out and built up, about new ways to earn a living, be informed and entertained – injected some comprehensibility and a modicum of order to an ever larger, diverse, and socially mixed-up population.22 But these writers resisted the temptation to find much that was good or valuable in a city’s orderliness and diversity. They also did not give much if any credit for making it to persons and groups considered marginal players and usually passive recipients of what “culture” they were being fed by more respectable and accomplished groups. For these observers and authors, everyday people who live, work, or visit cities are not responsible for imagining how cities and a life-affirming urban way of life might be put together or making that happen. The unifying and common themes that made cities whole were thought to have been created by persons and groups bigger and better than the rest of us. These authors also offered little in the way of an explanation for why an urban way of life mattered apart from the monuments the mighty and wellborn left for the rest of us to admire and contemplate. Writers less positively disposed to cities and the kinds of people who fill them busied themselves instead and right up to today writing about all the ways a meaningful way of life could not possibly be created there.23 Or they have built careers writing about all the ways cities and suburbs systematically deny persons belonging to less well-off and less esteemed groups a fair share or fair shot at acquiring a fairer share of life’s necessities.24

24 Prologue

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these authors also see everyday people as being acted upon and hamstrung by conditions over which they have little or no control. No matter how well or poorly disposed writers are toward urban places, the people who live and work there, and how urban dwellers get along, most authors do not have a positive view of the subject at the center of this book: social unrest and collective violence. At best, such behavior is considered an unfortunate and unavoidable by-product of life in urban places filled with people from very different social classes, races, religions, and ethnic groups. At worst, unrest and violence are viewed as signs of a people incapable of making more of themselves, are a threat to the rest of us, and openly antagonistic to more peaceful ways of getting along. That is, unrest and violence are made by people who are less than civilized. By and large, my attempts to argue otherwise have fallen on deaf ears. For all these reasons, I suspect I have chosen a bad moment and vehicle for resurrecting key elements of my argument about the orderliness of modern urban life fashioned for and by an increasingly diverse population. For here I am writing about people publicly addressing and relating to each other in disturbing and sometimes destructive ways, but not especially deadly ways. And I argue that unrest and violence ultimately contribute to the creation of a more workable way of life by testing its limits and our ability to move past these limits together. How people pull it off and the value in the way they do it is best observed, I maintain, not in all the ways they get along but in the most dramatic moments when they don’t. Groups whose members view the world in markedly different and at times seemingly irreconcilable ways share values – some of them liberal and others more conservative – that are anything but irreconcilable and turn out to be surprisingly complementary. Ideas matter. And the way Americans have accommodated themselves to a world that requires a healthy mix of liberal and conservative ideas and ways of navigating one’s way through it has been a singular accomplishment. Their balancing act is apparent in all the important ways they get along and in the most important moments when they don’t. Somewhere in the first half of the book I will recall the words of two political scientists, Sam Sharp and Ed Fedder, who made sense of our unavoidable and always challenging relations with the former Soviet Union by declaring both sides were condemned to a dialogue. The dangerous and sometimes violent extremes to which that dialogue might take the rest of us alerted everyone to all the unfinished business these two countries had with each other. It is much the same for all the people who already were and would be Americans. We too have been condemned to a dialogue about how we should deal with each other and what kind of people we would turn out to be at the other end of our pushing, shoving, and reconciling. Social unrest and violence have been a part of the dance we do with each other to reach a sometimes rough or disagreeable agreement on such vital questions.

Prologue  25

What happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. are part of the legacy of how we Americans have worked on our differences in the past. Granted, the full story of the Capitol insurrection and attempted Presidential coup d’état in 2021 has yet to be written; and people who would rather not see the part they played in it aired publicly might yet succeed in keeping much of the story hidden for a long time. But we know enough of the events leading up to and following their occurrence to make some credible observations about how organized they were and how they fit into our long and complicated history with popular unrest and violence. The same is true of the other events featured in this book: the protests and rioting in Ferguson following the killing of yet another black male, 18-yearold Michael Brown; the unrest over the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville whose antagonists were well organized but fractious; and the mostly peaceful demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. My rendering and analysis of these events will be tied to what I noted at the beginning of this prologue is what we have come to understand about how unrest and violence fit into our civic lives and about similar episodes of unrest in American history. For those who hoped we had turned a corner in our use of violence to settle our endless arguments about race and other sensitive matters in America and for those of us who hoped to bring these lingering disputes to some final and fiery conclusion I have a simple message. It’s the same message Sharp and Fedder shared about relations between the United States and Soviet Union. Our situation is hopeless but not as deadly serious as we make it out to be because we are going to be stuck with each other for a long time whether we like it or not. We are going to be okay or as close to okay as we need to be to keep our dialogue going.25 I will spend the rest of the book explaining why. In doing so I realize I may be pulling on too thin a thread in speculating that contemporary unrest and violence tell us we are headed in a better direction, when so much we hear today is about people using violence for uncompromising political purposes. My reading of American history and the part unrest and violence have played in it may be plausible or turn out wrong. I am quite certain, however, that unruly behavior and violence will have a part in whatever we make of ourselves and keeping us together despite our differences, just as they have in the past. Historian Hugh Davis Graham put the matter before us quite clearly when he observed decades ago that the “historical coexistence of violence and institutional stability” was the central paradox built into the history of civil unrest in the United States.26 Reflecting upon this paradox, laying out more thoroughly how unrest and violence contribute to institutional stability, will be one of my principal challenges and goals in this book.

26 Prologue

My argument is built on two kinds of evidence historians and social scientists have looked at in the past: the incidence of unrest and violence and the characteristics of this behavior.27 How often people argue and fight in public, whether they are doing less of it or more than in the past is an indicator of how well or poorly people are getting along. It also is an indicator of how much they are willing to put up with each other’s nonsense and meanness. Paying attention to how people conduct themselves when they argue and fight in public, how enthusiastic or restrained they are in their confrontations, what and how much they break, and how many persons they injure or kill tell us about the respect and disregard different groups have for each other. I will argue that all kinds of Americans are showing they have more respect and less disregard for each other today than they did in the past, even if they cannot yet bring themselves to acknowledge it publicly or perhaps even recognize at this point. The way they show it is by engaging in less deadly and destructive forms of unrest and violence than they did in the past. I will point to how we do not fight as often and how our fights have become less deadly and destructive as the principal signs of our turn toward making more civil unrest today. Looking at how both the amount and kinds of unrest and violence have changed over time is the very least we need to do if we are to make better sense of the contribution they make to the towns and cities where unrest and violence happen. But we cannot stop there. Important as these signs are, they do not tell us why groups of people still find it necessary to deface public shrines and government buildings, loot and trash businesses, and deliver public beatings and kill each other when they do fight or what good it does. There surely are less deadly and destructive ways we could argue and fight, and maybe we are using more of them than we did in the past, though it sure doesn’t look that way for many of us whose job is to make sense of other peoples’ violence. The fact is people are often out of sorts with each other and quite able to find a pretext for picking a fight on many occasions. Most of the time, however, their uneasiness, upsettedness, and anger are not played out in public or played out violently when it is. Most of the time people do not fight out loud; they break very little, if anything, of what other people have; and they fall well short of hurting and killing as many people as they could. People work harder than it seems not to run up the body count when they take their private resentments public. However true this may be, it has not stopped us from searching for a compelling rationale, a clear and defensible explanation for the good that unrest and violence do for us. Absent such a rationale and explanation, we will not be able to untangle the reason why American unrest and violence contribute to institutional stability or how unrest and violence accomplish such an

Prologue  27

important but counterintuitive end. We want to understand what good could possibly come from bad behavior. We have the making of a response to such concerns and by extension for why people may be arguing and fighting in more restrained ways today, or at least less enthusiastically and destructively than they might have in the past. It has something to do with people becoming more “civilized” and our communities and larger society more “democratized” than they were in the past.28 No matter how one is inclined to define “civilized” or what it means when people say we live in a more “democratic” society, being less violent would be an important piece of the definitions. It may be their most important piece. If we have become more democratically inclined and treat each other in more civilized ways than we did in the past, however, it is not at all clear how we learned more democratic habits and became less disagreeable. Only slightly less mysterious are the reasons why so many of us still insist on ­behaving in less than civilized ways and are reluctant to share the burdens and benefits of democracy with people we may not like but can’t get rid of. And allow me to make it perfectly clear I am not talking only or even principally about all the people who have managed to move or slip into this country ­recently. I am talking about the Americans who have been here for more than a while and some of us would prefer not to deal with either. There is good and bad news in this for all of us. The bad news is until we answer such questions the paradoxical pairing of violence and institutional stability will remain a puzzle without a solution. The good news is the solution to this puzzle has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. We just didn’t figure it out until recently. Basically, the way people argue and fight in public complements all the ways they get along on all the days they are not arguing and fighting.29 The logic and values people reveal in the unrest and violence they make do as well. I argue in the book that the logic and values in unrest and violence are based on the same constellation of liberal and conservative values people draw upon when being civil and orderly. That is the principal reason why we can call upon them as readily and easily as we do. They are familiar to us and an important part of the most important ways we collaborate to make communities that work and make sense to us. The values invoked in disorderly behavior, even violently disorderly ­behavior, answer the same questions we effectively ask ourselves every time we talk and work together in public, even when we are less than tactful in what we say and anything but welcoming in our actions. Who has a rightful place in our community, and who should be excluded? Do we have to follow all the rules, or are there occasions when ignoring, bending, and breaking rules is allowed and perhaps even required? And, finally, are people accountable for what they say and do in public, or can they get away with saying or doing pretty much what they want no matter who is listening and watching?

28 Prologue

Most of our unrest in the past involved our attempts to answer the first question. More contemporary unrest and violence is dedicated to answering the third question. The kind of unrest and violence Americans use answer the second question. The way people answer these questions when they are upset or angry is different from the way people answer them when they are getting along well. But they are not so different that we cannot recognize them or tap into either or both when we need to affirm the rightness or wrongness of how we speak and treat each other in public. This is why some of the ways we show of how well we get along – parades, marches, public meetings and speeches, raucous celebrations, and the like – look very much like the behavior we use to make a show of being upset and put off by each other. The same behavior can be used to make a very different point about the kind of people we are and why that’s working for us or not. How often we call upon the same public displays to show how pleased or displeased we are with each other is the most obvious way we show how civilized and democratically minded a people we are on our way to becoming. My bottom line is this. We may not like civil unrest and violence; but we need them to show how well we are doing together. There is nothing new in making a show of being dragged kicking and screaming into a world we are ill-prepared to manage but unable to avoid. Newborn children do it all the time. Communities do too. What Americans have been up to recently is figuring out less deadly and destructive ways to acknowledge the hopelessness of their situation. But it is also their way of showing whatever happens probably won’t turn out as badly as they imagined because we are going to figure it out together, just as we have in the past. Notes 1 The New York Times, October 27, 2020, “Is the U.S. Already in a New Civil War?” Matthew Gault; The New York Times Magazine, November 4, 2020; The New York Times, May 1, 2021. “From the Past, a chilling Warning About the Extremists of the Present.” Neil MacFarquhar; “How Do You Know When ­ ­Society is About to Fall Apart?” Ben Ehrenreich. LaFrance, Adrienne, “The New Anarchy,” The Atlantic (April 2023): 22–50. 2 Erikson, Kai T., Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), pp. 130 and 155. 3 Lafree, Gary and Kriss Drass, “African American Collective Action and Crime, 1955– 1991.” Social Forces. Vol. 75 (3) (1997): 835–854. The odd juxtaposition of collective peace and quiet and individuals being more violent didn’t just fit mass murders. It also applied to crimes committed by black people. They also rose after 1970 even as collective violence by them, and other aggrieved groups, became less prevalent. 4 The New York Times, November 14, 2020. “Hate Crimes in U.S. Rose to Highest Level in More Than a Decade in 2019.” Tim Arango. Hate Crime statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Justice bear this out. Race and ethnic biases

Prologue  29

head the list of reasons why individual Americans assault and sometimes kill other people. Religious animosities, most of them antisemitic in nature, and strong antigay feelings round out the bias crime hit list. 5 Herman, Max, Fighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession and Urban Unrest in Twentieth Century America (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005). 6 Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 13, 2023. “Threats of strike heat up before UAW begins negotiations.” Tom Kisher. 7 Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), pp. 338–339. 8 See, for example, Maier, Pauline, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial radicals and the development of American opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: W,W. Norton & Company, 1992). 9 Tilly, Charles, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 10 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/nyregion/migrant-shelter-roosevelt-hotel-aoc. html; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/nyregion/migrant-delivery-unlicensedmoped.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/nyregion/migrant-protests-nyc. html; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/nyregion/migrants-nyc-politics.html? action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-ny-migrants&variant= show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc 11 Baldwin, James, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1985). 12 Monti, Daniel, The American City: A Social and Cultural History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Monti, Daniel, Engaging Strangers: Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism, and Public Order in Boston (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson ­University Press, 2013). 13 Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944). 14 Monti, Daniel, “‘A Momentary Brotherhood of Uncomfortable White Men, ­Trying to Figure Stuff Out’: Cultural Unity, Political Divisiveness, and the Black Lives Matter Protests,” in Matt Cement, ed., No Justice, No Peace? The Politics of Protest and Social Change (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2023), pp. 132–150. 15 Monti, Daniel, “Collective Violence and the American Dream,” in John Stone, Rutledge Dennis, Polly Rizova, and Xiaoshuo Hou, eds., The Wiley Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), pp. 471–486. 16 https://www.whsv.com/2021/01/07/charlottesville-law-experts-activists-compareviolence-at-capitol-to-unite-the-right-rally/; https://apnews.com/article/whitesupremacy-threats-capitol-riots-2d4ba4d1a3d55197489d773b3e0b0f32; https:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-charlottesville-led-to-the-capitol-attack/. 17 Other researchers, as we will see in Chapter 2, refer to these as “new social movements.” They distinguish them from an older kind of social movement that was more dedicated to making changes in the way economic and political resources were distributed. Another way people try to distinguish the two is by calling ­attention to the more “instrumental” character of the old-style social movement and the more “expressive” quality of the newer movements. There is merit to these distinctions. Research into the “new” social movements has paid a great deal of attention to the motivations of movement participants and what they got out of their involvement. In doing so, they play to the very kind of “identity” questions that are key to understanding more recent controversies over race and gender. Research and writing about “new” social movements also underplay or discount the political changes and policy reforms that “new social movement” participants try to make. I prefer to use “Us Too” social movements to describe movements that speak more to people’s social and cultural sensitivities than to their desire to change much if anything about the way important economic and

30 Prologue

political resources should be redistributed. In the next couple of chapters, I will begin to make a connection between newer and older kinds of social movements to unrest that raises questions over the recognition or “membership” of different groups in a community and their ability to shape a public dialogue and make other people more “accountable” for what they do and say in public once the former outsiders have been granted something closer to full recognition as members in the ­community or society. 18 Mennell, Stephen, Norbert Elias: The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 51–80. 19 https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/01/15/8-times-bidenobama-et-al-condemned-black-lives-matter-violence/4170932001/ 20 Monti, The American City; Monti, Engaging Strangers. 21 Borer, Michael, “The Location of Culture: The Urban Culturalist Perspective,” City & Community. Vol. 5 (2) (2006): 173–198. 22 Barth, Gunther, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-­ Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Rybczynski, Witold, City Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). These authors can trace their intellectual inspiration to scholars whose view of urban life and culture stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years to England and Europe. See: Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1961); Hall, Peter, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). For a more expansive treatment of these ideas see: Daniel Monti, The American City, pp. 1–23 but especially p. 19. 23 See for example, Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 44 (1) (July 1938): 1–24; Zukin, Sharon, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 24 Social science writing on matters involving racial, gender, and social class inequality is dominated by persons who chronicle all the ways discrimination, racism, sexism, and segregation remain the most crucial element in any story we tell about contemporary urban life. For some, the situation not only hasn’t improved but is growing worse. See for example, Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2021). 25 Ross, Marc, “‘Good-Enough’ Isn’t So Bad: Thinking About Success and Failure in Ethnic Conflict Management.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Vol. 6 (1) (2000): 27–47. 26 Graham, Hugh Davis and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 475. 27 Horowitz, Donald, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 467. 28 Mennell, The American Civilizing Process. Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), pp. 59–128. 29 Thompson, Customs in Common; Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in ­European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 83–118. Many other works by Tilly and his collaborators are cited in the early chapters of the book. Their good work made it possible for me to come to the summary points I highlighted in this prologue and made me look smarter than I probably am.

1 VIOLENCE AS A SUMPTUARY PRIVILEGE

Popular unrest and the use of extralegal violence are deeply woven into the fabric of American civic life. At different times in our history, some people, more than others, were able and allowed to use unrest and violence on behalf of their community’s interest. That popular and extralegal actions were taken in the name of a larger community may have been a thin cover for actions that also benefited the people using unrest and violence. However thin that cover may have been right then or in retrospect, it was an altogether necessary and convincing cover for people who found themselves and the larger community confronting extraordinary challenges and unexpected circumstances. It is a singular accomplishment and nuisance in American history that over the past 250 years, the privilege and obligation to make occasional use of unrest and violence has been grudgingly shared or claimed by people whose backgrounds were less than estimable and contributions to our way of life not yet locked in. This handover didn’t happen overnight. Indeed, important pieces of the way Americans use unrest and violence today trace their way back to customs and traditions in grievance making and public petitioning that were borrowed mostly not only from England but also from other ­European countries.1 These countries provided the United States with its first citizens and an understanding of how people could use popular unrest and violence for something done on behalf of their community’s good. Limited in its ambitions, supported by local leaders, and culturally chauvinistic, popular unrest and violence in 18th-century America complemented more peaceful ways of conducting the community’s business at a time when there was a unity of purpose shared across its several social classes.2 U ­ nrest and violence were used to establish the social and moral boundary lines DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-2

32  Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege

within which a local community might thrive and through which its people might handle unexpected problems, including managing outsiders and newcomers who had yet to prove themselves. The connection between popular unrest and community wellbeing became difficult to sustain after Americans secured their independence from England and the number and variety of immigrants to the United States increased ­dramatically in the early 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, local leaders gradually backed away from participating in popular unrest and supporting their fellow townsmen who continued to use it to assert themselves in community affairs. The handoff became messier and for a time much nastier as the privilege to use unrest and violence for the common good was passed from the hands of uncommonly good people to people who were not thought to be up to the task of using them responsibly. It is one of the premises of this book that unrest and public violence today, frightening and destructive as they often are, aren’t as threatening as they appear or come close to accomplishing what the people using them said they wanted to do. Odd as I know this sounds, Americans who use popular unrest and v­ iolence today are using their disruptive acts in ways more reminiscent of how they were used in early America. The practice of civil unrest is becoming more civil than it has been in quite a long while.3 Participants involved in public unrest and violence today are acting out in more restrained and less deadly ways than they did not too many decades ago. Americans are revisiting and reinventing older ways to be disorderly that fit a time when people had a much clearer view of how popular unrest could serve a greater public good. Popular unrest in early America was, as I noted, more elite inspired. It was easier to imagine how unrest served a greater and more common good because uncommonly good people in the community were behind it or supported what other people were hoping to accomplish with it. Popular unrest and violence are not so elite inspired today. People with less property and standing in the community are more in control of the timing and use of popular unrest and violence than at any previous time in our history. The less reputable and ­accomplished people who use unrest and violence today figure into an explanation for why it is harder to imagine that something so upsetting and sometimes destructive could serve the greater common good. People of property and standing in the community rarely feel compelled these days to take to the streets and register their displeasure with the way things are going. That does not mean they have forgotten how to. When the occasion calls for it, they can find it impossible to keep their hands clean and themselves a safe distance from a messy and potentially dangerous public fight. The ill-famed “Brooks Brothers riot” in Miami at the end of the 2000 presidential election is a good example of a moment when they didn’t think they could stand off to the side and keep their hands clean.4 Hundreds of

Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege  33

people showed up, some of them wearing suits and masks of George Bush. They made a considerable show of their displeasure with the recount of Florida’s votes, which wasn’t going their way. Many of the mask wearers, it turned out, were either congressional staff members or people who would soon take a position in the Bush administration. They did not want to be photographed or be called out for their involvement in such a rowdy adventure. They were subsequently “unmasked” in press accounts of the event. Roger Stone, a long-time supporter of Donald Trump with a record of successful “dirty tricks” going back to the Nixon administration, was one of the “Brooks Brothers” riot’s principal architects. His engagement then and in the ill-fated January 6 insurrection may be shocking to us. However, it has long and strong roots in more local unrest that notable community members supported and sometimes participated in well before the American Revolution and right through to the end of the 19th century. Elite support and participation in certain kinds of unrest was ceded to people with less property and social standing some time ago. Apart from saying little and doing less to stop an occasional insurrection in support of a presidential coup d’état, these days more notable and propertied people don’t see the need for dirtying their hands or reputations in a nasty and destructive public brawl. They let other people do it. In this and so many other ways, the duties and obligations of citizenship have been shared or “democratized” more broadly than they were 250 years ago. They are practiced now by people who well into the 19th century would not have been considered particularly good candidates for “democratization.” For black Americans, questions about their fitness would last well into the 20th century. Today, American people generally and black Americans in particular live in a much more open world than the one their ancestors made a couple of centuries ago and white people were still trying to keep from ­slipping out of their hands as late as the 1950s and 1960s. We live in a much more accommodating world today. How individuals present themselves in public – how they dress, what they say, and how they act in front of certain people – is guided more by personal preferences and custom than it was centuries ago. Back then, standards for appropriate dress, speech, and behavior were enforced not just by custom but by the prohibitive power of laws. So-called “sumptuary” laws put a public face to the way power, prestige, and wealth were distributed in a community. Persons or groups with less of these precious social commodities were not allowed to wear certain fabrics and colors or to adorn their garments with buttons and baubles deemed appropriate only for persons with more money and status. Individuals of a lower social class or from a less esteemed group could be punished not just for wearing garments inappropriate for their rank but for speaking out of turn or behaving in ways not befitting their lower social standing.

34  Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege

It was no less true for how groups of people were allowed and at times actively encouraged or discouraged to misbehave in public. The most obvious and best chronicled sumptuary restrictions on the use of popular unrest and violence in the United States were imposed on black people and Native Americans. Visible and collective resistance did emerge from time to time in the antebellum South in the form of slave “uprisings” which never ended well for the slaves. More common were “insurrectionary slave panics” that inspired slave owners and townspeople to crack down even harder than usual.5 These events were more likely to occur in the runup to events such as Christmas when white persons’ guard might be down. The reactions to both real and imagined unrest were reminders to blacks and whites of what might happen if the carefully choreographed steps in their dance of compliance and dread were violated. Individual displays of resistance by blacks to the limitations placed on what they could say and how they could act were far more common. As Allen Grimshaw put it, slaves showed their resistance “by continual destruction of property; the burning of barns and hayricks, the failure to cinch the master’s saddle up tight enough to prevent his being thrown; by the studied insult which is not an insult. In a large number of ways short of physical violence, the Negro slave protested his subservient status.”6 The same kinds of resistance by common folk were commonplace in ­European towns and villages centuries ago. Arson and other forms of property damage remained an important part of urban unrest in European cities. They traveled with immigrants who came to the United States even before there was a United States. Interpersonal acts of racial violence by both whites and blacks would ­diminish with time. By the end of the 20th century, it had become customary for black people to kill other black people, for white people to kill other whites, and for comparatively few murders to cross racial lines. The most visible reminder of the kinds of interpersonal racial violence that any white person once felt free to carry out came to be reserved for police officers. Sumptuary laws and practices affecting black people in the more mundane ways that were supposed to keep them from showing off or showing up white people have fallen out of use. Most anyone today can wear what they want or can get away with wearing. The same is true for how black and white people are allowed to speak and act in public. It has long been the case that important people could dress down or get away with acting in ways they and others would consider beneath their ­station. There are still more places well-to-do and socially respectable people can go where you or I would not be welcomed.7 But there are plenty of places someone like me can go to shop and show off that allow me for a time to act or speak in more uppity ways than my wealth or power would typically allow.

Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege  35

In short, there has been a notable leveling off in the way different kinds of Americans, including black Americans, are able to live, work, and present themselves in public today. Today, more persons who are less than privileged, wealthy, and not close to white can live and work just like white people do. Today, many less important people can also practice politics on a more equal footing with their social betters. That includes using unrest and violence to get what they want or protest what they believe has been denied to them. The “everyday” or “lay” people Langston Hughes called “low-down” had learned to “act up” in more ways than they or pretty much anyone else thought possible.8 Curtailing Violence

Violence is one of those sumptuary privileges whose use has been sharply ­curtailed for many of us. People aren’t supposed to abuse and kill some persons (and animals) like we once did.9 Lynching was outlawed and other ­extralegal attacks on black people have gradually diminished. Governments have worked hard to restrict the rights of persons to assemble in larger public settings, assault and kill each other, destroy property, and behave in a less than orderly way. These public safety laws have not stopped people from harming or k ­ illing each other, of course. But they have drawn much thicker protective lines around the would-be objects of our personal and collective disaffection. Black people rarely killed white people in the past and they still don’t. At the same time, white people no longer get away with killing black people as readily as they once did. Laws proscribing the use of violence by crowds or people representing a particular group or organization have also become more common over the past 300 years. But it is not clear how much difference these laws made, since their enforcement has been uneven at best and often ignored when it came to applying them to persons belonging to groups that were socially favored. What is clearer is that the customary uses of unrest have changed in the last century and especially in the last half-century. More people and groups than ever are acting out. Legally proscribed or not, however, the people ­acting out are doing so in more restrained and less violent ways than they did not so long ago. My selection of what happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection was purposeful. There were other moments of unrest in the 21st century I could have studied. Many dealt with racial controversies. I chose these four events because they had violence associated with them. Most unrest in America – all the rallies, demonstrations, protests, and marches people use to make a point they think more Americans should be

36  Violence As a Sumptuary Privilege

taking seriously – does not involve violence. Not enough is made of this important historical fact. I will be making more of it in this book than writers with scholarly pretensions typically make. I also chose these events because they garnered a great deal of national and even international attention. People know about them. Retelling what happened in each case is not necessary and wouldn’t provide much new information about them in any case. What I offer here is not so much a history or firsthand account of these events as a series of reflections about how they fit in the history of social unrest and violence in the United States. Undertaking this kind of analysis was difficult enough the last time ­America went through a tough period of unrest and violence in the 1960s and 1970s. The storylines people produced back then satisfied no one. The best we could do was to agree to disagree about why there had been so much domestic discord and what it had accomplished. Americans went on with their lives, still unsettled and less than confident about how we would face the future together. It is not going to be any easier this time around. My difficulty in making sense of all this will stem from the fact that the trouble Americans are making for each other today is different from the trouble we made during the civil rights movement and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. For one thing, there is just more of it. We are carrying on more arguments loudly in public these days about who we are as a people or about the kind of people Americans should become. Americans also have become even more adept at using unrest and social movements to continue their arguments. Some of the arguments and fights Americans have with each other look and sound familiar. Some are brand new. But there are just so many of them it is hard to keep track of everything being held up as the next big thing ­Americans should be worried about or taking to the streets to complain about. The noise is bewildering, the resolution of these new arguments just as elusive as our older more familiar sounding fights were. Missed in all the distracting noise is another crucial feature of unrest in America today. As I already noted, much less of it today involves violence where, depending on the size of the crowds, many people are seriously injured or killed.10 To be sure, people are still injured and killed, just in numbers much smaller than they would have been in the past. The reduction in violence and rise of more organized forms of public confrontation are related. Inspired as much by challenges more radical activists faced for flirting too much with violence as by conventional groups trying to keep themselves relevant and their organizations intact, our unrest calmed down even as the number and variety of movements to change the world grew dramatically. People moderated their tactics and tailored their agendas to what was achievable.11 Their supporters went on with their lives.

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Some number of them found ways to move around and climb over the barriers left in their path. These lessons were not lost on people who thought their group and ideas deserved more attention. But that message didn’t reach all the groups whose members disliked being ignored or suddenly felt marginalized in their own community. It fell especially hard on white people who openly fretted about their relevance and feared they would be unable to outlast, outmaneuver, outrun, and outvote the groups chipping away at privileges they used to think were exclusively theirs.12 Whatever the reasons for the marked decline in violence and recent rise of so many “Us Too” movements, it made the quick succession of violent moments in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection historically noteworthy. These were markedly different kinds of unrest and violence; and there was an “Us Too” quality to these public fights that was reflected in the number and variety of organizations that were involved on both sides of the conflicts playing out before us. It remains to be seen whether these events foreshadow a return to more violent times or were the cultural equivalent of a one-off. No matter which turns our fights take, it certainly doesn’t look like many Americans are any more comfortable with each other today than we were a half-century ago. Indeed, whatever fantasy Americans might have entertained along those lines was shattered by what happened during the presidential administration of Donald Trump and his attempt to remain in power after losing his bid to be re-elected in 2020. More of us than ever have taken to the streets to make ourselves heard. To be sure, people are as interested as always in achieving their best version of the American Dream. But there can be little doubt our long civic nap is over.13 The possibility we are waking up to a serious civic nightmare should escape no one at this point, however. Trying to figure out how long such a nightmare could last and what will come after will be hard. One place to start might be to liken the effects of unrest and violence to what happens when someone’s high fever finally breaks. It is a sign we survived our illness. We did not die. We are going to be okay. Except the problems that make a community agitated enough to incite a portion of its population to commit provocative and dangerous public acts are not gone. They are part of a chronic condition. Protests, strikes, r­ aucous public gatherings, and rioting do not inoculate a community or help it ­develop an immunity to whatever conditions laid it low. We need a better and more compelling answer, one to help cool the principal concern of people who live in places where unrest and violence have occurred. What do we do now? If unrest and violence are a kind of wake-up call, people have every right to wonder how they are supposed to answer it and when they might be shaken

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again from the too comfortable nap they were taking. For them, the question is not whether unrest and violence will return but when. The hard truth is we have yet to figure out with anything approaching scientific certainty what sets people off or why they insist on taking each other’s measure by using violence in public. Those of us who keep track of such matters can take no comfort in knowing no one has been able to predict any better than we can when unrest or violence might occur. Figuring out how we are somehow better off for having gone through such an unpredictable, destructive, and deadly experience together is an even bigger challenge. We need to remind each other this is hardly the first time in our history people have acted violently and destructively. We may be exaggerating how bad the unrest and violence are this time or simply forgetting how we made it through all the noise and mess the last time many of our fellow citizens acted out this way. Part of the problem, of course, is we have short memories and probably are too easily distracted. The answer to why unrest and violence surprise us could be no more complex than we occasionally need to be smacked in the head, so we pay attention to problems we forgot to take care of the last time people became angry enough to act out. I suspect there is more than a little truth in this. But it isn’t close to the whole answer. Another part of an explanation about what is going on with us may be that we are more sensitive about violence today because there is less of it than in the past. The violence we are experiencing may feel much worse because we have grown accustomed to living in a society that is just as agitated and maybe more agitated than ever but also more peaceful than it had been for a while. If this turns out to be the case, it would be an interesting take on a situation in the United States and Western Europe that looks appreciably worse, more threatening, and dangerous today than it has in a while. My guess is we are unlikely to settle this argument anytime soon. But it is still an argument worth taking seriously, which is how I will be treating it in this book. It also is possible, of course, that the vacuum left by the retreat of violence is being filled by all the less-than-violent fights being waged today. These new challenges may appear just as threatening to the integrity of our c­ ommunities as the more violent ones were, even though the new fights are more rhetorical and personal than immediately and visibly threatening to much larger groups of people. These days, the mere possibility of rhetorical challenges and threats could turn uglier and violent may be enough to put us on edge. People know sometime soon they will wake up to yet another hit coming their way. By some estimates, the threat of unrest and violence may be just as likely to come from Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists on the left as white nationalist organizations such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on the right.14 For most Americans these days, however, the bigger threat is coming from

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people and groups with rightwing sympathies.15 This belief is widely shared despite the fact that persons whose politics lean to the left rather than the right created much more unrest in the four years when Donald Trump was President than persons with right-wing sympathies made during Barack Obama’s tenure as President or today during the first presidential term of Joe Biden.16 Unrest and Violence as Cultural Early Warning Systems

It might be good to have a kinder or gentler early warning system to alert us to people and questions requiring our attention. As a matter of historical fact, however, kinder and gentler don’t get the job done. Popular unrest and collective violence do. They are the best early warning system ever created. For that reason, if no other, they are not going away. How destructive, deadly, and well organized that violence may be is another matter and a key question addressed in this book. If the number and variety of better organized challenges communities face today are not a serviceable substitute for violence, they still tell us something important about the way we have come to think about public order, who is eligible to challenge it, and how responsive we expect people to be to every new question being raised. “Democratization” is the word we use to describe how such matters have come to be considered by a much larger and decidedly less privileged collection of persons. As a community or society “democratizes,” more and different kinds of people step onto a public stage they had previously been discouraged from taking. Unrest and violence are among the more eye-catching steps people take to make their way to someplace closer to the middle of the stage. Their arrival makes a dramatic entrance into a compelling piece of public theater. A big part of any effective performance, of course, is not knowing what is going to happen next, even if we have some idea about what brought us to this point in the story. With apologies to Wiliam Shakespeare who already knew how the story he wrote was going to turn out, we need the surprises unrest brings to our attention, so we can make better sense of the story we are writing about ourselves and all the people clamoring for the right to help compose it. Violent public unrest is the biggest surprise and unscripted moment any community can give itself. No matter what else is going on with the amount of unrest we are experiencing or how much its violent character may be changing, I think the unrest and violence we see today are introducing us to a brand-new chapter in our national story. Americans are not close to finished surprising each other. Academic storytellers and social theorists, which is what I am, are in the business of deciphering such puzzles and making sense of them. That professional observers and storytellers do not see plot twists and the moral to a provocative and dramatic storyline like the one involving civil unrest and

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violence ought to be as unnerving to us as it should be concerning to anyone waiting for us to figure things out. The prologue to the piece of America’s history being reassessed here was written early on by a French nobleman who came to a young country to study prisons and left with a much bigger story to tell. Alexis de Tocqueville could not help but notice the substantial presence America’s white, black, and aboriginal races had in the country and each other’s lives. That they managed to “mingle” was obvious. Less obvious was the possibility members of the black and aboriginal races would be able to claim full membership in American society as part of their birthright. Much stood in their way. Tocqueville took note of the “codes of behavior” whites enforced that left black and aboriginal people nominal members of the community in which they lived but lacking any realistic chance of becoming more than marginal players in it. Compared to most white persons, they were at the bottom or much closer to the bottom than the top of their community’s social, ­economic, and political pyramid. These codes, Tocqueville observed further, were “deeply permeated by the consciousness of hierarchy.”17 It was a consciousness English settlers brought with them and would infuse into whatever they would make of America. Tocqueville was certain the “immense distance placed between them by prejudice and the laws” would keep black and aboriginal people separated, distinctive, and socially beneath whites.18 Two hundred years later, America’s other races are not as separated, distinctive, and socially beneath whites as they used to be. Tocqueville might be surprised to see how much the codes he saw being practiced have fallen into disuse and the consciousness of hierarchy supporting them has eroded. Peoples’ color has become less relevant as a marker of their social acceptability. Other badges of behavior and displays of privilege once used exclusively or almost exclusively by white people to keep other races in their place have become more widely shared and practiced by persons who are not white. America’s first settlers may have been slow to recognize and formally ­acknowledge the success newcomers had in copying them and insinuating themselves into public life. However, the sheer weight of all the ways newcomers and outsiders managed to mimic and replicate the habits and values of people who had arrived earlier, to celebrate their customs and embrace the same rituals, made their claims to membership difficult to resist. The ­behavioral codes and peoples’ outward displays of compliance with them were hard to undo but not as hard to chip away at as people living on both sides of the codes imagined. It is clearer today the codes used to keep different races apart were far from foolproof. But the flaws built into these codes, the inconsistent manner they were applied, the counterintuitive and at times hypocritical consequences of

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their application, and the pretense behind their claims of social distinctiveness and superiority already were apparent in Tocqueville’s time. He chronicled examples of white peoples’ inconsistencies and hypocrisy. His discussion of white slave owners bedding their female slaves was perhaps his strongest statement on this matter. What Tocqueville missed, however, was how aware black people and other less well-off persons were of the flaws, inconsistencies, hypocrisy, and pretentious exaggerations of entitlement practiced by persons who were more welloff and socially esteemed. Black and other less privileged groups were already finding ways to work around the codes and show their contempt for these codes in understated but nonetheless effective ways. The point is Tocqueville never considered how people who were less esteemed and well-off might turn the devices used to enforce those codes against the codes – the persons they benefitted, their property, and symbols of their authority – that kept them socially marginal and less than commendable. I will not discuss in any greater detail the codes to which Tocqueville and others have identified as keeping lesser members of American towns and c­ ities in their assigned and “rightful” place. I am much more interested in all the ways lesser members of a community found to challenge and undermine these codes, show how irrelevant they had become, and push them into disuse. America’s “colored” races did not do this on their own, however. They had help. Within decades of Tocqueville’s visit in 1831, the United States, not yet a century old, began receiving large numbers of immigrants from a succession of Southern and Eastern European countries. These people who were considered neither white nor black, but members of what David Roediger called “inbetween races” made white Americans enforce behavioral codes designed for a simpler color scheme.19 America’s increasingly complicated combination of different races and off-white shades helped to undermine the utility of the behavioral codes that were to have kept “colored people” in their place. The lines between these different groups became increasingly blurred and difficult to justify. Ideas about how people from different races, ancestries, and religions should speak to each other in public and act around each other in public are still informed by the consciousness of hierarchy Tocqueville wrote about ­almost 200 years ago. Despite the presence of so many different colors and the diminished strength of the codes and consciousness of hierarchy supporting them, race remains one of the principal lenses through which Americans make sense of who they are and how “together” or united they can be. The strength of the codes has diminished as much as it has because people somewhere between white and “colored” figured out how to work around and live with the codes that were also supposed to keep them in less-than-privileged places without permanently breaking the communities in which they all lived.

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The successes newcomers and outsiders have enjoyed are real. America’s only indigenous people and the descendants of the only people brought here entirely against their will also found they could challenge these codes and better ways to fit in American society than the places first assigned them by whites. Making unrest and violence were crucial parts of the behavioral repertoires used by established groups to keep newcomers and outsiders in their place and eventually by some of the newcomers and outsiders to challenge the codes used to keep them in unenviable places. The more willing outsiders and newcomers were to use provocative actions to make such challenges and a safer place for themselves, the more violence became a sumptuary privilege better established groups tried to deny them. Notwithstanding the successes newcomers and outsiders had in becoming more like other people in the community where they lived, their ascension into the ranks of fully vetted and commendable Americans was still ­challenged and rarely made easy. We still see flashes of resistance to their petitions and protests and sometimes more than flashes showing that not all of us are on board with their achievements and the changes they went through that made their accomplishments possible. On these occasions, we catch glimpses and backward glances at the way our lives were kept apart and the piece that violence played in keeping it that way. We are in the middle of one of those “other occasions” right now. Forbearance and tolerance for people who are not like us are in short supply these days. Part of our “new normal” consists of harsh political talk and stiletto-like tweets by Americans sympathetic to racist, antisemitic, antiimmigrant screeds, and anti-anybody-who-isn’t-white appeals. The newest newcomers have been likened to poisonous snakes and vermin, subjected to threats to expel young adults to countries they do not know, and separating children from parents who were trying to protect them by bringing them to what had been the best country on the planet … until they showed up. The monstrous races Pliny the Elder wrote about almost 2000 years ago and medieval cartographers painted along the edges of maps of the known world made their way into our world some time ago.20 In America, they were known initially by the unattractive slurs and names attached to their countries of origin and religions. However different these people may have been on the outside, they proved more persistent, stubbornly resilient, and better at fitting in among us than we imagined. The names they were called are rarely spoken in public anymore. And when these names are used today, it is mostly as the punch line to a bad joke that we are all in on. These changes did not happen quickly and the way things changed was not pretty much of the time. The cumulative effect of all the hard and inglorious work that made other people more like the rest of us is plain enough, however. We learned to accommodate each other more and almost always better than expected. Over time, they became part of us, not exactly like

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everyone else but close enough, so it became a lot harder to see any difference that really mattered when it came to being together in public. Learning to Be Alike and Different

One of the important messages of this book is that getting “close enough” counts for a lot and is accomplished in ways that escape our attention much of the time. Generations of newcomers and outsiders have mastered the art of becoming more like and closer to the rest of us. It was a hard-earned ­lesson, often imperfectly executed, the first English colonists taught themselves on the way to becoming Americans.21 It would be a lesson they grudgingly shared with the non-English immigrants who came later. The violence visited upon newcomers and outsiders and the violence these people eventually learned to use on their own behalf were very much part of the lesson plan. Working on all the ways different kinds of people could be more alike and less different was a big part of what kept all of us together and enabled us to become an American people and a country instead of a confederation of independent states.22 The way we play out our alikeness and differences is no less serious today. How well people manage their disagreements and learn they can be alike and different at the same time is hard work. It can enrich a community or diminish its integrity and long-term effectiveness. Failing to find an agreeable balance between disagreeing and staying together is something that also can threaten to drive people apart. At a national level, it is the stuff of which civil wars and revolutions are made. At a local level, it is where demonstrations, protests, boycotts, brawls, strikes, marches, riots, arson, looting, loud public denunciations, and crude public punishments for outsiders and newcomers come from. This book is about all the less-than-revolutionary ways people in this country have tried and are still learning how to strike a more agreeable balance between being disagreeable and staying together. At the end of the 20th century and first two decades of the 21st century, we were reminded of how unwilling some of us still are to accepting newcomers and how difficult it is to strike a good balance between being alike and different when a brand-new collection of immigrants began arriving in the United States and Western Europe. In both cases, the immigrants came in unprecedented numbers and from countries with cultures quite different from the one practiced by the people who were asked to take them in. I do not know what names newly arrived people in Western Europe are called today. In the United States, we know them as a single, undifferentiated mass of newcomers indiscriminately lumped together as the “other.” We know enough about how well the United States and other Western countries are incorporating these other people, however, to say the process in different places is as uneven in its accomplishments as it is in the manner of its

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execution.23 In the United States, newcomers are learning important lessons about how to fit in despite efforts to discourage them from showing up or sticking around. But there is nothing new about any of that. What is newer is the uncelebrated irony some of us whose ancestors used to make by God Americans shiver, shake, and resentful have shown in shivering, shaking, and being resentful of these “other” people today. The historian Richard Hofstadter gave a name to the resentment aimed at the newest newcomers. He said all the pushing being done against them is an expression of a longstanding “paranoid” strain in American politics. The fears people express, he argued, are conjured up by “angry minds” intent on belittling these people and keeping them as far away as possible from those of us who claim a birthright as Americans. Arguments raised against newly arrived people include the idea they do not deserve to be here or to become part of us. They diminish and dilute us. They contribute nothing to our way of life. The ones we could not keep out need to go back to from wherever it is they came. To make that point clear, our national government tried stealing the newcomers’ children for a while and waited to see if their parents took the hint. They didn’t. Such disrespectful notions and hateful acts are sharp sticks to the eyes of men and women who can be forgiven for thinking they have seen this awful movie before. The difference today is we are living the sequel to that bad movie. We own it. All the nasty words and deeds put into the storyline this time around belong to us. It does not matter that we have seen all this before. If anything, this makes it worse. It is not all bad news, of course. Many Americans today speak better of people who are different from us and treat them with more regard than newcomers would have experienced in the past. The defamation of people who are different is still met with cheers and nodding heads by some Americans to be sure but by no means all Americans. More of us than ever, I think, view such words and actions with a mix of embarrassment, revulsion, and public condemnation. We have tried to make our wish to move past such words and actions clear by making laws proscribing spite-filled behavior and hateful speech. Some of what we used to say and do to each other simply cannot be said or done anymore, at least not in public anyway without being rebuked or shunned. Important as such cultural and legal changes are, they do not appear to have discouraged some Americans from committing “hate crimes” against persons of a different color, ancestry, or religion. Indeed, these crimes have increased in recent years.24 What has not increased, Donald Horowitz has argued, are attacks conducted not by individuals but by groups of likeminded Americans who object to the presence of the newest people trying to find a safe place to settle in our country. The other fights we do not see any longer are the ones where groups

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of people from different religions, nationalities, and races attack each other. Violence between groups used to be a common feature in American towns and cities.25 It is not anymore. Whatever Americans have done to discourage groups of people from different races, ethnicities, and religions from insulting and assaulting each other in public may have worked out differently than people expected. Individuals are still murdering each other in numbers that are shocking. The number of mass murders committed by individual Americans has only grown in recent years, made easier by the ready availability of military-grade automatic ­rifles.26 Black-on-black homicides also have increased. A possible connection may exist between a reduction in racial unrest and the increased willingness of minority persons to kill each other.27 As the number of minority citizens killed by police officers decreased – a reaction perhaps to Black Lives Matter protests – black persons may have become emboldened and willing to kill each other. In what would only be considered a bitterly ironic turn, black people might have become less restrained as the police were becoming more restrained. No matter what is going on here, people from different races, nationalities, and religions have learned the same cultural lesson about how they should argue and fight in public. No matter how angry or feeling put upon they may be as individuals, people have learned to take their disagreements and challenges down a less deadly and destructive path when they act collectively. Groups of upset or angry people have come to exercise greater restraint than their individual members. This is a big and important idea. Its relevance in the present book is explored in the next chapter. There I show how people who have tried to make sense of popular unrest and violence have long believed the opposite was true. Individuals, perhaps even those with a big racial, ethnic, or religious chip on their shoulders, were supposed to be more rational and restrained. Groups of upset persons who take their collective anger out on public officials, commercial leaders, and people whose race, ancestral background, or religion are different from their own were supposed to be much less restrained and mindful of what they were doing. The persistence and virulence of individual hate crimes is hard to reconcile with the long-term decline in murders and acts of collective violence Steven Pinker and others have noted.28 It may be that hate crimes are a special case of violence, a holdover from an earlier time when many more of us thought it was alright to assault and kill people who were different from us. Whatever the reason for the recent uptick in hate crimes, it makes the marked decline in collective acts of violence even more noteworthy. It suggests that our ideas about where collective unrest and violence come from and how people have made sense of these acts may well be wrong and not by just a little.

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If this is so, we could be just as wrong in our view that nothing worthwhile comes from popular unrest and collective violence and the rampant incivility they feed upon that is so present in our public lives today.29 Upon closer inspection or looking at such acts differently than we have in the past, violent unrest may reveal more beneath the surface than the angry faces, coarse noises, and ranting, commotion and mess people make in public and leave someone else to clean up afterward. Unrest and violence may serve a greater good we simply had not figured out until now. I have come to believe that breaking the back of the codes that kept people apart and undermining the consciousness of hierarchy informing these codes is that greater good. Concluding Thoughts on the Science and Politics of Collective Violence

I do not expect the argument I make here will be greeted enthusiastically by most readers and would be even less enthusiastically by people who don’t read. People with a more liberal or “radically” left-of-center view of the world are unlikely to endorse much less embrace my conservative thesis that unrest and violence do not make the world appreciably better. Social and political unrest today is not going to make anyone rush to embrace the progressive changes some people believe need to be made. The conservative legacy of earlier fights and accommodations is still evident in today’s social and political squabbles. Americans with big chips on their left shoulder should not turn to unrest and violence thinking that life will become more agreeable for persons who have been treated disagreeably for a long time. The picture isn’t any happier for Americans with all their grudges piled on their right shoulder. Using unrest and violence to advance ideas they f­avor isn’t going to take us back to a time when only white people called the shots. Many white persons may never get over the feeling they have been discounted and disregarded. But they can take great comfort knowing they are irreplaceable. All the better parts of who they are and what they have accomplished will have been passed on to the newcomers they fear and all the white people who will still be here long after they are gone. If readers think I am making a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of argument in this book, they would be right. That is exactly the kind of argument it is. Street disturbances intended to achieve progressive ends reveal more conservative impulses when you scratch beneath their surface. Whether you like that picture, the moral of the story about violence and race I tell is nonetheless important and powerful. By the end of the book, if not the beginning, I think readers will agree that wherever it is we are making and taking history, it does not appear we are in much of a hurry to get there.

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We will see there was value to moving slowly and taking the cultural equivalent of baby steps when it came to addressing racial problems. The violence people used along the way reflects more tentativeness than we recognized and was not as permanently unsettling as we feared it might be when it happened. It was entirely consistent with the half-steps we have taken along the way to address our racial, ethnic, and religious differences. People on both sides of the public face-offs taking place on the streets of American cities today are equally invested in making public unrest less deadly and damaging. Tamping down violence and engaging in more temperate kinds of unrest are part of this slow-to-develop progressive storyline. This is a big and important piece of what Steven Pinker says is a worldwide downturn in “cruel practices” that has taken more than a century to unfold.30 His broad survey of violence covers everything from murder to revolutions and warfare. Collective outbursts and public fights of the sort described here get only limited attention in his 800-page book.31 If he is right, and I think he is at least as far as the kind of violence described here is concerned, then rioting, mobbing, civic rebellions, popular unrest, or whatever one chooses to call it should be retreating along with all these other “cruel practices.” Pinker’s most important source for his claim about reductions in civil ­unrest was the work of Donald Horowitz whose in-depth study of “deadly ethnic rioting” provides me with a good jumping-off spot for the argument I present here about racial violence. The progressive story both Horowitz and Pinker tell is based on what Pinker, Stephen Mennell, and their intellectual godfather Norbert Elias first identified as a “civilizing process” in Western societies that has helped us move away from violence as a more routine occurrence. Both Pinker and Horowitz draw our attention to among other things a softening of bad feelings that people apparently experienced, better self-control and empathy for their opponents, and greater attention paid to the rights of people whose presence might have been only barely tolerated in the past.32 What makes bad feelings soften, self-control and empathy grow, and attention to other people’s rights increase is much less clear. As an educator, I should find appeals to reason, universal education, and the “debunking of ignorance and superstition” congenial explanations for the turn away from violence.33 Alas, replacing collective outrage and revulsion with something else less violent, to my thinking, comes from more than individual tormentors having kinder thoughts about weaker and vulnerable people like women, children, and the “other.” What is required to make people turn from violence is not to be found in sharing more wealth with people who certainly could live a great deal better if they had more money. It is found in the discipline and self-restraint human beings in Western societies had to learn so they could acquire more money and spend it wisely, just as Pinker, Mennell, and others have argued.

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The answer is not economic or even political, at least not in a way that is mandated by courts or legislated by state or federal governments. It is social and more broadly cultural in nature. It builds on changes in customs, values, our shared understanding of how accountable different groups or social classes are to each other and are expected to behave when they are in public. People become actively engaged in associations and networks of organizations working to enforce the idea that no matter how poorly their constituents feel about the people they had been tormenting, violence is no longer legitimate and will be discouraged.34 Their governments also can discourage groups from taking up bricks, sticks, bottles, and arms by showing resolve rather than by intimidating citizens or provoking them with arbitrary actions.35 But expressions of resolve and acts that discourage people from using violence have less to do with the way governments are arranged than how they have learned to act when dealing with their disgruntled or outraged constituents. To their credit, neither Horowitz nor Pinker think that there is much to arguments pointing to economic prosperity or decline, inequality, or rapid demographic change as the principal causes of intergroup conflict and violence.36 If there were, there would not have been rioting in many U.S. cities in the 1960s and early 1970s when income inequality was at its lowest point in a century. Instead, rioting should have occurred any time after the 1970s when income inequality began its 30-year rise.37 Intergroup conflict and violence cannot be understood principally or best as a direct consequence of the way that a society’s economy and politics are arranged. How a community’s economy and polity are set up helps to set the stage for the kinds of conflicts different groups or classes of people may have. But their contribution to when and how conflicts break into violent public fights is at best indirect. They do not help us identify which places are going to experience violence and which ones are not or when violence may erupt. That is because the way different communities have arranged their economies and polities are not all that different. The nature and timing of civic unrest are determined more by custom and the ways different groups have arranged their social ties to each other. If we have come to use less threatening language when we speak loudly about each other and act more circumspectly in public, then the sources of our concord and comity are not to be found in the minds of individuals, their economic plight, or differences over candidates for elected office or the laws and policies they make. They are to be found in social and cultural worlds we build with and around each other, what we refer to these days as “civil society.” This realm is the domain of unenforceable customs and rules we have made and enforced on ourselves.38 The lessening of ethnic and racial antagonism that goes hand in hand with this “civilizing process” is an effect rather than the cause of the reduction in violence chronicled by scholars such as Pinker and Horowitz.

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The real “change agents” were at work even as people were still thinking about each other in less than friendly ways and well before the material circumstances and power of outsiders and newcomers had changed for the better. These change agents were cultural customs and codes that people amended and practiced in public so they might make accommodations to each other that neither side would have recognized were being made or been willing to acknowledge in public while they were happening. Americans amended their public rules of engagement through the associations, organizations, and institutions they had a real gift for making, just as Alexis de Tocqueville first observed in 1831. These associations let persons from different pieces of the American people watch and work with each other and learn the hard art of getting along better and putting those pieces together than they might otherwise have had a mind to do. But the United States isn’t the only country where people that may not have liked each other have used such organizational vehicles to learn how to get along better.39 How these customs and codes changed over time and have been used in public arguments and fights over race in America are the crucial elements of the story I will share here. Notes 1 Rudolph, Lloyd, “The Eighteenth Century Mob in America and Europe.” American Quarterly. Vol. 11 (4) (1959): 447–469; Davis, Susan, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Ehrenreich, Barbara, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Holt Paperbacks: 2007). 2 Maier, Pauline, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991). 3 Other researchers have noted that the United States has had fewer violent protests in recent decades. They come up with very different explanations for why. At least one study argues that police departments in the United States have moved away from repressive strategies and toward “managing” protesters and that challenges to authorities have become “quasi-institutionalized” and correspondingly less threatening and violent. See McPhail, Clark, David Schweingreber, and John McCarthy, “Policing Protest in the United States: 1960–1995,” The Control ­ of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, Donatello Della Porta and ­Herbert R ­ eiter, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 49–69; ­McAdam, Doug, Robert Sampson, Simon Weffer, and Heather MacIndoe, “‘There Will Be Fighting in the Streets’: The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 10 (1) (2005): 1–18. A more recent study argues that violence has become less prevalent because American police departments have become more militarized and repressive. See Katz, M ­ ichael, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?” Journal of Urban History. Vol. 34 (2) (2008): 185–208; Katz, Michael, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (­Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The argument presented here is more in line with the idea that authorities have moved toward managing protests rather than suppressing them.

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4 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/179367; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Brooks_Brothers_riot; https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-hill-insurrection-hasroots-in-brooks-brothers-riot-2021-1 5 Grimshaw, Allen, “Lawlessness and Violence in America and Their Special Manifestation in Changing Negro-White Relationships,” in Allen D. Grimshaw, ed., Racial Violence in the United States (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 18–19. 6 Grimshaw, “Lawlessness and Violence,” p. 19. 7 Mears, Ashley, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 8 Lebron, Christopher, The Making of Black Lives Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 50. 9 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Viking, 2011). 10 Soule, Sara and Jennifer Earl, “A Movement Society Evaluated: Collective Protest in the United States, 1960–1986.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 10 (3) (2005): 345–363. Protest and movement unrest was already becoming less violent and destructive by the end of the 1960s. Police presence at protest events declined as well between 1960 and 1985. If police were present, however, they continued to take formal actions in well more than half the time. 11 Hinton, Elizabeth, America on Fire (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021) and Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?; Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. There is nothing new in this observation. Leaders of earlier social movements made similar strategic decisions. Becoming calmer didn’t necessarily work for all of them. But movements that didn’t foreswear violence had less successful track records. See Gamson, William, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1975). 12 Soule and Earl, “A Movement Society Evaluated,” p. 357. The most interesting finding in this paper is the growth of right-wing protests after the 1960s. Groups espousing such views mimicked strategies they saw left-wing groups use, setting the stage for the mix of progressive and reactionary unrest and violence occurring in the last couple of decades. 13 Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Bennett, Larry, John Fairfield, and Patricia Mooney-Melvin, Bringing the Civic Back In: Zane Miller and American Urban History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022). 14 Gonzalez, Mike, “For Five Months, BLM Protests Trashed America’s ­Cities. After the Election, Things May Only Get Worse,” The Heritage Foundation. November 6, 2020. https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/five-months-blmprotestors-trashed-americas-cities-after-the-election?&_ga=2.111666564. 1888522058.1673615367-1631696701.1673615367# 15 Gelman, Barton, “January 6 Was Practice,” The Atlantic. (January/February, 2022): 24–44; The New York Times, October 4, 2022. “Antifa, election fraud and 1776: messages provide window into Oath Keepers.” Alan Feuer; The New York Times, November 26, 2022. “At protests, guns are doing the talking.” Mike McIntire; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 23, 2022. “Congress plans electoral law changes.” Mary Clare Jalonick; The New York Times, January 6, 2023. “Two years later, prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters continue to grow.” Alan Feuer; The New York Times, January 23, 2023. “For many who marched, Jan. 6 was only the beginning.” Elizabeth Dias and Jack Healy; St. Louis Post-Dispatch. December 24, 2021. “Military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.” Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven ­Anderson. The Washington Post, December 21, 2021. “A scary future: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says.” Dana Milbank.

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16 See “Protests against Barack Obama” and “Protests against Donald Trump” in Wikipedia. 17 Mennell, Stephen, Norbert Elias: The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Polity Press, 20017), p. 3. 18 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America; translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Literary Classic of the United States, Inc., 2004), pp. 365–366. 19 Roediger, David, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants ­Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 20 Friedman, John Block, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (­Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 21 Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 22 Morgan, Edmund S., Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988). 23 Alba, Richard, and Nancy Foner, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 24 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/hate-crime-recorded-law-enforcement2010-2019 25 Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 26 The New York Times, January 24, 2023. “A partial list of mass shootings in the United States in 2022.” https://www.nytimes.com/article/mass-shootings-2022. html 27 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opinion/black-lives-matter-depolicinghomicides.html; Campbell, Travis, Black Lives Matter’s Effect on Police Lethal Use of Force (December 14, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract= 3767097 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3767097 28 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). 29 Clayton, Cornell and Richard Elgar, eds., Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2012). 30 Pinker, Better Angels, p. 168. 31 Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 184–185, 382–386. 32 Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 169–171, 378–481; Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, pp. 467–521. 33 Pinker, Better Angels, p. 477. 34 Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, pp. 473–475; Varshney, Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 12, 131. 35 Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 55–56, 110, 202, 388–389, 540; Soule, Sarah, and Christian Davenport, “Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, or Even Hand? Protest Policing in the United States, 1960–1990,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 14 (1) (2009): 1–22. 36 Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, pp. 326–334; Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 119, 312, 561. 37 McAdam, Doug, and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 31. 38 Monti, Daniel. Engaging Strangers: Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism and Public ­Order in Boston (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013); Monti, Daniel. A Semblance of Justice: St. Louis School Desegregation and Order in Urban America (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1985). 39 Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, pp. 3–52.

2 DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL UNREST IN AMERICA (AND ELSEWHERE)

If violence has been a sumptuary privilege used in the past by some groups while being denied to others, how are we to reconcile its appearance today in unrest instigated by people from different races, religions, and backgrounds whose social and political views can be either progressive or reactionary? And what hope might we have that there won’t be even more social unrest and violence when there are so many organizations today pushing their way of being an American onto the rest of us? My answer to these questions revolves around a paradox articulated ­decades ago by the historian Hugh Davis Graham. Americans have found a way to marry disorder and institutional stability that works for them. Why this peculiar union should have worked at all, much less for as long as it has, is a concern for many Americans whose job is to watch over the rest of us and make sure we don’t do anything fatally stupid to each other and our society. Lately, some persons among us have decried violence by anybody for any reason or cause, no matter how laudable we might think the reason or cause is.1 ­President Joe Biden is one of them. What happened in Charlottesville and how President Donald Trump responded to the unrest and violence made there apparently was a big factor in his decision to run against Trump in the 2020 election. Though most of us may not like unrest and the violence that sometimes accompanies it, the fact remains that Graham was right. There is a time-worn and tested connection in America between the use of unrest and violence and the stability of our institutions and communities. It may not be pretty, but it works. More importantly, or just as importantly, it doesn’t work just for the groups whose beliefs and preferences are more left-of-center or progressive. DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-3

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It works equally well and has worked longer for groups whose beliefs and preferences are more right-of-center and even reactionary.2 Both have a place in our social and political life, though not so much anymore in our economic life, which is another puzzle I will be addressing in this chapter. A case can be made that people who use unrest and violence for more progressive causes today learned everything they know from people who used unrest and violence for reactionary purposes. And they’d be right. The fact is people on the left and right ends of our political spectrum have been sharing ways to petition governments and make grievances for some time now. It turns out there is some advantage to this for all of us. Learning to fight the same way may have contributed to them learning how to fight nicer. There is a downside to learning how to fight nicer, however. It has meant that more of us than ever think it is a good idea to climb into the public ring, thump our chests, and holler down anyone who dares to disagree with us. People from all kinds of groups trying to scratch a bewildering array of itches are pushing themselves onto the public stage…seemingly all at once. To make matters worse, they insist their issue warrants not just more attention but should be memorialized in laws that everyone else would have to follow. Their ideas and values should be everyone’s. Ethnocentric narcissism has become a way of life in contemporary America. Campaigns pushing my way to be an American in your face might only be a cover for deeper and more serious concerns about the way people from different races, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and genders can or cannot work together in contemporary America. But if highly symbolic fights over people’s personal identities are a proxy for bigger problems we have with each other, then the more restrained ways that different kinds of Americans are fighting these days may prove to be a workable substitute for violence and something we all can live with. All I am prepared to say about these matters right now is that they all have something to do with the kind of democracy Americans practice, the people we imagine Americans should be, and that popular unrest and violence ­figure into our deliberations. Exactly how unrest and violence fit remains to be seen. But the idea that unrest and violence may contribute to our conversations is the trickiest piece of the puzzle I will try to put together here. Important as the discussion over Americans’ penchant for committing acts of public unrest and violence is, I must lean into it with a confession. For someone who has pretensions about being a scientist and more than a little experienced in studying and writing about unrest and violence, it is hard to acknowledge but important to admit I don’t always know what’s going on. I, for one, did not see the attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021, coming. Indeed, I wrote a commentary piece saying there would be no violence on January 6. It wasn’t published in my local newspaper, a doubly embarrassing fact for an alleged expert.

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Granted, I did not have the kind of inside information people in law enforcement had about what was going on. But I heard Donald Trump’s overheated rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and call to arms like everybody else could. I knew about Charlottesville and the attempted kidnapping of the Governor of Michigan by a group of people posing as a patriotic militia. I just didn’t think much would come of Donald Trump’s invitation for the likes of the Proud Boys to “stand by” and wait for their President to call upon them. Neither did enough intelligence and police officials, too, apparently. I really do not know how they missed it.3 But then again, I guess I do. These kinds of events have always surprised us. We never see them coming. And it turns out there may be a good reason why we shouldn’t. (More on this later.) Part of the reason I missed what was coming is that I had not paid enough attention to the kinds of groups promoting rightwing and white nationalist causes. (The Oath Keepers who showed up with semiautomatic guns to protect local businesses in Ferguson were new to me.) Other researchers have studied these groups. I have not. My intellectual bandwidth was not as broad as it should have been. Another reason I was caught flatfooted had to do with coup d’états in America. Americans don’t do coups. Political parties and organizations with serious political aspirations like the Ku Klux Klan often used violence for partisan political purposes before, during, and after elections in the 19th c­ entury.4 But an out-and-out coup d’état is a much bigger and rarer deal in United States history. The only one I can recall being well studied took place more than a century ago in Wilmington, North Carolina.5 It involved white people (who happened to be Democrats) taking control of the local government from black people and white people (more sympathetic to the Republican Party back then) who thought it would be a good thing to govern the city together. For people inclined to think change is inevitable and the arc of history bends toward justice, the lesson should be clear. Basic concerns about the makeup of our communities – who matters and who doesn’t, who makes the rules and gets to break them, and who gets to do and say pretty much what they want – don’t change. The parties raising them change. So does the way such questions are raised and how seriously we are expected to take them. (This is where unrest and violence enter the picture.) But the less than definitive answers that follow from the way we question each other and sometimes fight in public are part of a dance group do to find congenial dance partners and figure out each other’s moves and intentions. Their persistence in learning how to dance together better turns out to be an important cultural achievement, one to which unrest and violence make valuable contributions. Right now, however, I want to return to my failed prediction and the commentary piece I wrote. On January 6, I sat in front of a widescreen TV in a state of bewilderment and anger just as millions of other people did as we watched

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several thousand of our fellow citizens break into the Capitol and deface it. The objective of those who stormed the Capitol was nothing less than to help Donald Trump violently subvert one of our most crucial political rituals: The peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to another. By any measure, that was a big deal and something I should have been watching more closely. I won’t make that mistake again. Neither, I hope, will other Americans. So, yes, the social scientist and historian part of me was surprised by the Capitol insurrection and attempted Presidential coup d’état. That person wants to understand better how these events fit into the customary ways Americans have argued and fought in the past. The citizen part of me is still angry but left wondering whether being awakened from a long civic nap might not be better for all of us in the long run. No matter which way the story develops, I count myself among the many Americans who are struck by the power of a good theatrical performance. Thanks to events such as the ones I explore here we are all paying attention now. And this is what we see. Unrest is on the rise, and a great many of us are concerned about what this means for our future as an American people. We want all the ill will and discord to go away, but we have not yet managed to cool our fever-pitched rhetorical excesses or formally punish more than a few hundred of the most ardent flamethrowers among us. We are still trying to figure out important stuff about ourselves, which was one of the bigger lessons left us by the Black Lives Matter protests and violence following George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in 2020. Unrest and violence associated with our attempts to know ourselves better revealed a great many of us had changed the way we think about our racial differences and are ready to work on them, not just more than we have in the past but more progressively than we did in the past. It also revealed a substantial number of us aren’t there yet. As I will note several times in this book, I am hardly the first person with pretensions about trying to make sense of all this. But I have come to two conclusions about my ability and that of my fellow social scientists to make sense of American unrest and predict when some of our fellow citizens are likely to go off script and cause the rest of us a lot of public grief. Tied as our customary ways of arguing and fighting in public are to the history of England and other Western democracies, as I describe them in this chapter, we Americans do unrest and violence differently. Our way of making public trouble is more conservative than theirs. At least it used to be anyway. And when it comes to predicting where and when our fellow Americans are going to step up and act out in public we should stop trying. Unscheduled, intemperate, and sometimes violent outbursts are that way for a reason. We aren’t supposed to see them coming. They are supposed to

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be a surprise. They would lose their dramatic punch if we knew when they were coming. Trying to predict such events, I have decided, is a fool’s errand. Unrest and violence will continue to defy our best efforts to predict when and where they will occur. My conclusion as a social historian is more promising or at least sounds more hopeful. As I just declared, I do not think we are supposed to know when and where unrest and violence will happen. The good they do us, I have come to believe, depends on us not knowing they are coming. Let’s suppose I am wrong, though, and it still may be possible to predict when unrest and violence will occur. In that case, a big part of why future predictions will turn out no better and why we cannot appreciate the importance of not knowing the answer to such questions can be traced to the way we have trained ourselves to think about this kind of behavior. We were looking for answers in all the wrong places, mostly inside the heads of upset and discontented people. (I will talk about this later in the chapter, too.) Here, in the second chapter, I will begin exploring one of the places we should have been looking at harder: How unrest and violence figure into the way societies and especially the cities in those societies become more open or “democratic.” That is, how we court disorderliness and at the same time stay united. As social historians have pointed out, there is a great deal of similarity or overlap between the ways we get along most of the time and make a show of getting along and the ways we show we are upset with each other.6 Upon this many American and other Western historians agree. A meeting or a gathering where people petition their leaders; a community party or festival where people come together just to share each other’s company; parades and demonstrations making a show of their solidarity, and any number of other perfectly conventional activities groups of people do together have a Janus-like quality. They can be used to celebrate and commemorate. They also can be used to register a complaint and threaten. It’s the same behavior, but it is used to convey very different messages to anyone who happens to be watching or should have been paying more attention. Anyone who has put together, or tried to put together, a large puzzle composed of many small pieces will understand the point I am about to make. Many of the pieces are similarly shaped. In fact, they may be the same shape, differing only by the small part of the picture stamped on the shiny side of the puzzle piece. Now imagine the finished puzzle with all its similarly shaped or identically shaped pieces turning into a picture that looks more orderly on most of the puzzle’s face and disorderly on the other smaller part. You were working with the same shapes but end up with very different pictures that happen to fit together. The pieces may have been indistinguishable when they were spread all over the table, but they made a very clear picture that was orderly

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on one side and disorderly looking on the other side when the pieces were arranged properly. That’s what is going on with the orderly and disorderly ways groups deal with each other: Many similarly or differently shaped puzzle pieces arranged differently and making different statements. In the next chapter, I will consider the other place we should have been looking at harder: The values people bring to public arguments and violent fights and how they compare to the ones we use to organize the rest of our lives and keep our communities whole. These values are the back side of the puzzle pieces, the part we don’t see when we put a puzzle together but whose effect we see at work on the shinier part of the pieces we assemble into a picture that is mostly orderly but has some markedly disorderly parts to it. These pieces may look the same, but they are arranged differently enough so that most of the time the behavior in which they are embedded is more orderly and on occasion more disorderly. People recognize the pattern of orderly and disorderly ways of getting along and fighting because they are made up of the same values and can look similar. Looking at the completed puzzle from above, it makes sense. The disorderly-looking pieces fit in the picture and make it whole. Order and disorder complement each other. The way we fight and get along complements each other. The disorderly angels on our shoulders inspire and push the more orderly ones to consider ways to organize and run the world differently and perhaps better than we have been running it until now. More importantly, should the orderly ones win out today, we would have been reminded that the takenfor-granted way we live today can be revisited at some point in the future without the world coming to an end. Individuals have codes they live by. Communities do too. Our values are the pieces of code we arrange one way in our everyday lives and differently when we go off script. Unrest and violence are the principal tools we use when we go off script. The temporary way we rearrange our values to make unrest and violence will be described in more detail in the next chapter. It may be intellectually fashionable and easier to imagine our world splitting apart than it is to see how well it works. It also is easier and never out of fashion to point out how unrest and violence keep us divided and our world on the verge of coming undone along its well-worn racial, religious, ethnic, social class, and gender-ripping seams. But that is not how public fights over such matters turn out, especially in urban areas. I will argue instead that unrest and violence help keep local communities from splitting apart and all their different races, religions, nationalities, classes, and ever-growing list of genders more united than divided, even when some of these people are not treated especially well. People draw on similar strategies and values when they are cooperating. They can use the same

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strategies and variations of the values they invoke when they get along to make it clear they are not in a mood to be cooperative at that moment. The marriage between orderly and disorderly ways of acting in the world keeps communities together. Sociologists have long imagined that conflict could bind opponents together just as readily as it could divide them.7 But we have not done an especially good job showing how this happens or the greater good accomplished by all the pushing and shoving, dividing, and reuniting people do, especially in urban places. We have imagined the urban world as more disorderly than orderly, more prone to breaking apart than holding together. My goal is to show how the appearance of disorderliness, even violent disorder, disguises all the ways it contributes to a situation in which different groups find themselves coming to a better understanding of how they might face the world together. Deva Woodly put it well when she said, “The whole purpose of protest is to interrupt your daily life, to interrupt the previously scheduled programming so you pay attention to something new.”8 It is not designed or intended to make the world turn on a dime and take a radically new direction. It is a complement and counterpoint to whatever people experience and practice every day as “normal order,” not a full-blown rejection of it. And, again, it is a skill and custom that Americans with markedly different social and political views and agendas are well practiced at using. Trying to Assemble the Social Unrest and Violence Puzzle

My early attempts to compare what happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, in Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection did not go well. Apart from the fact they all reflected Americans’ continuing problem with race and had violence associated with them, they look like very different kinds of unrest. It was hard to connect what happened in each to older themes of American unrest and violence. I scoured past studies of rioting for features I saw in the four events featured here. I wish more had come from my search, but it wasn’t a complete bust. At least one interesting lead did come from the exercise. It involved 19th-century political campaigns in which rival organizations with markedly different philosophies and social agendas had taken their partisan fight to the streets. There were more moments like these, it turns out, in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of one of America’s wars. Still there but not as much during the execution of these wars because people do pull together or hit something like a pause button in their disagreements with each other during times of war.9 Except when they don’t. Then it can become ugly, as it did in a several cities during World War I and a couple of decades later during the second half

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of World War I when black people showed how fed up they were with the way they were being treated in the cities to which they had recently moved.10 Rival organizations and their respective supporters fought as recently as the civil rights movement and for and against the War in Vietnam. ­Partisan violence with a distinctive racial look is on the rise again in the United States, only this time as a reaction to the progress black and other non-white ­Americans have made in becoming more like white Americans.11 That organizations would become more deeply involved in popular unrest is part of the historical puzzle about contentious politics and mass movements that social historians got right. The piece they missed was how rightwing protests and movements would take advantage of the same organized approaches to mobilize their supporters and make claims just like leftwing activists do. This isn’t happening only in the United States. The same thing has happened in European protests and mass movements. In contemporary Western democracies, people and organizations have adopted similar ­approaches to making claims and petitioning governments.12 Parallel ways of organizing and making claims are just one of the ways that formerly discounted and disenfranchised people show they know how to play on the same democratic landscape as their erstwhile opponents and that their presence on this terrain is accepted. Their political leanings and programmatic initiatives may be different, but they have come to be very much alike in the way they play politics. The convergence between the way black and white activists fight today is a sign that whatever democracy may mean in the United States, people who used to be treated as outsiders have figured out and demonstrated they know how to act like insiders. It is not a coincidence that white, black, and other non-white Americans have also become more alike in terms of the social and political rights they enjoy, the kinds of jobs they hold, how well educated they are becoming, and how much money they make. Granted. We’re still working on how many white and black persons need to live next door to each other for it to count as a win rather than a continuing loss. And it is going to take a much longer time for the wealth black and other non-white persons to catch up with that possessed by white persons. But some of the economic and political differences between white and nonwhite people are closing. Closing such gaps has made many white persons more than a little anxious about their standing in American society. They are wondering aloud and louder than they have in a long time about how they are going to fare in a society where they are no longer the predominant race. These concerns have been cultivated by right-leaning politicians marketing a brand of “grievance politics” that a good-sized portion of the white American electorate shares. It is what continues to feed Donald Trump’s otherwise head-scratching success and fueled his 2024 re-election campaign.

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Leftwing activists are not far behind in learning to use “grievance politics” to make their own pitches to the American people and in political campaigns. Ordinarily, the revving up of hyper-partisan claims and grievances might be expected to produce a great deal of unrest and violence. But the “wokeness” issues and other questions involving personal identity and redemption that both leftwing and rightwing activists have leaned into as “culture warriors” has let them make all kinds of noise but generated little in the way of serious face-to-face fights. It is hard to imagine people taking to the streets over the use of personal pronouns and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates. These arguments have found more fertile ground in colleges and universities.13 Even much more heated campaigns over abortion and immigration rights, which have led to protests by people on both sides of these issues, haven’t ended in much more than shouting matches when the two sides meet up on the streets. Fights over the way entire communities are organized and how groups relate to each other in public are different and frankly more important. Here is where the movement away from community-based unrest and into more organized forms of unrest and violence transitioned into the politicized unrest and violence that happened in the run-up to wars.14 The possibility more of this unrest turning violent in the run-up to our next national election may be the dream of dedicated far-left and far-right activists. But a replay of what happened in January of 2021 is the nightmare haunting most everyone else. Why threats of war and revolution might inspire more organized and politically motivated unrest and violence can be surmised from the history of several Western societies and especially the United States.15 It turns out these were moments when elites imagined their leadership might be threatened or thought they needed help from less privileged groups to keep their nation intact and themselves in power. Unrest and violence by less esteemed or wellestablished groups scared them. On such occasions it was not uncommon for elites to discover they could share some of the rights and privileges they enjoyed with people below them. High on the list of these rights and privileges would have been the assumption of duties and obligations that typically fell to elite people as the community’s principal caretakers. It could and often did include more permanent upgrades in peoples’ status as citizens. This might be accomplished by granting them the right to vote and be taxed, just like wealthier and more prominent people. The “sharing” would not have extended to the willingness of community leaders to redistribute much if any of their wealth to less well-to-do fellow citizens. “Democratizing” moments such as these are clear in the history of many nations. They have not been so well chronicled, to the best of my knowledge, in the history of American towns and cities facing what could be big ­challenges to their sovereignty or integrity. What is happening today in the United States may give us a chance to see the sovereignty and integrity of American cities tested in ways not heretofore

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observed much less studied. More partisan and revolutionary-minded groups are talking as if we are in the early stages of our next Civil War. However, I think the use of more organized and politically charged unrest and violence in American towns and cities today is more a reflection of the way unrest and even violence have become “normalized.” Indeed, I would argue that forestalling or tempering challenges to the ­integrity and sovereignty of American cities is one of the principal contributions intermittent outbreaks of the unrest and violence make. The occasions when local people fight and how they fight foreshadow bigger battles they could imagine happening but step back from having because even bigger, more politically charged, and partisan unrest could end so much worse than the fight they just had. Momentary breaks or disruptions to a community’s regular order and peoples’ customary deference to their superiors on such ­occasions are effective and perhaps necessary reminders to everyone that questions about how to make their community work better are not as settled as people thought. Whether what happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection foreshadows bigger fights ­ ­people are itching to have or anxious to step away from remains to be seen. But these four events were provocative enough to capture my attention and make me wonder why such different kinds of unrest could have happened within seven years of each other and what larger cultural message might be embedded in the coincidence of their arrival. To the extent I have a bias in matters related to the history of popular ­unrest and violence in the United States, it is, as I hinted, that I do not ­believe in coincidences. Something’s going on in America. My objective in this book is to figure out what that “something” is. This will not be easy, and the results of my intellectual labor may prove less than satisfactory. After all, Americans have a complicated history with unrest and violence. Others before me have tried to make some bigger sense of that history. Those scholars have done a good job describing different kinds of communal unrest such as vigilantism, lynchings, labor conflicts, brawls between r­ival neighborhoods, and attacks by people from one race, religion, or ethnic population on people belonging to other groups. Some who came before me took their analysis to “the next level” by showing how a particular kind of unrest had changed over time or fallen out of favor for one reason or another. The obvious drop in labor violence in the 20th century, for instance, has been ­attributed to the recognition of labor unions as the legitimate representatives of their members.16 The transition of racial violence targeting people to more attacks against businesses and symbols of government authority was identified some time ago.17 A few scholars have thought a big part of what is going on has to do with the process of democratization and the concessions leaders and more

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privileged groups make to groups with appreciably less wealth, power, and social prestige. How much democratizing a society can handle, and the role unrest and violence play in making it happen, depends on how open people are to addressing questions about who can stand as a full-fledged member and who can be held accountable for what they say and do in public. Basically, some kinds of societies are more open to the possibility of ­democratization than others. People in some societies make more room for less well-to-do and less socially prominent groups to ask and answer such questions. People in other societies make little or no room for less privileged groups to consider these matters in public.18 Which is why, as the history of racial violence in the United States clearly shows, violence is far more likely to be used against a minority population in closed and rigidly hierarchical social settings. It is more often used by minorities in more open social s­ ettings, especially cities.19 When considering how the process of democratization played out in the United States and other Western societies, one might hypothesize there would be more unrest and violence on the upside of the slope where groups are beginning to assert themselves and being resisted. One might hypothesize further that there would be less unrest and violence on the downside where longtime residents have begun to figure out other people aren’t as awful as they imagined and can get along better with them than had been thought possible. There is evidence suggesting these hypotheses are correct. Steven Pinker’s analysis of how all kinds of individual and group violence have diminished over the last couple of hundred years is consistent with these hypotheses. So, too, is Donald Horowitz’s detailed analysis of how “deadly ethnic riots” in the United States became less prevalent in the last decades of the 20th century.20 Their argument, which was borrowed and adapted from the writing of Norbert Elias, is that people had become more “civilized” and showed it by not fighting as often or hurting each other as viciously and enthusiastically as they had in the past.21 Pinker’s and Horowitz’s works move us some way toward understanding the conditions under which people take their private grievances public. They do an even better job helping us understand why people sometimes use violence to make their complaints and wishes unmistakably clear to anyone who is looking or had been reluctant to look until the moment their neighbors started acting out. Pinker and Horowitz made a good start, but there are other important matters we need to understand about when and why ­people take their fights in a more deadly, destructive, and unmistakably ­public direction. The “democratization” and “civilizing” arguments Pinker and Horowitz make suggest there may be something fundamentally different about the kinds of unrest and violence people use on the downside of their historic slide

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toward becoming more democratized and civilized. What might that difference be and what would it tell us about the kind of people we are becoming? No matter what the answer is to this question, people are acting out less violently than they did in the past, but it hasn’t had much impact on the amount of unrest and trouble people are making. If anything, there appear to be many more groups and organizations acting out today and inviting strong reactions from groups and organizations that disagree with them. Pinker’s answer builds on the idea that a “rights revolution” occurred and afforded legal protection for under-valued human beings such as blacks, women, and LBGTQ individuals. Here I repeat what I said in the prologue about Pinker’s thesis and Donald Horowitz’s rebuttal to it. These protections, however important, cannot account for why black people who would benefit most from such protections increased their use of violence in their own communities after federal protections were approved. Nor can it account for why whites reduced their use of violence before these federal protections became a fact of institutional life in communities where they were still very much in control. White people began walking away from violence and black people started walking toward it at the very moment the “rights revolution” was happening. Donald Horowitz says the answer to this puzzle has something to do with cultural changes that had already taken hold before civil rights protections were in place. But for those “cultural changes” there would have been no reason to push for much less codify protections in the law for people who had been mistreated for a long time. In short, the “rights revolutions” Pinker writes about were the effect of cultural changes that were already being made, not their cause. Protective legislation codified more tolerant accommodating cultural practices that already were being practiced in many communities.22 Whatever these “cultural changes” might have been, there is nothing in Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing effects of democratization that would account for why so many whites would make an abrupt move away from violence at the exact moment blacks were making more of it than at any time in their history. Fights over community membership – the kind that play out as rivalries ­between different races, religions, and ethnic groups – tend to be nasty ­affairs in which people end up being killed and lots of personal property is d ­ estroyed. Such fights happen as new groups make moves to assert themselves and more established groups clamp down harder than usual on the real or imagined threats presented by the upstarts. Public fights about how accountable people are for what they do and say in public tend to be less contentious, destructive, and deadly.23 Such fights are less awful than the fights people wage of membership rights. The reason why is that in fights over public accountability people do not have to justify their existence. They can and will argue endlessly about what should be done to

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change their community, but they don’t have to fight about whether they deserve to be taken seriously. They already made the cut. They’re on the team. Questions about which groups can or cannot make the cut and be ­accepted provoke more unrest and violence. They are raised most often and nastily when new groups are trying to break their way into the community and older groups try to keep them out. This is where questions involving the importance of diverse groups’ social identities come into play. The idea that one favors one’s own group or people is called “ethnocentrism.” Peoples’ ethnocentric concerns do not come up when they are kept from elevating their group’s status as a matter of public interest. Ethnocentric concerns also are not hotly contested when anyone who believes their group should be taken more seriously does not have to worry about being publicly vilified or punished for coming out in public. The matter of how ethnocentric Americans are today adds an interesting piece to our historical puzzle and clues to why people are more upset than ever about “identity politics.” As I just noted, people have less reason to be caught up in fights over their group’s social identity when questions over their membership in the community are settled or uncontested. People are more likely to become wrapped up in questions about their group’s racial, ethnic, or religious identity or bent out of shape over a new way to reimagine themselves when the right to ask and answer “identity questions” has been opened but not yet settled. Under such conditions, people can find countless moments and endless ways to argue and fight about their special identities in public. I think Americans are in the middle of what will turn out to be the biggest ethnocentric binge any society has ever witnessed, precisely because America is more open and “democratized” than many other countries. A big part of the reason people in the United States and other countries have more unrest but less violent unrest today is that the playing field has become more crowded with different groups and organizations claiming their kind of ­people should be taken seriously too. The rise of so many social movements today is unmistakably tied to all the groups claiming their identity matters and they should have a bigger voice in what happens in the communities where they have been living quiet civic lives for a long time.24 People in these groups may be working harder than ever to reinforce their social identities to their fellow members and impress other people enough to join them. But these identities only become socially problematic and contested when they are coming into existence or on the way to becoming irrelevant. That is when people are likely to make a bigger public deal about how important their identity is compared to someone else’s. Thus far, people may be having more arguments than ever about all the identities being outed and declared in public, but they have not been inclined to fight to the death over them. This is something groups prone to acting out

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may already have begun to figure out and might be wise for the rest of us to consider before we hang ourselves out of fear about the future. The best contemporary examples I can come up with that capture what I am trying to say involve the public hair-pulling and rhetorical muscle-flexing people do over how politically correct or woke they are and how irredeemably racist or sexist everybody else is, how many hidden racial and gender biases I didn’t know I have but apparently am incapable of hiding from anyone else, about my ignorance and perhaps willful indifference to people who are differently “abled,” how permanently fixed our children’s gender or racial identity is, and what personal pronouns we should use to describe ourselves online. Mine is (pending). Academic types like me have teamed up with activists to describe and promote these new identity groups, whose situation has been compared to that of other “oppressed minorities” in the United States.25 There is no getting around the fact that many people in the United States care about such matters and spend no small amount of time and energy ­trying to make the rest of us care about their personal identity as much as they do. Some corporations and institutions have gone so far as to create gender and racial sensitivity officers to help keep everyone in the organization from uttering offensive thoughts and acting in less-than-enlightened ways. The most noteworthy thing about such institutionalized nods to interpersonal civility and public shaming over impure thoughts, words, and deeds is that the social change they could create would happen one individual at a time. As challenging public arguments go, the larger cultural service these perform is that they are unlikely to change many of us for good and rarely end up with someone walking away with much more than a blemish on their job record but nothing close to a bloody nose. Such fights annoy at least as many of us as they engage. And those of us inspired enough to ascend to a higher plain of racial, ethnic, religious, or gender awareness don’t go much further than shaking our head or waving a disapproving finger in the face of anyone who does not get what is patently obvious and offensive to him/he, her/she, or them/they.26 The important point is this. Arguments about personal identities have little impact on our larger public lives and civic culture apart from the way politicians exploit them for their tub-thumping potential. But that fact is worth talking about and taking seriously. It points to how we may have become so civilized we have nothing more or better to worry about these days than salvaging our individual identities. What our collective American identity should be and how more of us can work on it together apparently would not seem to be as big a concern as it used to be. It suggests the bigger fights we used to have about what it means to be an American people either have been settled or written off as unwinnable, which is precisely what people at the farthest left and right sides of arguments about “critical race theory” have been saying loudly and for a while.

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Burying such disputes in a school board race or arguments over library book purchases is a great deal less threatening than bringing automatic weapons to a state legislative hearing.27 I laid out my alternative explanation for how all this has come about in the prologue. It has three elements. First, all Americans were more committed than they realized to civic customs and rituals that make fights less destructive and accommodations easier. Second, both whites and blacks became ­better practiced at flipping between making big public shows of getting along and making trouble for each other. Third, at the heart of their grudging commitment to sticking it out with each other and the art of making simulated rebellions are liberal and conservative values we also share more than we appreciate or are prepared to acknowledge in public. More surprising yet, as I will argue in the next chapter, these shared values, and the order they help sustain, are practiced more often and better in the last place on Earth most of us would think to look for them: cities. The ancient Greeks wouldn’t have been surprised by this, but we are. What this suggests, at a minimum, is that Antifa supporters, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and all the other people out there heralding, mobilizing, and organizing for what they imagine might be or will be the next American Revolution have their work cut out for them.28 One need look no further than our own time and the events chronicled in this book for evidence of how crowded and complicated the marketplace for unrest and violence is today. Reactionary and Progressive Unrest

The rise of progressive unrest and violence, on the one hand, and the persistence of reactionary unrest and violence, on the other hand, remind us of where our noisy but much less violent fights over people’s private identity and chance for personal redemption come from.

TABLE 2.1 The Legacy of Reactionary and Progressive Unrest in American Towns and

Cities.

Local Event (with national impact) National Event (with local impact) a

Reactionary Unresta

Progressive Unrestb

Charlottesville

Ferguson

Capitol Insurrection

Black Lives Matter Protests

Reinforces customary rights, privileges, duties, and/or obligations. Limits or softens the effects of customary rights, privileges, duties, and/or obligations; usually by sharing them with people unaccustomed to practicing them.

b

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Bringing such different kinds of unrest and violence together to study at the same time is more than a logistical challenge. It is an invitation for a serious historical reckoning for the people and groups who would participate in them. I labeled the ones in Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection as e­ xamples of “reactionary” unrest. I labeled what happened in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter protests as “progressive” unrest. Decades ago, historian and social scientist Charles Tilly observed contemporary unrest in Western Europe was more progressive, clearly implying reactionary unrest and violence had been more common in the past.29 Tilly and the scholars who used his work all recognized there was no single ­moment when people stopped using reactionary unrest and began challenging authorities using more progressive kinds of unrest. The use of reactionary and progressive kinds of unrest and violence overlapped, maybe for a long time, as they have in the United States.30 There was no mistaking Tilly’s and others’ historical judgment, however, that reactionary unrest carried out by communal groups would fall into disuse over time and unrest and violence from that point on would be much more organized and progressive. That has not come close to happening yet in the United States. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of American unrest and violence is how ingrained reactionary forms of disorder are in our culture. As I will explain in later chapters, Charlottesville was a dramatic example of reactionary unrest being used to great effect by organizations representing both sides involved in that fight. A similar argument might be made about the two sides that lined up against each other in the Capitol insurrection. Progressive unrest and violence became a bigger and more permanent fixture in American towns and cities with the rise of labor unions in the 19th century. But more reactionary strains of violence also were apparent in labor disputes whenever bosses provoked fights by using scab laborers and armed guards or even police officers to break up rallies and end strikes. The marriage of progressive and reactionary forms of unrest, as I noted earlier, appeared in many fights between supporters of civil rights organizations and people who supported organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Organizations sympathetic to what KKK members believed and practiced are picking similar fights today. They might not expect a full restoration of the rights, privileges, duties, and obligations white people used to call their own. But some white people are working harder than ever to resist further attempts by black people and other non-white groups to enjoy more of the rights, privileges, duties, and obligations they once claimed were exclusively theirs. What happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection reflects the complicated history of unrest and violence in matters involving race. The unexpected arrival of the Oath Keepers in Ferguson and the more active presence of likeminded organizations in

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Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection certainly is part of the story. But I suspect there is more to the story than latterday racists thinking it is safe to stick their heads up in public again because Donald Trump said it was okay. If the story turned out to be no more complicated than that, there would be good news and bad news in it for both sides. The good or bad news, depending on your point of view, is that reactionary unrest and violence rarely win out in the end. The other piece of the good or bad news is that progressive unrest and violence never accomplish all that their detractors feared and defenders hoped for. The reason, again, has to do with the process of democratization. There is nothing inevitable about how it starts, how long it might take, how many interruptions or barriers to a faster and cleaner implementation will need to be overcome or worked around, or what life will look like at the other end. Furthermore, the process is almost guaranteed to play out differently in ­different communities and states. That is because different communities and states have different civic cultures and ways of dealing with the same problems. What passes for progress, then, won’t be the same either.31 The back-and-forth arguments and fights between groups wanting to push for more change faster and those trying to restore old ways of imagining and “doing” community are sometimes messy but always complicated a­ ffairs. What they are not or historically have not yet become is revolutionary a­ ffairs where the world everyone knows turns immediately into whatever the groups pushing for change wanted the new world to look like. That is not how ­democratization works. As I reminded the reader at the beginning of this chapter, historian Hugh Davis Graham argued that the “historical coexistence of violence and institutional stability” was the central paradox built into the history of civil unrest in the United States.32 The persistence of reactionary and progressive unrest and violence in America today is a powerful piece of evidence Graham was right. Americans simply do not change as often or as abruptly as some would prefer and others fear. Fighting in public is something we do while figuring out how quickly or slowly we are going to change. Sometimes these fights turn violent. Our principal challenge is to figure out how unrest and violence contribute to community stability when everything about the events makes it look like people are trying to undermine and dismantle their community and throw away everything keeping it in good working order. As a practical matter, we might like or dislike the idea of democratization, but we have not had much success figuring out how unrest and violence accomplish such a difficult balancing act in more open societies. We need a fuller picture of all the fits and starts and in-between steps people take so they can fight and stay together at the same time. A few historians

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and social scientists have discovered pieces of that picture.33 Someday we might have enough pieces to put together something that passes for a theory of social and political unrest and violence. Until we do, here is a list of pieces they have come up with so far: 1 Historically, groups use unrest and violence only after they have exhausted other avenues of grievance redress or community leaders have shown they are unable or unwilling to address peoples’ concerns. I’ve already flagged this as something I will be taking a harder look at in the book. Groups may be more discriminating in their use of unrest and violence than it seems, but that doesn’t mean they are equally patient and reluctant to use violence. Newcomers and cultural outsiders may have to be more cautious. Old-timers and insiders may not need to be and haven’t been. 2 Groups involved on both sides of a violent fight are more aware and respectful of each other’s prerogatives and interests than they are able or willing to acknowledge in public. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, different groups that share the same town or city have more pieces of culture in common than they recognize. Insiders and outsiders may use unrest and violence differently but still recognize and tolerate each other’s right to act out from time to time. 3 Groups could kill many more people than they do when unrest turns violent and they could destroy a great deal more property as well. They need each other. Surprising as it may seem, their grudging recognition of that fact constrains both sides and effectively limits the damage they do to each other and to their community. 4 Popular unrest is likely to become less restrained and more destructive and deadly when people believe they do not share a common culture. 5 People can unlearn that belief by finding opportunities to collaborate on matters of mutual concern. As groups learn they have more in common than they imagined, they do not fight as often or as violently as they did in the past. The process of democratization results in these kinds of understandings, a reduction in the number of occasions groups fight in public, and the extent to which fights turn deadly and destructive. Changes in how often groups fight in public and the amount and kinds of violence they visit on each other show how far along the path of democratization they have come. I will be looking at the unrest that happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and Capitol insurrection with these points in mind. I hope to make a clear and convincing case unrest and violence do more than test the resilience of the towns and cities where they happen. They demonstrate how much more resilient the civic culture of American communities

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is today than we imagine, expected, and given our history maybe deserved it to be. At the end of the day, how we make sense of unrest and violence depends on how sympathetic we are to the people who are acting out and whether we think the world needs to be fixed or left alone. Such an exercise is fraught with intellectual and political peril because there are no casual bystanders in these arguments today. The stakes are too high. The lines between those who are for and against unrest and violence either as a matter of principle or because they object to who has been targeted are more fixed than they have been in a long time. What is at risk and how sharp the lines have become is apparent in the events featured in this book. One may be inclined to describe and characterize what happened in Ferguson and in all the towns and cities that held Black Lives Matter protests in positive ways, seeing them as necessary or at least understandable responses to problems Americans should have worked through well before now. By comparison, what happened in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. might be viewed in less positive ways and as events rekindling racial sentiments and practices we had moved past and promoting undemocratic ways of being governed and minding each other’s business. The characterization of these four events would look a great deal different if they were made by people who hold more conservative social and political views. In that case, unrest in Ferguson and all the towns and cities that held Black Lives Matter protests look more like radical anti-police demonstrations or the first step toward a political rebellion. By comparison, local activists in Charlottesville were trying to wipe important legacies and lessons about American history from our memories. And the Capitol Hill rioters were patriots who were upholding the right and duty of all Americans to keep elected officials honest or, failing that, at least make them accountable for their misdeeds. Reconciling these competing views of contemporary American unrest and violence may be impossible. Exploring important ways in which different kinds of unrest and violence draw on the same historical precedents and made remarkably similar cultural statements about who we are as a people is not. The first step in making such a comparison would include the following points about unrest and violence in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection. These events gained almost immediate national and even international attention because of social media. Indeed, Ferguson may have been America’s first “Twitter riot.”34 People from different races, religions, and ethnic groups often fight during a riot. Some people involved in the unrest considered here certainly did, and in most instances those people were identified by their race. A potentially

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more important way to describe who was involved in these events was how people were organized. Historically, most American unrest has been carried out by informal groups of neighbors and fellow townsmen or city dwellers. It was not conducted by organizations like a union or political party. To be sure, organizations as different as the NAACP, KKK, local Democrat or Republican Party have become active in unrest, especially unrest tied to political concerns. On those occasions, organizations purporting to represent one side or another in a public fight either encouraged people to become more violent or tried to keep violence from becoming worse. However, it is rare for both sides in the same public dispute to have formal organizations championing very different causes stepping in to fight each other. Such organizations were present in Ferguson and some of the Black Lives Matter protests. People belonging to well-organized groups sympathetic to rightwing and white nationalist causes played a pivotal role in spurring on the violence that occurred in Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection. People with ties to leftwing and rightwing organizations were alleged to have plans to cause trouble in larger cities where violence erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.35 It also is not uncommon for people to be hurt or killed during a riot or violent public protest. How many persons are injured or killed depends on the weapons people bring to their fight. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, firearms often were used during riots and not just by the police. Dozens of people were seriously injured or killed. Sometimes more than dozens were hurt or killed. People showed up with firearms in Ferguson, Charlottesville, at the Capitol insurrection, and at some of the Black Lives Matter protests. But virtually no one used them. What people did instead, especially during the Capitol insurrection, was use weapons and armor that might have impressed a caveman but would have embarrassed a medieval knight. What people didn’t do was use all the guns they brought to shoot each other. For reasons I have no difficulty understanding, the guns impressed news people and intimidated politicians and police officers who imagined they were about to die. But the heavy weapons were nothing more than props. The explanation made by Proud Boys that they kept their rifles on the other side of the Potomac River from the Capitol until the outgoing President asked for them to be retrieved begs the question of what other insurrectionists would have done once gunfire erupted. Most of these people appeared satisfied with spreading feces on walls, sitting in elected officials’ chairs, taking trophies from offices, and being led away from where these officials were hiding while they snapped pictures of themselves showing off. With or without guns, they were amateur insurrectionists. As bad as the violence at the Capitol was, only people in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and every city but

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Portland where Black Lives Matter protests turned momentarily violent have talked about how much worse their unrest could have been. Another feature of past unrest involved who was assigned blame for inciting violence. On most occasions, people who opposed riotous violence or wanted to blame anyone but local people for starting it often declared “outside agitators” as causing most of the damage that happened when really it was local people. In Ferguson, Charlottesville, and some Black Lives Matter protests, however, many of the participants were in fact outsiders. In the Capitol insurrection most of the participants did not live in the Washington, D.C. area. They were outsiders who came to the capitol city to support a coup d’état. Local people rarely cooperate with local authorities during a riot, but that does not mean they are unmindful of the damage they were doing. Historically, and here I am thinking in terms of several hundred years ago, people on both sides of a violent public fight tried not to kill each other and put more of their energy into pulling down or burning down buildings and mocking symbols of public authority. Beginning in the 19th century, at least in the United States, people on both sides of violent public fights still destroyed property and insulted public buildings and commemorative artifacts. But they became even less restrained and killed many more people than had been the case in the past. Today, people and organizations on both sides of heated public arguments have returned to fighting in ways reminiscent of earlier violent political confrontations. But they have cut way back on killing each other and in some cases destroying other persons’ private property. Violence against objects of public interest or representing public authority is still as popular as ever. The attention paid to targets with less practical value in peoples’ daily lives is another indication of rioters dialing down the amount of damage they do even as they increase its symbolic impact. In these and other ways, civil unrest has become more civil.36 This change carried over into other aspects of the violence that happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and most of the Black Lives Matter protests. It was most obvious in the way local people wanted nothing to do with more serious troublemakers. In Ferguson, local people pointed them out to authorities or tried to keep their distance from them. After the Capitol insurrection, many citizens turned in neighbors, friends, and even family members who had participated in the violence. The move toward showing greater restraint and less tolerance for violence also was apparent in how people reacted to the property damage that occurred. In the past, local people usually left the mess made during a protest or riot for someone else to clean up. Local people in Ferguson and the surrounding St. Louis area, Charlottesville, and virtually all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests made a point of trying to hold down the

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amount of violence and property destruction. In Ferguson and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer, local people took the first steps in cleaning up their community, sometimes even as the violence was moving to other nearby neighborhoods or commercial areas. I already noted how all four events became national and even international incidents. Most unrest in the United States has been a local affair. Newspapers in other parts of the country might carry stories about a particular uprising or violent outrage someplace else. But local unrest and violence were not national events, much less international incidents. Efforts to limit the effect of unrest and violence were usually also made by local authorities and occasionally by state authorities. Federal authorities did not intervene and usually tried to have as little to do with these events as possible. Except for what Donald Trump did in sending federal law officers to places like ­Portland, ­Oregon during Black Lives Matter protests, that is still the case today. The Whiskey Rebellion, a violent tax protest that took place in western Pennsylvania beginning in 1791, only ended when President George Washington sent thousands of American troops to end the “rebellion.” The first time that federal troops were used in a city took place in New York during the Draft Riots in 1863. Labor and political unrest would bring state and federal authorities to become involved in other local outbursts in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s that were not in cities.37 So, too, did several major episodes of racial unrest during and after the 1960s. Even today, however, it is rare for federal authorities to intervene in riots that happen away from the national Capitol. And when they show up, or when local authorities use heavy military gear to intimidate protesters as they did in Ferguson, it is viewed as a big mistake and an unnecessary provocation. Government authorities have emerged as the principal target of protest and unrest. Local businesses today are still vandalized in many riots and violent protests. Otherwise, businesspeople and commercial leaders have become marginal figures in our most heated public arguments and violent fights. Neither of these changes was new to the unrest that happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, or the Capitol insurrection. The selection of both public and private targets has been a feature of popular unrest for a long time in both the United States and Europe. The emergence more recently of law enforcers and government buildings as the principal targets of unrest has made it easier to declare riots and other mass disturbances as “political” acts and put local governments in the position of being the principal arbiters of peoples’ private grievances. The problem is that public officials were never in the best position to address concerns people had with retailers, employers, lenders, and landlords or to push private institutions to make big public concessions. The growth of governments as employers and their influence as customers of commercial entities made it even easier for people with grievances to target governments

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as both the cause of their problems and the place to look for help when they had complaints with businesspeople. Notwithstanding the active involvement of outsiders in the events that transpired in Ferguson, Charlottesville, the Black Lives Matter protests, and Capitol insurrection, at no point was their membership in the community seriously contested. Their presence certainly drew skeptical looks and more than a little pushback. But their right as citizens to be there was not ­challenged. How they behaved was the issue. This was another big change in the history of unrest and violence in the United States. As I noted earlier, questions about who could be viewed and treated as fully vetted and accepted community members have been at the center of most public unrest and violence in American history. Newcomers and outsiders would present themselves as legitimate claimants for membership in the community. Long-time residents and people with more social and political status actively resisted such efforts. These confrontations often turned violent. They also were among the more destructive and deadly fights people had in American towns and cities. But today, violence over a group’s claim to membership in a community has all but disappeared. The unrest and violence in the four events featured in this book had much more to do with the accountability of public leaders and officials to the people they led and governed. Members of “the people” were either protesting an action that public leaders had already taken or petitioning officials to take a particular course of action. At the root of all the petitioning and protesting were complaints about the government’s exercise of its power. In the case of the unrest in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter protests, the power in question was the use of force by law enforcement agencies. In the case of Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection, the power in question involved making decisions that people wanted to contest. I will make a big deal later in the book about the fact that the protesters and rioters in these last two cases were white people. In general, however, unrest prompted by questions of public accountability is much less deadly and often less destructive than popular unrest and communal violence that involves questions over a group’s status as full-fledged community members. This latter kind of unrest and violence was common in the 19th century and well into the middle of the 20th century. Its most recent expression surrounded the arrival of black people in predominantly white neighborhoods. The unrest and violence that happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and Black Lives Matter protests involved community people and organizations. Organizations were deeply involved in what happened at the Capitol, but so too were many citizens who were not members of the white nationalist groups that were there. The unrest in Ferguson and Black Lives Matter protests was progressive in character. What happened in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. was more reactionary in nature.

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Americans had not seen this mix of communally inspired and more organizationally rich progressive and reactionary unrest since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.38 There was a great deal more violence associated with these movements than with contemporary movements that also bring community members and organizations together in public violence. I will try to make better sense of how these different elements fit into the long and complicated history of unrest and violence in the United States. There is a good chance I will succeed more than I hinted at earlier. That is because the kinds of unrest and violence some Americans might be inclined to support have a great deal more in common with the kinds that they would disapprove of than any of us appreciates. Later in the book, for instance, I will draw parallels between the process of conflict escalation preceding the Capitol Insurrection and the conflicts that preceded many “protest riots” of the 1960s. One can make similar comparisons of left and right-leaning participants in contemporary unrest. To put the matter too bluntly, perhaps, people who support Antifa may have more in common with members of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers than they imagine or would care to acknowledge. They have jobs, families they love, houses they work hard to keep up, good friends and neighbors, go to church, pay their taxes, and vote. Antifa supporters and members of white nationalist groups are broadly representative of the people who live where they live. That’s one important piece of the story of American unrest and violence that has not changed. This fact may prove important in calming some of the heated political rhetoric and violent moves contemporary radicals say they want to make. If Proud Boys and Oath Keepers didn’t use the guns they brought to Washington as part of an insurrection and coup d’état, they are unlikely to bring them to a school board meeting. Antifa supporters and members of leftwing militia are no more likely to shoot up the places where they live, or their children go to school. Activists may be more restrained today than they were in the past. But even in the past, radicals talked a lot tougher than they were willing to act. As Ted Gurr put it more than 40 years ago, (m)any people committed to social change in Western societies used revolutionary rhetoric during the 1960s and early 1970s. Few had the dedication, skills, or calculated willingness to kill that are necessary to organize and sustain an armed revolutionary movement. The fact of the matter is that their revolutionary rhetoric was seldom more than a dramatic way of calling attention to reformist demands for societal justice and more responsible government.39 For a long time, disorder has been more restrained than people imagined. This restraint is part of the complicated history of civil unrest and violence

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they acquired from English colonists who practiced different ways of making order and changing order in the communities they founded.40 Most of their popular unrest and violence was designed to bring bourgeois sensibilities and orderliness to their community, not push it to the breaking point but to the point where people would fix it. Craziness in Popular Unrest and Violence

In the face of all the new and old challenges Americans had to face and all the would-be contenders for membership in their communities, people searched for a new explanation for all the unrest and violence that the newcomers and outsiders inspired. The way they came to explain it to themselves was remarkably straightforward. People use unrest and become violent not because their communities work poorly but because they aren’t as civilized as other individuals in their community. The problem people had following rules and being compliant had little or nothing to do with how well their town or city worked. It had everything to do with them being unwilling or unable to live and act like people who had lived there a lot longer and were more culturally attuned to what was expected of them.41 Whether people involved in different kinds of unrest were of sound mind, off their rocker, misjudging their situation, or absolutely spot on in their assessment of how they were being talked about and treated in public really does not matter. The key to understanding the unrest people made was the idea that troublemakers ignore or reject more conventional kinds of behavior. Customs and norms that constrain people’s behavior and give it meaningful direction, keep them in line and their more dangerous impulses in check had failed. People turned to violence when they no longer feel constrained. Pushbacks against this argument are only a few decades old and only happened because a great many of us agreed with civil rights protesters. We didn’t think they were crazy or unable to fit in. Our new explanation for unrest was that people acted out when customary ways of thinking and playing by the rules weren’t working for them. The rules needed to be reset. People acted out so others around them would be inspired to act better. This way of thinking about unrest and violence makes it look more rational than the way it often plays out, however. And it most certainly does not fit the way people opposed to unrest and violence characterize the people acting out. If nothing else, the tension between these different ways of looking at unrest and violence and making sense of this behavior should help us understand a bit better why we have such a hard time figuring out when and why people use violence in public. When it comes to making sense of their own violent behavior, the fact is aggrieved people are not necessarily their own best advocates. They often

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are unable to articulate all that is bothering them or to express their anger in ways others would consider reasonable. In this, aggrieved people may be no more self-aware than the rest of us. The lesson history teaches us, however, is that just because an over-the-top reaction to a situation looks wildly inappropriate, does not mean peoples’ fears or anger were misdirected or won’t get them something they want. It only means people involved in a seemingly irrational act of collective ­behavior were searching for a new way and place to park their grievances and ­address their serious concerns. More than a half-century ago, Alan Kerckhoff and Kurt Back described a particularly dramatic incident that captures the larger theoretical point I am trying to make about the danger in taking head-on the problems we have with people from a different group or class. Kerckhoff and Back, sociologists from Duke University, were asked to figure out what had happened to make the new owners of a Southern fabric mill shut it down during the busiest manufacturing time of the year. The story told to the sociologists was that many workers had passed out and sought medical treatment after being bitten by a bug. The problem was no one seemed able to find “The Bug.”42 Kerckhoff and Back described what had happened as a textbook case of “hysterical contagion.” There had been no infestation of bugs. No one had been bitten. But peoples’ problem wasn’t just “in their heads.” The important question the sociologists set themselves to answer was why people had acted as if that’s where the whole problem had been. Crazy as the workers’ behavior might have appeared to everyone else, the researchers noted the “infestation” had accomplished a couple of things that in retrospect made good economic and social sense. Workers got muchneeded time off. They did not have to go on strike and face the possibility of losing their job. The owners had a chance to step back and figure out how they might respond the next time their workers felt stressed out. And before too long, everyone went back to doing what they were expected to do: Make more fabric. The moral of this story was clear enough. Acting in an “irrational” way on this occasion had produced a better result and certainly a more immediate response to what was bothering workers than they would have gotten had they turned their problem into a much bigger public fight about “workers’ rights” versus “owners’ privileges,” which Southern workers almost always lost.43 “Sick days” were easier to deal with than “defiance days” would have been. The bottom line is this. Acting crazy does not mean you are. Sometimes crazy works. Sometimes “crazy” ensures the legitimacy of a system better than coming at “the system” straight on. Bringing “crazy” to “the system” straight on is a recipe for more serious trouble and potential carnage. Just ask anyone inside or outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

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From the perspective of a scientist or theoretician, this is the part of unrest – the spontaneous, outrageous, seemingly untethered, and altogether surprising and unpredictable parts of collective behavior – critics point out and dwell on. It is also the part of unrest more sympathetic outsiders miss when they insist outrageous-looking behavior isn’t crazy when crazy is the biggest thing everyone else sees, including the people who had to figure out afterwards why they acted crazily. Sociologists interested in the civil rights movement unknowingly made their own contribution to the idea collective behavior is not predictable and, hence, not a rational response to problems people have. It came with their research on rioting that occurred during the 1960s. Other than the fact cities with more black residents tended to have more unrest, sociologists could find very little that distinguished places that had riots from places that did not.44 On the surface, this was good social science. There was a hypothesis. Researchers expected underlying conditions that had a large and not good effect on minority persons’ lives – poverty, joblessness, residential segregation, the way local governments were arranged – would produce more violence. The hypothesis did not pan out nearly as well as researchers expected, however.45 The bad conditions with which black persons wrestled did not account for where rioting occurred or how severe rioting had been. There were just as many places, in fact more places, with these same built-in or “structural” impediments to black persons’ well-being that did not have unrest. Had social scientists been true to their calling they might have tried to find other “structural” factors to account for where violence happened and did not happen. (They couldn’t come up with any other variables of that sort.) Or, they could have searched for other non-structural factors – things they could not count such as the way groups dealt with community disagreements – to account for why some places had unrest and others did not. To that end, they might have turned to historical case studies of riots for clues to what might be going on. Such studies were available. But that still would have left them empty-handed because few people write about riots that do not happen. Besides, the whole point of being a scientist was to have lots of numbers of countable things and compare them to places that had violence and did not have violence, which they had already tried. This left social scientists in a quandary. People responsible for coming up with ideas about how to soften the effects of the “racism” they knew deep in their bones caused people to rebel or believed just as firmly had absolutely nothing to do with why people rioted and waited for scientists to tell them what to do about racial violence. And we had nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Social scientists had lots of theorizing about what allegedly goes on in the minds of people who act out in public demonstrations and other more violent

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public gatherings. And it was to psychological theories about the rationality and irrationality of riotous persons that researchers like me turned to for answers.46 More liberally inclined social scientists, now occupying the high moral ground and in charge of most academic journals, reverted to explanations focusing on all the grievances black people must have had and the anger this created in many of them. Cities with more black people seemed to have more unrest. The reason why was that there were more people with grievances, bad feelings about their situation, and perceptions of mistreatment. The problem is that opponents of Civil Rights unrest and rioting, with no more evidence to support their claims than liberals had to support theirs, could and did find their own psychological explanations to justify their negative view of the same events. Namely, riots did not happen because black people had legitimate grievances. Riots happened because a great many ­people with poor impulse control, black people in this case, lived in cities. The connection between cities as places where less civilized things happen and the less civilized people living there was spelled out by Edward Banfield who argued black people were “rioting for fun and profit.”47 His book The Unheavenly City was mandatory reading for persons working in the White House during Richard Nixon’s term as President. I had the chance to be interviewed by Banfield when he was at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was looking for my first academic job as a new Ph.D. out of the University of North Carolina. My dissertation, which figured into one of the pieces of a future theory of unrest to which I alluded earlier, was all about the sequence of events that had preceded the first major riot in the 1960s: The 1964 violence in New York City’s Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods. No one had ever done research on the sequencing of events leading to a riot. I discovered some interesting things and was feeling pretty good about myself. I also was understandably nervous in my interview with such a notable social scientist. Banfield was calm and asked good questions. The only question I recall asking him was very much in keeping with my status as a brandnew smarty pants Ph.D. “How hard was it to dig up a theory of rioting from inside the brains of black people?” I do not recall his answer. I owe Banfield an apology which now will be delivered a quarter century too late. His explanation about black people rioting for “fun and profit” got it half right. Historically, the “fun” part of his characterization was a good insight. The making a profit part was politically popular at the time but wrong. Obviously, rioters had looted a great deal from stores they vandalized and sometimes lit on fire. Research on more recent rioting in England have used similar language when referring to looters as going “shopping.”48 But Banfield was wrong about the advantage realized by rioters for the looting they did. It was short-term at best, closer to “shopping” than

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undermining the capitalist system. Whatever consumer goods they might have taken after breaking into a store changed nothing about the bad economic situation they would continue to face. In fact, the long-term economic consequences of rioting ran were just as bad as its critics maintained. Rioting hurt the economic prospects of the communities where it occurred and the people who lived there.49 The part of his thesis about rioting as “fun” should not have been dismissed so quickly. On the one hand, his argument echoed ideas in classical theories of collective behavior, implying riots were irrational outbursts of emotional release that accomplished nothing. On the other hand, Banfield anticipated more recent work by historians who traced the historical roots of exuberant carnivalesque celebrations that were tolerated, encouraged, and even sanctioned by community and church leaders.50 Riotous exuberance bore a striking resemblance to medieval carnivalesque celebrations. The disruptive look and feel of riots and other outrageous public acts, the ecstatic behavior presenting itself as irrational and out of control is real. Historians and social scientists who have written about this behavior were not mistaken. People do lose “it” for a time. One would be hard pressed to call the behavior “rational.” What most social scientists missed or chose to ignore were the conventional ends served by groups acting in ecstatic and irrational-looking and sounding ways.51 Far from tearing society apart, crazy-looking behavior that goes away almost as quickly as it shows up can and does reaffirm the importance of rule following and orderliness in all the other parts of our lives together that persist. It does so by having put the more conventional parts of our lives through a kind of cultural stress test, which the conventional parts almost always pass by lasting a great deal longer than the challenges to them do.52 Banfield looked the other way and appealed his argument to critics of racially inspired reforms who had already made up their minds about black people and violence. At the same time, advocates of racial reform drew on the same kind of psychological profiles of rioters and protesters to defend their view of violence as erupting from the accumulated grievances black people had for all the ways they were still being mistreated. Both sides climbed into the heads of black people and pulled out what they wanted to see and already believed. We know better today that black people are not the only people who can act unexpectedly and inappropriately in public. One of the historians discussed below, Alexis de Tocqueville, figured out almost two hundred years ago how more well-to-do white people, from the South, could behave this way too. What is more, Tocqueville thought such displays performed a valuable cultural service in the communities where they happened. Americans, it seemed, left plenty of room in their civic lives for behavior that looked more problematic and unhinged than it was and let us look and sometimes laugh at our own hypocrisy.

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The foundation of all arguments about the craziness apparent in unscheduled acts of collective behavior, as I already noted, was laid in the late 19th century. That is when scholars worked hard to make sense of behavior that no longer seemed to fit a world facing challenges leaders were struggling to keep up with and everyone who wasn’t a leader was unwilling to accept quietly. It is against this historical backdrop that unrest and the violence sometimes accompanying it became outdated and objectionable relics from an earlier time, behavior to repress if it could not be contained and its popular energy put to more peaceful and productive ends. This is how popular unrest became unpopular and the people who acted this way came to be criticized for being as mindless and unhinged as their behavior was destructive. The destruction was not confined to private property and the lives of persons who were attacked. Violence was an assault on the integrity and stability of the whole community. In the case of the Capitol insurrection, the attack was an assault to the integrity and stability of the whole nation. The idea that people might have suffered from privation or been mistreated was no longer a relevant consideration for people in charge or sitting on top of the heap in their community. It was left to the people who were not in charge or were much lower on their town or city’s pecking order to make their private grievances a public affair. Ever since, theorists have had much to say about the connection between peoples’ political powerlessness and economic plight and their use of unrest.53 Inequality and Unrest

The argument positing a connection between inequality and violent unrest was straightforward. People act out when they believe they are being mistreated or given less public regard than they are accustomed to or think they deserve. Their assessment of mistreatment can be wildly overstated and off the mark or right on target. It doesn’t matter. People imagine they are being treated in a lessthan-evenhanded or equitable manner, even if they cannot articulate why. And they sometimes take strong, quite violent steps to correct whatever is bothering them and do so without any guarantee they will be treated better afterward but every expectation they should be. The principal kinds of mistreatment or unequal treatment and public disregard people find most troubling involve their social, economic, or political standing in the community. Research and theorizing about the connection between inequality and unrest holds that people are more likely to act out when they are consistently or badly insulted in public; when they experience a sudden and sharp reversal in their economic fortunes or when their fortunes are improving; or when they believe their government refuses to take them or their interests seriously.

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Except for the part about people sometimes rioting when their current economic situation deteriorates and sometimes when their economic fortunes are improving, the unrest-inducing properties of inequality sound plausible. The relation between inequality and unrest becomes more complicated from this point forward. Differences in peoples’ economic or political standing affect whole classes of people such as rich people and poor people or people who govern the rest of us and those of us who are governed. Persons in the same economic or political class need not know each other or have shared anything more than a higher or lower rung on their community’s economic, political, or social ladder. Differences in the fortunes of social groups are more immediately and obviously felt by people who know more about each other, and belong to the same community, ethnic population, religious body, and local associations. Differences of opinion about social groups and displays of the poor regard shown them are played out in public every day, sometimes difficult to ignore, and often hard to watch. One of the important lessons involving unrest and violence in U.S. and European history is that people work overtime and apparently successfully to keep potential class conflicts and violence from happening. They focus instead on conflicts and violence peculiar to the groups they identify with more closely. It is sometimes a relatively simple matter to identify which kind of inequality is being fought over. For instance, a fight between persons from different races, ethnic groups, or religions certainly involves disagreements over their respective social or cultural standing in the community. Their public exchanges can become emotionally charged brawls. A strike pits business owners against their employees. Disputes between people who have the right to vote and people who do not have obvious implications for whose political voice counts and whose does not. In a country with as complex a population as the United States has, however, it is a safe bet any given public disagreement or fight might involve more than one kind of inequality. A labor dispute in which an owner brought in scab workers belonging to a race or ethnic group different from the one most of the striking laborers belong to is a good example. Indeed, there was a substantial connection between racial or ethnic unrest and labor unrest in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The complicated arrangement of social groups and classes in the United States is often reflected in the fights we pick with each other, and just as importantly the ones we don’t pick. Even a casual review of American history, for instance, shows we have been playing “identity politics” and refining its meaning for a long time. People have fought often and bitterly over mistreatment and public insults they experienced because they were part of a particular race, religion, or ethnic group. People representing different political groups or classes have used unrest and violence, but not as often as people from different ethnic,

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racial, and religious groups have. People from different economic classes have used unrest and violence even less to settle scores and make important points.54 Additional evidence of fights we have tried to keep in check is found in campaigns to vet women as full-fledged and credible members of their communities and the nation. It was not until the 20th century that women made gender another “group” identity to be socially, economically, and politically contested. Our first big public fight involving the status of women was over their right to vote, and we all know how that one turned out. Disagreements over the status of women did not end there, of course. The failure of states to support an Equal Rights Amendment to the United States. Constitution in the mid-1970s and the debate over abortion rights were unmistakable clues that public contestation over the status of women as fully vetted citizens was not close to being settled. Indeed, more recent disagreements over peoples’ gender identity and transgendered people have expanded the contested field of man–woman differences. What is important here isn’t that people disagree about such matters. It is that none of our fights about the social status of women and, more broadly, over peoples’ gender has become violent or inspired much more than large and noisy public demonstrations. The absence of violent public disturbances over women’s status and “­gender rights” is an important example of how Americans practice and succeed at keeping certain disagreements within non-violent boundary lines. The absence of violent fights between groups or classes of people – a classic example of a “non-event” – is important for the people who might otherwise have been injured, of course. But it also tells us something important about how open or closed a community is to the would-be combatants. The “non-event” is crucial to understanding not just debates over ­women’s rights but the four moments of unrest and violence featured in this book. It turns out that what happens in moments of unrest or violence is not the most telling sign of what matters most. More telling and important is what doesn’t happen. In the case of disagreements over women’s status and gender relations, the absence of widespread unrest and violent confrontations as big and violent as those between people from different religions, races, and ethnic backgrounds today speaks to how well integrated and accepted men and women already were in their communities and American society generally. People belonging to these other groups had to fight more and often more violently for the privilege of being recognized and taken seriously. Men and women didn’t or not nearly as much. What did not happen in these conflicts mattered a great deal, not so much tactically but culturally. One way we might better appreciate the significance of the non-event is to acknowledge how long and hard people have worked to keep arguments about economic inequality in front of legislators and judges

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and off the street. Americans had made class-based unrest and violence in the past, and elites recognized the threat it posed, which is why they found legislative and judicial ways to manage these kinds of disputes. The willingness of elites to let enough outsiders and newcomers be successful kept enough of them happy and the rest of their peers quiet was a big factor in making worse class violence something that didn’t happen. It is not that economic inequality or political inequality are unimportant or people do not feel the sting of being less well-to-do or politically voiceless. Indeed, social scientists and historians have written extensively about the class-based origins of economic and political revolutions. The fact there are few revolutions speaks to the difficulty of bringing so many people together whose intention would be to overhaul the entire arrangement of economic and political classes in their society. The absence of persistent and violent fights over economic inequality turns out to be a big cultural “tell.” Making class-based unrest is hard. If it were easy, given how much economic inequality is still a big fact of life in American society, people would make more of it. Finding ways to soften the effects of economic inequality rather than ending it has been an easier solution to the problem. Of late we have seen people more willing to use unrest and violence for explicitly political purposes. As I mentioned earlier, the last time this happened during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements the results were inconclusive but did not end well for groups that espoused more revolutionary goals and displayed a willingness to use violence to achieve them. Right now, rightwing and white nationalist organizations and their members are receiving the same kind of pushback law enforcement agencies gave black, Hispanic, and anti-war radicals a half-century ago. Whether elites find a way to move most white nationalists off the streets and into courts and onto legislative agendas remains to be seen. But elites also could receive help from an unexpected source: Non-elite persons and groups in the communities where today’s radicals live and work. It may not look that way now, but this would not be the first time that different groups of upset and angry Americans in the same community figured out they could get along better than expected. Our rich history of community-based unrest between people from different races, religions, and nationalities show it can happen. Fighting and Making Up in Public

Violent fights between groups from different races, nationalities, and religions have become much less frequent and deadly. People apparently have found ways to get along with their new and potentially disagreeable neighbors and move past whatever had been bothering them. Unfortunately, we are not sure how this happens.

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There is no research whose explicit focus is on unrest and violence that didn’t happen. It is clear, however, that people belonging to different social groups often came to accept the presence of outsiders and newcomers in their community. After what was a difficult and sometimes violent introduction to each other, people gradually learned they could live near each other if not exactly with each other.55 Sometimes they only managed to keep a respectful distance. On other occasions, they did appreciably better than that. There are many case studies of urban neighborhoods where these kinds of accommodations apparently worked out. Most of these studies mention the existence of “tensions,” hard feelings, and disagreements between different groups. Few, if any, mention these tensions, hard feelings, or disagreements growing into community brawls or anything resembling efforts to expel the newcomers and outsiders.56 The knowledge and practices people bring to their fights may figure into how they back away from fighting and learn to make accommodations to each other. At this point, however, we have not studied this other face of conflict and violence enough to know how we make peace with ourselves and each other after a big violent fight. The best that researchers have been able to come up with so far to describe how conflicts grow into violent confrontations is that people try to avoid violence. As I mentioned earlier, they will petition, protest, and make appeals through whatever informal channels and formal institutions are available to them before turning to violence. They do not ratchet up public pressure until less-than-violent ways of redressing their grievances have been shown to be ineffective or deemed irrelevant. I noted earlier how researchers have more than a notion that people use violence more as a last resort than the first thing they do when they become angry with each other.57 Violence is understood to be an extreme response to problems people have with each other. All signs to the contrary notwithstanding, most Americans, even the angriest white ones, are unable to carry out their most violent fantasies and plots to take over the world. Connections people make across racial, ethnic, or religious lines inoculate them from attacks by their neighbors. Attacks continue in communities where cross-racial, ethnic, or religious ties are absent or severely underdeveloped.58 Research into community conflicts that end violently are stories about people who could not figure out how to make such connections or saw no good reasons to try. Social historians working with information about violent conflicts in Europe have identified behavioral “repertoires” different parties brought to their past conflicts and chronicled.59 They have tracked how some actions are used more than others and argued about the strategic and moral value of violent versus non-violent actions. And, of course, they also tried to make sense of the effect violence has on the parties involved in a conflict.

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What sociologists have not done is to build on the insights provided by social historians. They have not presented well-defined and empirically tested hypotheses about how violence fits in a specific series of events surrounding civic conflicts. They also have not compared these findings to conflicts that have not involved violence. Therefore, we still do not know enough about how old-timers and newcomers or people belonging to different races, ethnic groups, and religions test each other’s patience to the point their disagreements will grow into unavoidable, nasty, and violent public fights. If there is a sequence of behavioral cues that take groups from making non-violent challenges to engaging in violence or keeps them from going there, we have not yet discovered it. The process by which conflicts escalate into violence is still a mystery, at least to most of us anyway. As it happens, this was the problem I addressed in my dissertation and had a chance to discuss with Edward Banfield. I had tracked every news account of racial disagreements, disputes, public utterances, attempts at making accommodations, and conflict in New York City between January 1960 and the rioting that took place in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in July 1964. Almost 700 different groups and organizations were involved either as initiators or the targets of these activities. They represented the “minority community” or were government agencies, political groups, businesses, and a host of civic organizations, all of which were drawn into civil rights controversies in the city at that time. The behavior of these parties was coded on an eleven-point scale ranging from more cooperative acts at one end, non-cooperative actions at the other end, and conventional information sharing in the middle.60 While I had hypotheses about the process of conflict escalation based on what we knew or supposed about intergroup conflict, this was a first-ofits-kind study and a study of only one city’s experience at that. At least in this case, conflicts did not continue to escalate up to the point that rioting ­occurred. Protests, marches, and other iconic civil rights’ challenges that had been directed first at local business and private institutions and then against public officials dropped off dramatically before the July 1964 riots. Turned to instead were even more provocative and legally problematic challenges to the local government. The 1964 riots were the most extreme example of these challenges. The drop-off in less confrontational kinds of petitioning and protests had not been expected. I did not explore what happened after the violence subsided in 1964. I do not know how everyone reacted to the violence and how much they changed their behavior afterward. We do know subsequent episodes of unrest for the rest of the decade were smaller, weren’t preceded by so much public agitation, and didn’t last as long.61 So, all the sides to these conflicts learned something about the hazards and consequences of making violence. But I never considered what those lessons might have been. And, to the best of

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my knowledge, no one ever tried to see if the pattern of conflict escalation I found had happened in other places. Its limitations notwithstanding, this half-century old study remains the most detailed account we have about how conflicts escalated before a major violent outburst. A second item of interest raised in my case study has only recently been explored in a very nice study of mobilization and public challenges initiated between 1970 and 2005 by groups in Chicago.62 The researchers found protest activities were a dramatic but comparatively small piece of the civic acts initiated by groups during the period of study. Most of the time, most groups did what one would expect them to do: Routine civic-minded activities. I had found that groups and institutions involved in civil rights fights continued to make neutral and more cooperative noises and gestures to each other right up to the point when violence occurred. Researchers and theorists who believe unconventional actions like unrest and violence complement more conventional kinds of group actions see no big gap between big public fights and more conventional ways people have learned to get along and manage their differences.63 Conflict is not just about becoming more aggressively contentious. It is about cooperating, too, even with one’s opponents, and not creating a permanent split in the community. Another item of interest raised in the Chicago case study points to a continuing problem sociologists have with history. They don’t read enough of it. The Chicago research team claims to have discovered a brand-new kind of civic engagement: A “hybrid” civic-protest kind of activity. This would be an activity, something like a community party or a commemorative march, that the participants used to challenge authorities about something bothering people in the community. The problem is there is absolutely nothing new about this kind of “­hybrid” form of community activism. Many of the attempts to communicate and cooperate made by civil rights groups in New York City that I chronicled reflected this kind of “hybrid” blend. More importantly, case studies of conflicts and interracial testing of the sort I referred to earlier show how community groups use conventional activities to make a statement about wider community concerns. Less powerful groups have long used the protective cover provided by a religious service or community gathering to make claims and complain. The parodying and mocking of community leaders by black people built into community celebrations such as Mardi Gras parades, for instance, were not just tolerated by whites. They were juxtaposed with the white’s celebration of themselves and their higher status in the same parade. The parodies and fun making at the expense of white people were accepted by white community leaders, for that one time in the year. While there may have been nothing new in the “civic protests” made by the groups in Chicago, showing how big a part they played on Chicago’s

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civic stage was an important contribution. One of the points I already made about contemporary civic unrest is that it is bringing together contradictory reactionary and progressive themes in the same event. The Chicago research team shows how “conventional” an “unconventional” challenge can be. There is a final piece of the conflict escalation puzzle I identified that to the best of my knowledge sociologists rarely talk about and historians talk about all the time.64 Differences between minority activists, between institutional and business leaders, and between government agencies and officials play a part in the way conflicts escalate and sometimes turn violent. The inability of like-minded and situated groups and organizations to get their own acts together makes it difficult to make accommodations to their opponents or put forth a common action agenda. In New York, it also contributed to the escalation process that led to rioting in 1964.65 The principal reason some cities have riots has little to do with how much economic inequality minority persons have endured. It has much more to do with the way persons have practiced being disagreeable and fighting in public about their patently unequal status in the community, usually falling well short of killing each other or running somebody out of town. Violence is not a “structural” problem and will not be managed or ended by overhauling a community’s economic hierarchy or political system. Violence is a social and cultural problem that will not be managed better much less managed away until people learn how to manage themselves and each other more agreeably. Norbert Elias and Steven Pinker were right. Being less violent is all about learning to be more civilized. It is all about less well-off and less well-­regarded people learning to share the rights, duties, privileges, and obligations that were once claimed to be the special province of more well-off and betterregarded people. As sociologists might put it, it’s all about taking the role of the “other” or learning how to walk in someone else’s shoes. The ratcheting up and ratcheting down parts of conflict and the way people mix more organized and more spontaneous ways to fight in public still elude and bewilder us. Whether we approve or disapprove of the way public disagreements work out, the process by which conflicts escalate remain nearly as mysterious, unpredictable, and surprising as the violence they sometimes produce.66 What we have learned about contemporary social movements might well point us in a promising direction. “Us Too” Movements

Repeating what I said earlier, we know the violence Americans commit during public disturbances is much less deadly than it used to be.67 Violence to public buildings and businesses has returned to its once preeminent perch

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as the most favorite targets of popular discontent. It never really fell out of favor. Now that people are not targeted as much as they were in the past, attacks on private and public properties are just more obvious.68 Social movements have become an even more popular and accepted element in the repertoire of strategies people use to insert themselves into the public arena and press their views about what they want to change.69 The number of groups and the variety of interests promoted in contemporary social movements are quite remarkable.70 Many are explicitly political in nature, aiming to influence public policies, just as researchers have argued for some time. Their accomplishments are as varied as the causes they support.71 Others, such as the “Us Too” movements mentioned below, are smaller and associated with groups more involved with “identity politics” than with larger political concerns. In general, the principal service social movements perform is not unlike that of much shorter, smaller, and intense rituals of rebellions staged by local people and whatever organizations they can muster to back their play. Social movements mobilize would-be supporters on behalf of issues they believe the public should be paying more attention to, attempt to redress grievances toolong overlooked, and petition leaders to do something about the overlooked issues and unaddressed grievances. Because they are often far better organized and draw on more resources to make their claims, the singular advantage social movements have over rituals of rebellion is that they often make a more immediate and obvious difference in what leaders do.72 The decline in violence and growth in social movements in the United States today are connected.73 State repression and harassment of minority activists in the late 1960s and 1970s clearly played a part in discouraging groups with more radical and violent sympathies from carrying out armed attacks against government agents. But so, too, did serious and successful attempts by all manner of minority-based activists to work through more politically conventional channels to redress grievances and affect public policies.74 Loosely coupled but well-connected networks of organizations engage in all kinds of short and longer-term social movements and claim-making in public today. More progressive and reactionary groups have been involved in such campaigns in recent decades.75 They have become accepted as new petitioners and the way protesters are able to air their views and make their complaints. Their messages are reaching opinion leaders and decision-makers. Other more traditional pieces of popular unrest in the form of street demonstrations, marches, and the like are being practiced more widely as well. They are a comparatively easy way to find and energize people who share the ideas of more committed activists but have not yet joined the larger movements those activists organize and run.76 More advantaged people have made a reappearance in popular unrest as well. This is apparent in the kinds of social movements whose middle-class

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supporters push more boutique causes. These movements, many of which focus more on matters of personal identity than politics, make good use of the contacts and “soft skills” more advantaged people possess. The combined effect of having more organized movements and less violence has made our unrest more civil but at the same time more politically polarized.77 It is difficult to reach compromises or find ways to split the differences between groups whose principal goal is to talk about themselves rather than thornier matters like pollution, abortion rights, and censorship whose supporters and detractors have different social class, racial, and religious profiles.78 Individuals inclined to look at the world through more liberally or conservatively shaded glasses both have something to celebrate with this turn in popular unrest. Liberals can take satisfaction knowing the movement to secure more civil rights for black Americans inspired people with other special social identities – women, “Hispanics” or “Latinos,” persons of Asian descent, gays and lesbians, persons with disabilities, and any number of groups – to launch “Us Too” movements and try to make a place for themselves in the public arena. The rise of such groups made Americans with more conservative political views go apoplectic over the views “Us Too” movements have been pushing or alleged to be pushing down everyone’s throat. Today, political conservatives rail against political correctness, critical race theory, and absolutely anything and everything that seems to diminish more traditional view ways of looking at the world and the comfortable places they had staked out for themselves in it. And right up to the 2022 mid-term elections, their erstwhile political leaders and media avatars had done a cracking good job of channeling these outrages into effective political campaigns and electoral victories. On the one hand, the social impact of “identity politics” clearly favors liberals who don’t mind different groups poking their finger in everyone else’s face. On the other hand, the political impact of “identity politics” clearly favors conservatives trying to preserve America rather than open it up to cultural outsiders whose principal goals seem to be self-promotion and rattling the cages of their more conservative neighbors. The success more reactionary groups have had in pushing their versions of white nationalism into the public arena and politicians have had in exploiting white people’s special identity shows that identity politics can be played just as readily and effectively by cultural “insiders” as it can be by people long ignored or considered “outsiders.” No matter whose identity is being advanced or resisted today, “identity politics” and “Us Too” movements need to be appreciated both for what their supporters want to accomplish and the way they are going about it. In most of the 19th and 20th centuries, questions about who could be considered a full-fledged and vital contributor to the community were more heavily and violently contested. Today, these questions have been taken off the streets and treated as partisan punchlines in electoral campaigns whose

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practical impact is real and thus far has favored more conservative political leaders and their media-friendly enablers. The rise of “Us Too” movements has opened the public arena to many groups who had little or no public presence in the past. But it has also fractured and polarized our political discourse and made it hard for activists to mobilize enough support for long enough to have much impact on the streets or in the ballot box.79 This is not what Tocqueville had in mind when he suggested the only good way to counter the effects of groups backing into their own private corners was to find common ground in the political arena where they could all meet. There is much to recommend giving groups with special identities the time and space outside the political arena to figure out on their own how they can be alike and different at the same time. These are social and cultural matters, not political ones. Taking our social and cultural differences out on each other in the streets led to quieter accommodations being struck after people had a good knockdown fight in front of all their neighbors. As I said earlier, sometimes people need to be smacked in the head just to be reminded how much unfinished business they have and the potential harm they can do to their community if they don’t take more interest in each other’s business. Running away from a big public fight only postpones a social and cultural reckoning. It doesn’t make our differences go away. Just ask the people of Ferguson, Missouri or anyone trying to understand what happened in Charlottesville, in Black Lives Matter protests, and on January 6, 2021. This is what makes the events discussed in this book so interesting and important but also illustrates why this is such a confusing time in our history. We are turning our local differences into national chest-thumping contests and ignoring the calming effect a good local fight can have for the people who have the most to lose when they don’t take each other seriously and the most to gain when they do. Civil Unrest

All this notwithstanding, given the amount and kinds of unrest and violence we are experiencing today, the word “civil” probably would be way down on the list of adjectives used to describe unruly behavior. Nevertheless, I maintain that the practice of unrest in the United States today is more civil than it has been since the late 18th century, but at the same time it has also lost the moral punch those earlier fights had. Local business and political leaders have pawned their problems off on national leaders who have no stake in the outcome of their local fights but use them to raise their personal political capital by pretending they care and can do something about them. Nevertheless, compared to how lethal American unrest was, say, in the 19th century, violence today is not as bad. Compared to what communities

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experienced in the better part of the 20th century? Here, too, my answer would be yes. By the end of the 20th century, violence committed by citizens fighting each other or police and other law enforcers such as the National Guard was less lethal. I cannot say the same about how destructive and costly collective violence was in the 20th century. The value of property destroyed in violent public outbursts probably was greater, if only because the cost to repair or replace it today would be so much more. Most popular unrest in the past was directed against property rather than property owners and against the buildings where government officials worked rather than officials themselves. In this sense, destroying more but killing less may be a good trade-off and a sign of progress. People are figuring out on their own how to be more civilized or maybe how expensive it is to be uncivilized. Compared to the destruction left in the wake of the four events discussed in this book? Well, if you exclude what happened in Ferguson, the physical destruction left behind in Charlottesville, averaged across all the cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection certainly was much less severe than what we had in past civil disturbances. But “averaging” the property losses that happened all the places that had Black Lives Matter protests and leaving Ferguson off the list is absurd. We will see a couple of chapters from now that property destruction associated with Black Lives Matter protests was immensely expensive. Property damage done in Ferguson was also substantial. Predictably, rebuilding efforts in that part are ongoing but the going is slow. Big plans to improve the commercial corridor most touched by arson and vandalism have yet to be implemented nearly a decade after violence occurred. The other reason excluding Ferguson would be a mistake is that we would miss one of the more important features of recent popular uprisings: They are all over the sociological map, so to speak. In the first two decades of the 21st century, we have had an unprecedented mix of reactionary and progressive types of disorder, not just in the same decade but in the same event. The unrest and violence that happened and did not happen in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection laid out a very real clash of reactionary-looking and progressive-looking ways of imagining the world and the kind of society we want to have in the future. Americans in the past have shown they know how to stage fights that brought these very different kinds of unrest and violence together. It was more obvious in particularly unsettled times. The American Revolution and the Civil War were prominent 18th-century and 19th-century examples of vastly different views of the world being fought over in public. In the 20th century, we saw a similar pattern in the uses of progressive and reactionary unrest and violence that occurred as part of the Civil Rights and Anti-­ Vietnam War movements.

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A return to unrest and violence with both progressive and reactionary features, especially at the local level, would be something to think about. My immediate reaction would be this is a big deal, though how threatening, destructive, and deadly a deal remains to be seen. It might not turn out so badly, given how much less lethal American civil unrest has become. The threat in mixing two types of unrest and violence together might be more symbolic this time and the damage done to institutions that are supposed to protect us from the worse angels of our nature more easily repaired. But, again, we simply do not know how much more mixing of progressive and reactionary unrest we will see and how such a turn of events would play out. I will argue there have been changes beyond the one where mixing progressive and reactionary unrest may happen more in the future or how much more “civil” unrest is today. The fact we have more groups than ever vying for public recognition and acceptance today is notable. It is even more noteworthy that these contests are not ending as violently as they did in the past. My conclusion for persons who want to make more scientific sense of unrest and violence is as annoying as it is unavoidable. Theories are neat. History isn’t. And democracies are downright messy. The same must also be said of the brave new world unrest and violence might be helping people fashion even as we kick and scream our way into it. We do not know what the new world will look like or what good all the thrashing does in bringing it about. But clues to where we might be headed are embedded in the unrest and violence we make and use against each other. I will try to make historical sense of where our most recent fights may be headed. I also will show our customary ways of being disagreeable and fighting with each other will more likely than not help us arrive to wherever we are going in one piece. Notes 1 The New York Times, June 4, 2020. “Can Riots Force Change?” Frank Bruni, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Goldberg; The New York Times, November 3, 2022. “America can have democracy of political violence. not both.” Editorial Board. 2 Williamson, Kevin, “The American Right Hits Its Hippie Phase.” National Review (July 23, 2021); Washington Post, February 17, 2022. “Sixty years late, right-wingers join the counterculture.” Dana Milbank. 3 The New York Times, January 7, 2021. “The Far Right told Us What It Had Panned. We Didn’t Listen.” Seyward Darby; The New York Times, May 7, 2021. “G.O.P. Focuses on Polarizing Cultural Issues in Drive to Regain Power.” Carl Hulse. 4 Garson, G. David and Gail O’Brien, “Collective Violence in the Reconstruction South.” In Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), pp. 243–260.

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5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898#:~:text= The%20Wilmington%20insurrection%20of%201898,Thursday%2C%20 November%2010%2C%201898. 6 Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis ­Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 83–118; Tilly, Charles, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Oxford: Oxford U ­ niversity Press, 2015); Tilly, Charles, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1998). 7 Simmel, Georg, Conflict & The Web of Group-Affiliations (New York: The Free Press, 1955). 8 The New York Times, June 16, 2020. “Why protest movements are ‘civil’ only in retrospect.” Maggie Astor. 9 Brooks, Robin, “Domestic Violence and America’s Wars: An Historical Interpretation,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in A ­ merica: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 307–328. 10 Collins, Ann, All Hell Broke Loose: American Race Riots from the Progressive Era through World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012); Barnes, Harper, Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker & Company, 2008); Waskow, Arthur I., From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967); Tuttle, William, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Haynes, Robert, A Night of Violence: the Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). 11 Just as important and hard-edged questions were raised by organizations representing the entire spectrum of left-to-right-wing views in the last third of the 19th century. That was a period in which all kinds of Americans, including people new to the country, wrestled with how to deal with the challenges posed by industrialization, city building, and large influxes of immigrants from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe and China. The tension and struggles associated with making the United States into a bourgeois society built around the accomplishment of order and pursuit of prosperity during this period has been well documented. See: Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Keller, Lisa, Triumph of Order: Democracy & Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820 and 1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 12 Torcal, Mariano, Toni Rodon, and Maria Jose Hierro, “Word on the Street: The Persistence of Leftist-dominated Protest in Europe.” Western European Politics Vol. 39 (2) (2016): 326–350. 13 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/princeton-anti-capitalist-class-teaching-blackpeople-should-be-considered-handicapped-due-to-systemic-racism/ar-AA1fduNF; https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-school-teaching-that-white-­peoplehave-no-culture-sparks-fury/ar-AA1gWuhy?cvid=98670dea5145422081839 beb6625674b&ei=26; https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/college-slammed-overnew-course-teaching-that-black-people-should-be-considered-disabled/arAA1fdX6x 14 https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-political-violencein-the-united-states/ 15 Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins

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of Nations (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Morgan, Edmund S., Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988). 16 Taft, Philip and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 187–242. 17 Janowitz, Morris, “Collective Racial Violence: A Contemporary History,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 261–286. 18 Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis ­Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 83–118; Tilly, Charles, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Tilly, Charles, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1998). 19 Horowitz, Donald, “Racial Violence in the United States,” in Nathan Glazer and Ken Young, eds. Ethnic Pluralism and Public Policy: Achieving Equality in the United States and Britain (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1983), pp. 188–190. 20 Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp. 202–204; Horowitz, Donald, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Horowitz, “Racial Violence,” p. 191. 21 Mennell, Stephen, Norbert Elias: The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 22 https://apnews.com/article/march-for-life-abortion-roe-anniversary0a7e6ef93091d16307ca935e0ae1d2bd. The Supreme Court’s decertification of abortion as a Constitutional right illustrates well the paramount importance of cultural change over changes in laws when our larger cultural debate on an important matter remains unsettled. It is hard to protect a right when there are two very different conceptions of what is right being contested. 23 Rule, James, Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 121, 129, 158, 185, 192. Charles M. Blow captured this idea well in a pair of columns he wrote in 2020. The New York Times, August 4, 2020. “The resurgence of policy protests;” The New York Times, August 9, 2020. “In the wake of protests.” He points out, as I do later, that protests and social movements have sprung up recently on a whole range of social and cultural matters. White people more than minority group members are involved today. They are equally well organized and appealing to both left and right-wing beliefs. Their singular focus is on petitioning and protesting specific policy-related matters being addressed by public officials and making those officials more accountable. 24 McAdam, Doug and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 25 See for example: Godley, Dan, “Dis/entagling Critical Disability Studies.” Critical Disability Studies. Vol. 28 (5) (2013): 631–644. 26 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/opinion/dei-trainings-effective.html 27 The New York Times, December 14, 2021. “Proud Boys regroup, focusing on school boards and town councils.” Sheera Frenkel. 28 Glaude, Eddie, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2017); Glover, Joshua, Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (New York: Verso, 2016); Belew, Kathleen, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Tenold, Vegas, Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside

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the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (New York: Nation Books, 2018); Mogelson, Luke, The Storm is Here: An American Crucible (New York: Penguin Books, 2022). 29 Tilly, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” pp.108–109. Tilly also used the phrases “backward looking” and “forward looking” to make the same point about how unrest and violence had changed. I did not recognize until now how much contemporary American unrest and violence do not follow Tilly’s sense of how the history of unrest and violence in Europe has unfolded. He conflated communal unrest with reactionary goals and progressive unrest used by organizations with being forward-looking. In the United States, the “protest riots” that became part of the Civil Rights Movement were carried out by communal groups, not by the organizations that were involved in protest activities. And today, organizations pushing more reactionary ideas have been behind a great deal of violent unrest. The contemporary unrest that happened in Charlottesville was even more confusing. Reactionary unrest in defense of local community customs was used by organizations representing both sides to defend their respective backward-looking and forward-looking view of what life in Charlottesville should be like. 30 Public celebrations invented by a less esteemed group of people can be appropriated by a more esteemed group whose members want to make a community-wide appeal of unity, effectively stealing the cultural thunder of the less esteemed group. See: Deever, John F., “Report on Public Celebrations in Boston, 1912 and 1913, from the Citizens’ Public Gathering Association to the Director of Public Celebrations.” (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1913). In this case, well-to-do Bostonians appropriated Italians’ Columbus Day Parade and transformed it into a public celebration of all the different peoples who had made the city great. The most obligatory nod, of course, was to the white Protestant ancestors of contemporary Brahmin Bostonians. The new celebration included the Italians, of course, but also more recent Chinese immigrants. A “progressive” public demonstration highlighting the cultural “arrival” of Italian immigrants was transformed into an unmistakable but gentler “reactionary” public display commemorating the city’s founders and the “others” who followed them. 31 Robert Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 32 Grimshaw, Allen, ed. Racial Violence in the United States (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969); Lane, Roger, and John J. Turner, eds. Riot, Rout, and Tumult: Readings in American social and Political Violence (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1978); Graham, Hugh Davis and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 475; Brown, Richard Maxwell, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 33 Rude, George, Ideology & Popular Protest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Maier, Pauline, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial radicals and the development of American opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Brown, Richard Maxwell, “The American Vigilante Tradition,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 153–186; Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 83–118; Monti, Daniel, “Patterns of Conflict Preceding the 1964 Riots: Harlem and BedfordStuyvesant.” Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 2 (1) (1979): 41–69; Monti, Daniel, “Intergroup Conflict and Collective Violence: The Case of New York City,

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1960– July 1964.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology. Vol. 6 (1978): 147–162; Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993); Varshney. Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Several of these points were anticipated in earlier theoretical work on collective behavior and social movements. See Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, pp. 121, 129, 158, 184, 189, 209. 34 Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 42 (1) (2015): 4–17. 35 The New York Times, May 31, 2020. “Many claim extremists are sparking violence. but which extremists?” Neil MacFarquhar. 36 There are many ways one might think about popular unrest and violence becoming more “civil.” The number of people arrested and killed during such events are just two of them. In that regard, the best numbers we have suggest that the number of arrests and deaths tied to different kinds of unrest and violence in the 1960s were much greater than those associated with Black Lives Matter protests and violence in 2020 both in absolute terms and relative to the number of events over which they were spread. There also was a great deal more attention paid to the way police over-reacted to unrest. See: Gurr, Ted Robert, “Political Protest and Rebellion in the 1960s.” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), pp. 49–81; https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ over-300-people-facing-federal-charges-crimes-committed-during-nationwidedemonstrations; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/factcheck-thousands-black-lives-matter-protesters-arrested-2020/6816074001/; https:// www.denverpost.com/2021/12/26/denver-george-floyd-protest-prosecutions/; https://www.okayplayer.com/black-lives-matter-new-york-protestors-awardedsettlement; https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b39x/blm-protesters-are-still-grapplingwith-their-arrests-months-later. 37 Laurie, Clayton, “‘The Chinese Must Go’: The United States Army and the AntiChinese Riots in Washington Territory, 1885–1886.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly. Vol. 81 (1) (1990): 22–29. 38 See, for instance, Kuhn, David, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 39 See Gurr, “Political Protest and Rebellion in the 1960s,” p. 72. 40 Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 41 For an excellent treatment of the literature on “psychological” theories dealing with unrest and violence see Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, pp. 91–118 and 200–223. This hard-to-shake bias has proven remarkably resilient despite all the evidence marshalled against it. See: Wilkinson, Steven, “Riots.” Annual Review of Political Science. Vol. 12 (2009): 329–343. 42 Kerckhoff, Alan C. and Kurt W. Back, The June Bug: A Study of Hysterical Contagion (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968). 43 Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, p. 57. 44 Spilerman, Seymour, “Structural Characteristics of Cities and the Severity of Racial Disorders.” American Sociological Review. Vol. 41 (5) (1976): 771–793; Olzak, Susan and Suzanne Shanahan, “Deprivation and Race Riots: An Extension of Spilerman’s Analysis.” Social Forces. Vol. 74 No. 3 (1996): 931–961; Myers, Daniel, “Racial Rioting in the 1960S: An Event History Analysis of Local Conditions.” American Sociological Review. Vol. 62 (1) (1997): 94–112.

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5 Horowitz, “Racial Violence,” p. 193. 4 46 Mason, T. David and Jerry Murtagh. “Who Riots? An Empirical Examination of the ‘New Urban Black’ versus the Social Marginality Hypothesis.” Political Behavior. Vol. 7 (4) (1985): 352–373; Capeci, Dominic and Martha Wilkinson. “The Detroit Rioters of 1943: A Reinterpretation.” Michigan Historical Review. Vol. 16 (1) (1990): 49–72. English researchers are just as likely to turn to psychological explanations for why people engage in rioting in their country. Willmott, Dominic and Maria Ioannou. “A Narrative Based Model of Differentiating Rioters.” The Howard Journal. Vol. 56 (1) (2017): 105–124. 47 Banfield, Edward C. The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little Brown, 1970). 48 The rise of “flash-mob” robberies in city retail establishments and reduction in looting during many but by no means all civil disruptions suggests that community people are practicing more restraint during riots and less restraint when shoplifting in more organized ways. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 2, 2021. “Today’s America gave looting mobs the go-ahead.” Leonard Pitts; https://thehill.com/homenews/ ap/ap-business/ap-funding-bill-targets-online-sites-amid-retail-theft-concerns/ 49 Kelly, William and David Snyder, “Racial Violence and Socioeconomic Changes Among Blacks in the United States.” Social Forces. Vol. 58 (3) (1980): 739– 760; Walrath, C. M., “Impact of Racial Rioting on Crime in the United States.” (1994) http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=151382; Francis, David, “How the 1960s’ Riots Hurt African Americans.” The Digest No. 9 (2004); Collins, William and Robert Margo, “The Labor market Effects of the 1960s Riots.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 10243 (2004). 50 Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets; Thompson, Customs in Common; Clement, Matt, A People’s History of Riots, Protest, and the Law (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 94–95; and all the other authors cited above in endnotes 11 and 12. See also, Case, Benjamin, “Contentious Effervescence: The Subjective Experience of Rioting.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Vol. 26 (2) (2021): 179–196; Wilkinson, “Riots,” p. 339. 51 Johnson, Benton, “Do Holiness Sects Socialize in Dominant Values?” Social Forces. Vol. 39 (1961): 309–316. 52 A fine example of research making this point was presented by Naegler, Laura in her paper entitled “The Ritual of Insurrection and ‘Thrill-Seeking Youth.’ An Instant Ethnography of Inner-City Riots in Germany.” in David Pritchard and Francis Pakes, eds., Riots, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage (London: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 150–168. In this work, Naegler shows how “periodic outbursts” in one Hamburg, Germany neighborhood had changed from protests over the threat of gentrification to carnivalesque-like riots by middle-class young persons whose ostensible challenge to the excesses of consumerism led to well-­ choreographed fights between them and authorities charged with maintaining public order. It was noteworthy that the “political” nature of the anti-­gentrification unrest had only changed once gentrification of the area had been accomplished. In neither case, however, did unrest and violence result in any notable social or political changes much less constitute a fundamental challenge to how public authority was wielded. 53 For excellent treatments of writing on the relationship between political and economic inequality and violence see Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, pp. 54–87 and 170–199. 54 Ostby, Gudrun, “Inequality and political violence: A review of the literature.” International Area Studies Review. Vol. 16 (2) (2013): 206–231. 55 Kornblum, William, Blue Collar Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974). The different ethnic populations living in one Chicago neighborhood

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might have learned something from one violent confrontation over residential mixing or desegregation. Their subsequent dealings with each other show how people learned to constrain themselves and manage their differences better than they did before violence erupted. 56 See the following works for examples of communities where newcomers and oldtimers, sometimes from different races and ethnic groups and sometimes from the same race or ethnic group, figure out how not to fight. One of the implicit lessons embedded in these books was best summarized on the inside flap of the cover to Elijah Anderson’s work cited below: Anderson “finds that the community’s widespread reputation for and appearance of order, comity, and racial tolerance are in fact often sustained by active color and gender prejudice.” That which separates us also makes it easier to not just keep a safe distance but not have to fight as often as we might or at all, or at least for as long as it takes for us to figure out how to get along more congenially. Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Osofsky, Gilbert, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Suttles, Gerald, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968); Suttles, Gerald, The Social Construction of Communities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972); Miller, Zane, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Kornblum, Blue Collar Community; Philpott, Thomas Lee, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration the Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Merry, Sally Engle, Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Katznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981); Gans, Herbert, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: The Free Press, 1982); Rieder, Jonathan, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Rutledge, James Paul, The Vietnamese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Slayton, Robert, Back of the Yards: The Making of Local Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Pritchett, Wendell, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Anderson, Elijah, StreetWise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). 57 Maier, Pauline, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial radicals and the development of American opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Hoerder, Dirk, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977); Newman, Simon, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Rude, George, The Crowd in History, 1730– 1848 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964); Rude, George, Ideology & Popular Protest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Tilly, Politics of Collective Violence; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics; McAdam, et al.. “‘There Will Be Fighting in the Streets’”; Olzak, Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict; Gamson. The Strategy of Social Protest. 58 Varshney. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life. 59 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 60 Monti, “Patterns of Conflict Preceding the 1964 Riots”; Monti, “Intergroup Conflict and Collective Violence.” 61 Black New Yorkers had engaged in city politics and grassroots activism to secure better housing and jobs throughout the first three decades of the 20th century.

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Through their engagement in local politics, they forged “a political infrastructure” and “a black politics anchored in black institutions and receptive to forging coalitions across the political spectrum.” King, Shannon, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era (New York: New York University Press, 2015), p. 4. Later in the century, Puerto Rican and other Spanish-speaking people would rev up their campaigns for civil rights after the 1964 rioting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. They had been working alongside and sometimes collaborated with black groups since the late-1950s. My study period had begun in 1960. The on-again-off-again collaborating blacks and Spanish-speaking people made it easy for each to borrow ideas and strategies from the other. It also accelerated their movement into more conventional political activities and successes in local elections. Popular unrest didn’t keep them from becoming more integrated in the city’s regular life. It complemented their efforts to gain a firmer foothold in the city’s political regime. See Opie, Fredrick Douglas, Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City, From Protest to Public Office (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Fernandez, Johanna, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Popular unrest and violence had the same kind of galvanizing effect in the politics of other cities in the 1960s and 1970s. See Mumford, Kevin, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 62 Sampson, Robert, Doug McAdam, Heather MacIndoe and Simon Weffer-­ Elizondo, “Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature of Community Structure and Collective Civic Action.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 111 (3) (2005): 673–714. 63 All the work by Charles Tilly is built on this idea. See citations to his work in note 8 above. 64 Rickman, Kirssa, “A Turn to Violence: The Escalation of Nonviolent Movements.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 64 (2–3) (2020): 318–343; Ives, Brandon, and J. Lewis, “From Rallies to Riots: Why Some Protests Become Violent.” Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 64 (5) (2020): 958–986. 65 Flamm, Michael, In the Heart of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 66 Clement, A People’s History of Riots, p. 161. 67 For a notable illustration of this, see Robert Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, p. 347. “Given the ferocity with which organized white supremacists valued the (Democratic Party’s) historic project (to intimidate and suppress black political mobilization and protest), the region featured surprisingly little violence. Fewer than ninety individuals’ deaths across the entire South have been attributed to political violence” during the height of white resistance which took place between 1944 and 1972. For an example of more contemporary rightwing violence, see Olzak, “Ethno-Nationalism and Right-Wing Extremist Violence in the U.S., 2000–2018.” Also see, Nichols, Tom, “The New Era of Political Violence Is Here: The danger is not organized civil war but individual Americans with deep resentments and delusions.” The Atlantic. August 15, 2022. 68 The death of 52 persons in the 1992 Los Angeles riot is a clear exception to this trend in contemporary riots. The loss of more than $446 million because of that riot is more consistent with the trend toward riots doing more property damage. See DiPasquale, Denise and Edward Glaeser. “The Los Angeles riot and the Economics of Urban Unrest.” Journal of Urban Economics. Vol. 43 (1) (1998): 52–78. 69 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics.

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70 Soule, Sarah and Jennifer Carl, “A Movement Society: Collective Protest in the United States, 1960–1986.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 10 (3) (2005): 345–364; Tilly, Charles and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements, 1768–2012 (London: Routledge, 2016); Goodwin, Jeff and James Jasper, eds., The Social Movements Reader (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Kane, Melinda, “Social Movement Policy Success: Decriminalizing State Sodomy Laws, 1969–1998.” ­Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 8 (3) (2006): 313–334; Staggenborg, Suzanne and Verta Taylor, “Whatever Happened to the Women’s Movement?” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 10 (1) (2006): 37–52; Halebsky, Stephen, “Explaining the Outcomes of Antisuperstore Movements: A Comparative Analysis of Six Communities.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 11 (4) (2007): 443–460; Noakes, John and Patrick Gillham. “Police and Protester Innovation Since Seattle.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Vol. 12 (4) (2007): 335–340; Valocchi, Stephen, “The Importance of being ‘We’: Collective Identity and the Mobilizing Work of Progressive Activists in Hartford, Connecticut.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol.14 (1) (2009): 65–84; Moore, Ryan and Michael Roberts, “Do-It-Yourself Mobilization: Punk and Social Movements.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 14 (3) (2009): 273–291; Aslanidis, Paris, “Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 21 (3) (2016): 301–321; Polletta, Francesca, “Social Movements in an Age of Participation.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 21 (4) (2016): 485–497; Beyerlein, Kraig, Pteer Ryan, Aliyah Abu-Hazeem, and Amity Pauley, “The 2017 Women’s March: A National Study of Solidarity Events.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Vol. 23 (4) (2018): 425–449; Piazza, Alessandro and Dan Wang, “Claim Specialization, Tactical Diversity and the Protest Environment in the Success of U.S. Antinuclear Activism.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 25 (1) (2020): 93–114; Laschever, Eulalie and David Meyer, “Growth and Decline of Opposing Movements: Gun Control and Gun Rights, 1945–2015.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 26 (1) (2021): 1–20. 71 Edwards, Bob and Melinda Kane. “Resource Mobilization and Social and Political Movements.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007): 205–232; Jenkins, Craig, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 9 (1983): 527–553; Amenta, Edwin, Neal Caren, Elizabeth Chiarello, and Yang Su, “The Political Consequences of Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 36 (2010): 287–307. 72 Amenta, et al., “The Political Consequences of Social Movements.” 73 The clearest example of this trend is especially apparent in matters involving race. On the one hand, there are detailed treatments of all the organized attempts to combat one or another kind of minority and racial injustice since the late-1960s, most of which were non-violent and involved petitions and protests made to government officials at various levels. See Oliver, Pamela, “Resisting Repression: The Black Lives movement in context,” in Hank Johnston and Pamela Oliver, eds., Racialized Protest and the State: Resistance and Repression in a Divided America (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 63–88. On the other hand, there has been a marked decrease in rioting since the early 1970s. Hinton, Elizabeth, America on Fire (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021) and Michael Katz. Why don’t American Cities Burn? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Also see McAdam, Doug, Robert Sampson, Simon Weffer, and Heather MacIndoe, “‘There Will Be Fighting in the Streets’: The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Vol. 10 (1) (2006): 1–18. 74 Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, p.466.

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75 Soule, Sarah and Jennifer Earl, “A Movement Society Evaluated: Collective Protest in the United States: 1960–1986.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 1 (3) (2005): 345–364; Buechler, Steven, “Beyond Resource Mobilization? Emerging Trends in Social Movement Theory.” The Sociological Quarterly. Vol. 54 (2) (1993): 217–235, especially page 220; Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory,” p. 532. 76 Klandermans, Bert, “Between Rituals and Riots: The Dynamics of Street Demonstrations.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 17 (3) (2012): 233–234; Dixon, Marc, William Danaher, and Ben Kail, “Allies, Targets, and the Effectiveness of Coalition Protest: A Comparative Analysis of Labor Unrest in the U.S. South.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 18 (3) (2013): 331–350; Santoro, Wayne and Max Fitzpatrick, “‘The Ballot or the Bullet’: The Crisis of Victory and the Institutionalization of the Civil Rights Movement.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 20 (2) (2015): 207–229; Olzak, Susan, Sarah Soule, Marion Coddou, and John Munoz, “Friends or Foes? How Social Movement Allies Affect the Passage of Legislation in the U.S. Congress.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 21 (2) (2016): 213–230; Isaac, Larry, Jonathan Coley, Daniel Cornfield, and Dennis Dickerson, “Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 21 (2) (2016): 155–176; Banaszak, Lee Ann and Heather Ondercin. “Public Opinion as a Movement Outcome: The Case of the U.S. Women’s Movement.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 21 (3) (2016): 361–378; Fassiotto, Magalia and Sarah Soule. “Loud and clear: The Effect of Protest Signals on Congressional Attention.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 22 (1) (2017): 17–38; Vann, Burrel, “Movementcountermovement Dynamics and Mobilizing the Electorate.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 23 (3) (2018): 285–305; Gose, Leah and Theda Skocpol. “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups Opposing the Trump Presidency.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 24 (3) (2019): 293–317; Pressman, Jeremy, Erica Chenoweth, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jay Ulfelder, “Protests Under Trump, 2017–2021.” Mobilization: An International Journal. Vol. 27 (1) (2022): 13–26; Sen, Anindya and Ömer Avci, Why Social Movements Occur: Theories of Social Movements.” Journal of Information Economy and Management. Vol. 11 (1) (2016): 125–130. 77 McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided, pp. 17, 28, 30, 55, 118, 142, 150, 159, 163, 183, 300–352. 78 Rose, Fred “Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements.” Sociological Forum. Vol. 12 (3) (1997): 461–494. 79 The New York Times, March 31, 2017. “The Strange Persistence of Guilt.” ­David Brooks; The New York Times, October 30, 2017. “When Politics Becomes Your Idol.” David Brooks. Other persons argue that far from being a symptom of ­ people’s withering ethnic or religious identities, contemporary politics has reinforced and even hardened “ethnic”-like lines in American society. See: Will Wilkinson, “David Brooks Is Wrong about Partisanship and Identity.” Niskanen Center. ­November 1, 2017.

3 THE MORAL FOUNDATION OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DISCONSENT

If popular unrest and occasional violent outbursts by people aren’t foundational to the practice of democracy, they most certainly keep us from becoming complacent. Americans learned early on that they invited the peculiar trouble that comes with unrest and violence when they failed to take care of problems brought to their attention. Over the next couple of hundred years and right up to yesterday, Americans have frequently had to be reminded that the way our communities and society are organized and operated aren’t the best or only way they could be set up and work. In Chapter 2, I laid out an argument about how popular unrest and violence complement more peaceful democratic practices. Before showing how this worked out in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection, there are two more pieces to the puzzle to consider. The one explored in this chapter involves the values embedded in both popular unrest and all the other parts of our lives that pass for “normal.” We will see how Americans treat extraordinary moments of disorder and turn them into customs and rituals that Americans cherish and use all the time. The cultural medium that makes such a transformation possible are the liberal and conservative values we call upon in what passes for domestic peace and quiet and in those moments when the last thing people are thinking about is being peaceful or quiet. The last piece of the puzzle, the one discussed in Chapter 4, shows how our democratic practices and the important customs and public rituals that bring our liberal and conservative values together are shown off better and more often in American cities than anyplace else. The magic that takes place in cities cannot be appreciated until we touch one last time on why people DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-4

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came to believe that cities were the last place on earth where civility and orderliness would be admired or practiced regularly. We need to recall that until recently the underlying premise of theories about popular unrest, collective behavior, and social movements was that discontented and angry people are more dangerous, destructive, and deadly when they act together than they would be if they were acting alone. And since there are so many more different kinds of people in cities who already had problems getting along and figuring stuff out together, doing something that made them even more agitated than usual was bound to bring them out swinging. Crowds gave people a way to act out that made it hard for them to be held accountable. Crowds gave them cover. They let people hide. And crowds, when they turned on whatever and whoever was bothering them, could, if they had a mind to, wreak havoc on a community. It’s the “if they had a mind to” part that has figured prominently in the theorizing about social unrest and violence since the end of the 19th ­century. The “psychology” of crowds and mass unrest holds that individuals caught up in a crowd lose their mind, for a time, and commit all manner of misdeeds and atrocities under the cover and anonymity afforded by all the ­people around them. Surely, the destructive potential of well-organized and armed groups is greater than that of a deranged but solitary individual who carries a powerful weapon. But a side-by-side comparison of the deadly damage done by contemporary American crowds and mass movements, on the one hand, and embittered individuals who acquire automatic or semi-automatic rifles, on the other hand, point to a much different conclusion about which is more dangerous. The number of individuals killed in Ferguson, Charlottesville, all the cities and towns where Black Lives Matter protests happened, and in this nation’s first Presidential coup d’état pales in significance to the number killed by solitary gun toters.1 Contemporary crowds and mass movements that become violent are much less deadly. They have shown themselves to be capable of greater restraint and behaving more civilized than the individuals who might belong to them. With this point firmly in mind, I offer the following assessment of unrest in American society today. We are living in unsettled and uncivil times but not especially violent times. Though, as I just observed, there is abundant evidence these days of individuals speaking badly and behaving violently in public, the incivility and violence I have in mind is the kind committed by larger collections of persons acting in concert, not by individuals acting alone. As the Black Lives Matter protests and rise of so many “Us Too” movements indicate, the kind of collective trouble people make these days may be more widespread than it

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has ever been. It is unsettling and disconcerting to be sure, but probably not as unsettling and disconcerting as we make it out to be. That is because ­American unrest is not as destructive or deadly as it once was. Americans have lived through other periods marked by collective unrest and incivility. The regional and racial conflicts that preceded the Civil War provided few clues to the number and variety of reasons Americans and would-be Americans would find to fight in the decades following its conclusion. Social routines, economic exchanges, and political activities were often upset by attempts to bring some order to the chaotic-looking changes brought on by even more city building, industrialization, and widespread immigration. Two wars and an economic depression in the first half of the 20th century did not stop people belonging to different social classes, races, religions, and ethnic groups from carrying on their disputes and sometimes having violent fights. What they did do, however, was give these disputes and fights a national stage for peoples’ grievances to be aired and worked through. And, as I pointed out in Chapter 2, this change would have the odd effect or at least become the occasion for two of the principal combatants – white people and black people – to adopt each other’s principal ways of projecting their power and protecting their interests. Black people continued to work through legislative and judicial channels to make their case. But they also became more violent when they were upset. White people backed away from the violence they used against black people. They reverted even more than they had in the past to legal and political stratagems to keep black people away from them and minimizing their political power. These different colored people didn’t switch their final solution to the problems they had with each other. They shared them with their principal opponents and showed they had learned how to fight like each other. The salutary effects of this learning and sharing process became more apparent in the last two decades and were put on vivid display in the four episodes of unrest and disorder featured in this book. This is the first time in a long while that Americans have dialed down the violence they commit against property and especially to other persons when they act as a group. Disrupting public life has become more commonplace, but the effects are less severe than they have been since the late 18th century. I know it may not look this way, but crowds have become more restrained. So, too, have the authorities brought in to stop angry crowds. Crowds of upset Americans today still tear up commercial property, deface public buildings and monuments, attack groups new to the United States, and sometimes still kill each other over differences they have. But they’re doing much less of it than they did in the past. In addition to being a relatively disrupted time, ours is also a confusing time filled with conflicting messages about who Americans are becoming and

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the kind of communities we want to live in. Americans cannot make up their mind about the direction we want to take on a host of important matters. Buried beneath the confusion created by our unresolved arguments about the future and the messes we leave when we take our fights to the street are two important lessons I will be exploring in some detail in this chapter. First, Americans’ inability to choose a direction much less a destination for where they want to end up isn’t a momentary sidetrack but a deeply rooted tradition. And second, all the fighting Americans do on the way to their next indecisive outcome is a dramatic but backhanded compliment to a way of life people care enough about to fight over. It is much more a challenge to do better than a rejection of everything Americans have accomplished in the communities they inherited and are now taking a turn at shaping. Necessity has long been the mother of convention in America. The cultural significance of fighting over matters in public, perhaps especially when those fights involve violence, cannot be overstated, and should not be dismissed. At the same time, there have been many occasions in the last century when Americans did not think their communities were worth fi ­ ghting for and left in large numbers to search for more congenial, less ­obviously troubled places to live. Some six million black Americans began fleeing the South at the beginning of the 20th century when white people made it clear they were not going to stop exploiting, demeaning, and punishing them. The black diaspora to the North increased again in the mid-20th century. The arrival of so many black people in Northern cities prompted millions of white Americans to leave crowded cities after World War II. They left for suburbs with newer houses, more grass, and few if any of the black people they did not like. A much smaller number of black and other non-white city residents would follow all the transplanted white suburbanites; but it would take a while for that to happen. The legal protections advanced in the “rights revolution” for black ­Americans to which Steven Pinker refers might well have inspired more fights and violence had so many white persons not been preoccupied with running away. The larger lesson to be drawn from all the moving around ­Americans do, however, is that no matter where they live, people do not want to end up in a place that isn’t worth fighting for. And in the case of the Civil Rights “revolution” waged principally on behalf of black persons, millions of white people decided their former communities weren’t worth the effort. They picked up and left.2 Who we are as a people is reflected in the kind of community we make and how willing we are to fight for it. It also is reflected in the values we wrap around everything we do to help us make it through the times we are trying to figure out whether we should stay or go. But people do not give much thought to what they value and the customary ways they make their communities until a bunch of other people complain. This is usually a group that

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wants in or finds a reason to question their fellow community members’ commitment to the place and the way it is run. Most of these arguments don’t end violently. The ones that do provide us with our best clue to the kind of people Americans think they ought to be and why fighting about the things we take for granted has become unavoidable. There are at least three good reasons people don’t make serious trouble for each other more often. Most importantly, perhaps, people can’t be consumed by self-doubt and accomplish everything they need to do to make it through the day, much less plan for their future. Regarding our future concerns, people also are reluctant to entertain the possibility there may be better ways to arrange their lives and treat each other. Fixing things is harder to do than complaining about them being broken. And, finally, it takes a long time for enough people to become worked up enough to call the rest of us out on what we were overlooking and needs fixing. The kinds of fixing-up Americans obsess about are not trivial. But the violently obsessive face Americans have often shown each other hasn’t yet made us replace the way we govern ourselves or rearrange the marketplace. It also hasn’t made us forget our commitment to being orderly most of the time, reject the belief we can become more well-off, or make us want to get rid of all the people who keep us orderly and our hope for a more satisfying future alive. However contentious and even violent our arguments become, the possibility of making a big, consequential, and permanent overhaul of our community doesn’t come up until after the fighting is over. Backing into the future turns out to be easier when it looks like your only other option is to be beaten up again. The reasons we do things backward are taken up in Chapter 2 of the book. Here is a peek into what comes later. Less recognized by the time our arguments turn violent and rarely if ever brought up afterward are the fixes we least want to talk about but are most likely to calm everybody down fastest. The most popular and surprisingly ­effective fixes involve the standards people use to judge the fitness of the groups that picked a fight so they might be counted as credible members of the community. Or the fix involves changing the way old-timers and newcomers are allowed to talk to each other and treat each other when they are out in public in numbers big enough to notice and too large to ignore. Sometimes the unstated or unaddressed problem vexing us most involves both these matters. It is important to note again that these are social and cultural changes, not economic or political changes. Coming up with new social and cultural fixes, however, usually happens against the backdrop of economic and ­political changes we are less disposed to making than we think but talk about more. The bundle of rights and privileges advanced in Pinker’s “rights revolution” are real but limited largely to the most able members of an abused population. In contemporary America, those would be black and brown people and

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women who have already shown they are prepared and eager to assume the duties and obligations that come with new rights and privileges most of us learned early on to take for granted. The social and cultural changes – those involved with matters over who can be deemed a credible person and who can (or cannot) stick their nose into our public affairs – has been the source of more trouble and fighting among Americans or between Americans and would-be Americans than any other concern people have. The fixes proposed for these problems have ­required us to pay attention to how much we expect new groups to play by the rules everyone else has been using, abusing, or ignoring when important questions are put before us. The fixes for these problems have also made the rest of us consider how accountable we now must be for what we say and do when less well-established and less well-regarded groups start asking questions the rest of us aren’t prepared or eager to answer.3 It is important to remind ourselves what the fixes that are proposed and eventually adopted do and don’t do. For one thing, they do not undo or challenge the legitimacy of all the big ways we organize our economy or governments. Neither do they reject the values reflected in how the economy and government work. What people pull off instead on the occasional days they seem to call every important thing into question is a dramatic, always theatrical, and sometimes violent challenge to how important matters are addressed in public and who can be involved in making this happen. Up to now, our response to the noise and destruction made on those occasions, and especially the deaths sometimes resulting from them, has been to deflect the questions that make us take a harder look at ourselves. What we do instead is make grudging concessions to the trouble-making groups raising them when these groups can no longer be ignored or run out of town.4 Turning the world on its head on these occasions is easier to accomplish and less threatening than it seems when unrest happens. Our history of making trouble also clearly shows that the rallies, vigils, meetings, marches, declarations, demonstrations, and celebrations people throw in public in their own honor, in honor of their community, or on behalf of some good cause can make easy and effective turns into petitions, protests, and punches or worse. The boundary line between making nice and picking fights is, as I just implied, more seamless than it appears and more easily bridged than we imagine. The reason why is less than surprising. The contrarian nature of not just the behavior but the values people piece together to make a big public fight do not line up with the values reflected in all the big ways people have organized their lives for as long as they care to remember. However valid peoples’ concerns may be, the extraordinary actions they take to address their concerns and the array of values reflected in the unrest and violence people make cannot be sustained for long. They get in the way of all the other work people

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do, that people must do, if the community is going to do better than hang on or shrivel away, which sometimes happens. Occasional displays of intemperance do not fit comfortably with the principal ways people have pulled themselves together over the course of centuries to make their communities work as well as they do. Despite the discomfort that troublemaking creates, people use intemperance to remind each other about the unfinished business they have with each other. Groups with concerns, complaints, and grievances also make their demands appear bigger, more threatening, and harder to address than they ultimately prove to be. The history of even destructive and deadly community upheavals shows this happens all the time. There is much more display than world changing rebelliousness at work when people posture and act up in public. What historians and social scientists have shown us is that certifying new groups as credible members of the community, especially the communities we make in cities, while often painful, turns out to be easier to live with than the prospect of it was. The tryout period for new groups can be long and challenging but prepares all the parties to get along better than keeping them apart ever did. Not allowing new groups to play by the rules everyone else follows requires an exhausting amount of time and energy to enforce and ultimately doesn’t work. And forgiving one’s own people for what they say and do in public while holding other people accountable for what they say and do insults a Golden Rule so universally admired that publicly mocking and parodying its willful violation is easy to do and all but impossible to ignore. These tryout stories are not the kind people share about themselves, especially the parts where groups already deemed credible did their best to keep newer groups from completing their successful break-in into the ranks of more fully accredited members of the community. Individuals who belong to groups that made the cut a long time ago would have us return to a time when such break-ins were less common and harder to pull off. People back then led more circumscribed lives. The lines between groups were more fixed and difficult to assail or undo. The other model community some Americans want to make would have even fewer boundary lines and social distinctions wrapped around different groups than the ones we still have. In more inclusive communities, persons belonging to groups doing their best to become more credible would try to enter the public arena more and assert themselves in unaccustomed ways. Adopting other peoples’ standards for how to act and speak in public and learning to follow, bend, break, and ignore rules the same way other groups do doesn’t guarantee they will be accepted. But it certainly makes their continuing exclusion more difficult to defend and maintain, which is what is behind all the pushing that “Us Too” activists are doing these days. Of all the acts we might look to for evidence of whose version of the model American community is currently winning, none provides clearer signs for

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where we are headed than the way groups argue and fight in public. And of all the public fighting we have seen lately none captures the confusing and seemingly contradictory notions of the kind of people Americans might become than the unrest and violence groups made in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Washington, D.C., and all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests. Groups instigating unrest in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., were looking to reassert privileges their kind of American had once enjoyed and believed had been taken from them. Their vision for the future looked back to good old days in America that were not so great for people who weren’t white Christians. Their ranks would eventually come to include immigrants from countries populated by in-between races that settled in the United States a century ago or earlier. Somehow, these groups managed to whiten up enough over the course of several generations to stay out of harm’s way and become members of Team America.5 The groups instigating unrest in Ferguson and all the towns and cities with Black Lives Matter protests had a more inclusive vision of who Americans should be. They would have communities where people speak their mind but are mindful of what they say and do in public. This is especially true for the way black people and other marginal groups are talked about and treated. Which of these competing visions for America is winning right now is hard to know. I am inclined to say it’s a tossup. But I don’t see the contest being settled in favor of one side or the other anytime soon or ever. Americans have tried to have it both ways for so long it is easier to imagine them having something closer to a cultural standoff than a showdown. What seems clearer is no matter which way the argument goes, and the kind of community Americans eventually will come around to making, we will not be as committed to killing each other over the outcome as we once were. And this may tell us more about the direction Americans are headed than anything else we do or say. In Chapters 1 and 2, I laid out the broad outline of an argument about the way popular unrest and violence have been changing in the United States. Some groups are stepping up to make more public noise and trouble. Other groups are pulling back and making less. The curious thing about the groups moving onto the civic stage or stepping back from it these days is this. Apart from the very different views they have of the world and who would be welcomed in their version of it, they take similar steps to inch their way into a fight and make their wishes clear to people who should be paying attention. The noise groups make is louder than it has been in decades; but they are leaving less mess to clean up and fewer bodies left on the ground at the end of the fights they pick. Their challenges and fights clearly are guided more by custom than by whimsy, chance, or the number of guns available to them.

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Appealing as the prospect of living in a community where everyone looks the same or holds the same views may be, Americans have been unable to make many such places or shown much willingness to live in them any longer than they must. Most of the communities we have are messier and reflect a mix of liberal and conservative ways people imagine themselves and live with each other. The results often are not pretty, but they apparently work well enough to keep the communities in which we live from falling apart even during difficult times. Whether the different ways Americans keep their communities together work better than they did in the past remains to be seen. But we can see how well the mix is working by looking closely at the unrest and violence Americans still make. The results, as you might expect, are decidedly mixed. Figure 3.1 presents a picture of the values underlying reactionary and progressive unrest and violence. Key to understanding what is going on is that both kinds of unrest and violence reflect both liberal and conservative values. Here is how it works. Conservative social theorists and philosophers tend to believe only certain kinds of persons should be members of a community, people should follow the rules, and they should be held accountable for what they do and say in public. Liberal theorists think communities should welcome different kinds of persons and residents ought to be able to do and say pretty much what they want. Not surprisingly, liberal theorists are also more comfortable with people ignoring, bending, and breaking rules.6

FIGURE 3.1 

Values Underlying Reactionary and Progressive Unrest and Violence

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Two of the values reflected in reactionary unrest and violence are conservative. Groups using this kind of unrest and violence believe only certain kinds of people should be welcomed in the community, and anyone living there should follow their rules. Only one of the values associated with reactionary unrest is more liberal. People already accepted as members of the community enjoy a lot of leeway in what they can do and say in public. People who are not accepted don’t enjoy that privilege. Two of the values reflected in progressive unrest and violence are more liberal in nature. Community membership should be shared by different kinds of people, and newcomers should be able to bend, break, and ignore the same rules old-timers do. The one conservative value people involved in more progressive unrest and violence very much want is for longer-term and better-established groups to be held as accountable for what they do and say in public as they are. The idea behind using unrest in a more progressive way to promote greater accountability is not new. Indeed, it was used well before the American revolution whenever local people wanted to show how displeased with their leaders’ behavior. They weren’t mistreated as badly as foreign newcomers and black people were. Newcomers and cultural outsiders were mistreated a great deal worse. Once immigrants and black people became more permanent and accepted features of city life, the kind of unrest directed toward them (and used by them) became more like what community leaders experienced when citizens were upset with them. Their membership in the community wasn’t being challenged. Their accountability to their customers and constituents was. Unrest and violence associated with matters of public accountability have always been milder.7 More generally, the fact that reactionary unrest and violence would be more conservative and progressive unrest and violence more liberal would surprise no one. The combinations of liberal and conservative values apparent in each, as I described them, make sense as well. The challenge and implicit threat presented by progressive unrest and violence to the more conventional ways communities are organized and how people live in them are clear. Just as clear are the way reactionary unrest and violence support how a community currently works and who makes it happen. This kind of unrest and violence is a less immediate or obvious threat to the community as it has existed for a long time. If people using unrest and violence in reactionary ways remain in charge, there will be less room for other groups to move onto the public stage and many disincentives for them to try.8 The chances of new groups being accepted as full-fledged community members would be small. The irony, of course, is this situation in the past often pushed groups with less standing in the community to use progressive-looking kinds of unrest and violence to make their claim for membership clearer and more compelling.9 The most interesting features of contemporary disorder are how much less deadly and destructive reactionary unrest has become and that progressive

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unrest, whose users never exhibited as much interest in killing anyone, also has become less deadly and not infrequently less destructive than it was in the past. The reason these changes have happened is that today we are fighting less about who can be a member of the community. Instead, we are fighting more about how mindful people must be for what they say and do when they meet and argue in public. Americans whose ancestors have been here longer and are more well thought of may not be thrilled having different groups living among them, especially groups whose members appear to be way more different than the rest of us. However, Americans who have been here longer and are thought of better appear to have all but given up trying to push out groups that haven’t been around as long or are thought of as well. These days, more highly regarded Americans pay much more attention to keeping other groups quiet. They do this even as they ramp up their own efforts to speak up more and more harshly and then criticize other groups for speaking at all, accusing them of talking out of turn, and behaving too aggressively when they come out in public. These are all “accountability” questions. Even white nationalists have given up trying to deny minority citizens the right to vote, which would entail raising the “membership” question again. The closest people come to pushing the “membership question” in our face these days is by trying to find ever newer and improved ways to discount the votes of minority citizens. The objectives of people making trouble with reactionary and progressive unrest and violence are as different as the liberal and conservative values behind them. But both the activities and their respective arrays of liberal and conservative values complement each other. People who use them are working off the same normative and behavioral script, whether they recognize it or not or are able to articulate their reasons for acting out as clearly as theorists think they should be able to do.10 The same is true of the logic informing how liberal and conservative values populate and enervate the most important ways people carry out their everyday lives as citizens, shoppers, as business leaders, or as members of distinctive ethnic and religious groups. The reason why making nice and making trouble complement each other is that the people who get along most of the time and fight only occasionally are part of the same civic culture. The habits, customs, and values groups use when they fight are variations of the habits, customs, and values they draw upon to keep their world intact on all the other days they act like they are more united than divided. More importantly, perhaps, this civic culture is more widely shared and practiced than we imagine by persons from different social classes, races, religions, and ancestral backgrounds.11 However overly optimistic this argument may sound, the ideas behind it are relatively new to people who study civil unrest in countries such as the United States. They also are, as I pointed out in Chapter 2, still largely untested. Indeed, there are many more persons arguing our culture is hopelessly

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fractured and violence is an unwanted presence in it.12 Even theorists sympathetic to groups trying to become less ignored or excluded from the communities where they live have a hard time coming up with a rationale for why these groups can legitimately use intemperance, unrest, and violence to become less ignored and excluded.13 To make matters worse, scant attention is paid to the continuing use and legitimacy of unrest and violence that is supposed to keep the world as we currently know it from turning more inclusive, tolerant, and accommodating than it already is. The big intellectual turn away from reactionary unrest and violence and having greater sympathy for progressive unrest and violence, as I also argued earlier, happened in the 1960s by people who were sympathetic to campaigns for minority persons’ civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. Persons who worry about unrest and collective violence decided older ways of imagining the world and acting in it together had failed and needed to be replaced by newer and arguably better ways of thinking and fixing their communities.14 Acts of collective behavior and social movements helped make us less ­obviously racist and end the war in Vietnam. Or so it has been argued. These acts required us to abandon and replace older customs and ways of believing with new and presumably better ways of believing and ways of acting that were a better fit for where society was headed. Unrest and violence in these cases would not reinforce existing traditions and more conventional beliefs, customs, and institutions. To the extent ­unrest and violence had been used for such purposes in the past, they would not be available to uphold the status quo as much as they had been in the past. As I argued in Chapter 2, more “progressive” and “forward looking” kinds of unrest and violence were supposed to have replaced them. I also noted, however, that this big transition had not yet happened in the kinds of unrest and violence Americans make. The unrest and violence seen in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., will point to a much different conclusion. Namely, “reactionary” unrest and violence are still very much a part of the American way of resisting changes many persons dislike and upholding time-honored customs and values. The most surprising feature of the unrest and violence that happened in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., is that both sides had well organized groups fighting on behalf of different reactionary goals. This is an idea many people who fancy themselves as being more progressive will find hard to wrap their brain around. Unrest and violence undertaken by or on behalf of racial minorities is regrettable but okay. Unrest and violence done by white people on behalf of their presumably “reactionary” way of looking at the world is not okay. People may not like “reactionary” kinds of unrest or the ideas that people using it want us to embrace. Indeed, they may decry all kinds of unrest these days, especially when it turns violent. However, we are a great deal more sympathetic to the people who use unrest and violence for more progressive purposes.15

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There is nothing in the history of popular unrest in America, or other Western societies, for that matter, that suggests communities and organizations will use reactionary unrest and violence against outsiders to protect their more progressive local customs and beliefs. This is an American invention. We saw it at work in both Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., in the Capitol insurrection. We might be excused for thinking history couldn’t be that messy. Except the use of unrest and violence in America is that messy and complicated. Most of the head-spinning we see when these kinds of arguments are made comes from people on the far ends of our public debates about contemporary social and political issues. They see unrest and violence either re-enforcing traditional values and ways of keeping the world whole or rejecting these values and older ways of running the world. Persons holding such diametrically opposed views would dislike being compared to each other or thinking that what they are doing is not all that different from what the people they don’t like are doing. Remember, put upon minorities are supposed to be good. White nationalists are bad. Except that both put upon minorities and white nationalists share many of the same values and borrow heavily from each other’s playbook when it comes to acting out in public, especially when violence is ­involved. We may define these people by all the ways they are different. My argument here is built around all the ways they are more alike than different. The people who push more progressive or reactionary kinds of unrest and violence are vastly more alike than they recognize or would be willing to acknowledge in public. It is why the unrest and violence undertaken today by groups more sympathetic to white or minority persons continues to end in something closer to a stalemate than a definitive resolution of their differences. It is how disorder complements institutional stability. The Difference Unrest and Violence Make

At the end of the day, how much difference unrest and violence make d ­ epends on the kind of inequality people are arguing and fighting about. Do unrest and violence change the economic fortunes of people who have little money and even less wealth? No, not for long or favorably. Do unrest and violence improve a group’s political standing in the community? It depends on whether the people instigating violence are trying to reinforce their power or trying to catch up to groups ahead of them. For the former, the answer would be, “yes” it helps them and for longer than they might

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deserve. For the latter, the answer is “sometimes” but not in as big a way as the violence users might have hoped.16 Do unrest and violence have an impact on relations between different social groups? Almost certainly, but again more often for people protecting their social position than the ones looking for an upgrade. The arrangement of these answers is anything but coincidental. As I ­argued in Chapter 2, this is because some kinds of inequality are more durable than others.17 And unrest, while more effective in dealing with the less durable kinds, rarely succeeds quickly or without a lot of help. The most durable kind of inequality is associated with peoples’ material wellbeing: How much money they have and everything that goes along with getting more of it or being kept from getting more. Ironically, one reason unrest and violence have less impact on a community’s economic hierarchy is that historically people have been a lot more accepting of this kind of inequality than liberal reformers and progressive politicians think. Americans have been much more distracted and preoccupied with their racial, religious, and ethnic differences. The least durable and most manageable kind of inequality involves peoples’ social and cultural differences. The public disrespect and mistreatment people experience provoke more fights, property destruction, and deadly violence than other kinds of inequality do. At the same time, disagreements and fights over peoples’ social and cultural differences probably are more avoidable and more easily resolved. People can figure out how to get along better or learn to tolerate each other’s presence more than they thought possible.18 Political inequality is not nearly as durable as economic inequality or as manageable as social and cultural inequality. It falls someplace between the other two other kinds. Disagreements and fights over political inequality and mistreatment happen more often than those involving economic inequality. They also are more likely to turn violent, especially when overlaid with potential threats to a community’s or state’s racial, religious, or ethnic hierarchy.19 In general, however, recent political fights have not provoked riotous violence of the sort one used to associate with political campaigns and in fights between people from different social and cultural groups. This is because until recently public leaders had done a better job figuring out how to take fights over political inequality off the streets and address them through institutions that promise compromises which only help some of us but are presented as being good for all of us. In the end, violence has played a role in addressing all three kinds of inequality. Of course, more conventional kinds of behavior do as well. The fact most of our fights do not turn violent or don’t stay violent for long tells

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us something important about the resilience of our customs and the part they play in keeping communities in one piece. It suggests that even when disagreements turn into nasty public fights the way we act out is kept within ­limits we can manage and reconcile with what we had thought or hoped would be accomplished before we tried to hurt each other. There is a highly stylized and ritualistic quality to popular unrest and ­violence that restrains people more than they recognize or would probably admit to in public. Rituals of Disconsent

More important moments in our lives are marked by rituals. David Brooks tells us, these moments “force a pause” and “encourage you to be more intentional about life. People can understand their lives’ meaning only if they step out of their immediate moment and see what came before them and what they will leave behind when they are gone.”20 Our entrances and exits are marked by rituals: Births by baptisms; deaths with funerals; marriages held in front of friends, holy people, or civil ­authorities; divorces overseen by the courts; graduations in front of families, the secular priests who educated you, the prominent people who run the school, and the office of alumni affairs that already had letters asking for contributions ready to mail the moment students got a diploma. These moments need not be big public affairs and most of the time for most of us they aren’t. But they matter, and not just a little. Such rich ritual moments happen for communities, too. It is how the people living there commemorate some of their biggest accomplishments and most awful moments. We do not want to forget them or the lessons they taught us. They can be loud and raucous celebrations or somber commemorations. But they are all big public affairs. They mark the time we served together and became touchstones for our faith in ourselves and our ability to meet and overcome future challenges together. Riots and other notable moments of societal unrest, even peaceful ones, have these same ritualistic qualities. Notable among bigger and peaceful commemorations recently was the August 2020 March on Washington by thousands of people celebrating Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 address in front of the Lincoln Memorial. People came both to protest the killing of black persons by police officers and, as one newspaper story put it, “to inspire their children and pass down a legacy of action against racial injustice.”21 Social anthropologists use the phrase “rituals of inversion” to describe moments when people make the world pause and take a hard look at who they are. People make it appear as if they are turning the world upside down by dressing and acting in unaccustomed and even disapproved ways,

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pretending to be someone they are not supposed to be. “Inverting the natural order of conscience,” as Tocqueville put it, momentarily upset a community’s arrangement of social ranks and privileges without having to permanently change it. The unequal ways a community worked, and people played out their lives could be questioned and even challenged, even as the integrity of the community was left intact. This is the ultimate answer to Hugh Davis Graham’s paradox about social unrest and institutional stability. Social disorder in America reinforces the legitimacy of communities by giving them a cultural stress test that tests their resilience but doesn’t break them. Social anthropologists saw how this worked in tribal societies and ­acknowledged the importance of these rituals in letting people manage away conflicts that might occur. But anthropologists didn’t see how this kind of arrangement could possibly work in our modern urban world where differences in peoples’ public and private lives would be harder to reconcile and their social, economic, and political statuses didn’t line up congenially.22 The irony is that I first saw “inversion rituals” playing out in an American city and several of its suburbs, precisely where anthropologists thought you wouldn’t see them. This was back in the late-1970s when the City of St. Louis Public School District and the brand-new Ferguson-Florissant Reorganized School District were commanded to desegregate their schools.23 As a newcomer to St. Louis and novice when it came to research on school desegregation, I had a lot to learn. What I saw confused me. On the one hand, many adults were concerned and visibly upset by the prospect of desegregating their schools and putting their children on the front line of the fight over how to make this happen. School officials were none too happy with the prospect either. For all practical intents and purposes, they had been declared Constitutional felons. Everything they had done with black children had been criticized. Everything they would propose to undo the harm they had done was being watched suspiciously. There was a lot of noise and public bickering about the process and its unknown outcome. On the other hand, adults weren’t fighting in the streets and children weren’t battling inside their schools. Behind the curtain, school officials were busy but not nearly as rattled as they looked and acted when they were standing in front of it. Again, I was confused. I explained what I had observed to a colleague, anthropologist Lorraine Kirk, and told her I thought cultural anthropologists surely must have come across what I was describing in their work in Africa. She pulled down a copy of the book that introduced me to the “inversion rituals” I alluded to above. The ceremonial resolution of the crisis created by school desegregation and the way people absorbed the effects of unexpected trials was by making “ritualized changes” or “ritualized reforms.” In the case of local school officials,

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they managed the conflict brought to their door by pulling plans for closing under-enrolled schools, making repairs to schools in need of an upgrade, and new programs they had wanted to implement for years but didn’t have money to make happen. The court’s condemnation and the federal dollars that became available only after school officials had been publicly admonished made it possible for them to do what they had wanted to do anyway. To be sure, some things changed. None of the changes, however, was so big, upsetting, or threatening to the districts’ core mission and their communities’ integrity that they could not be handled. Their crisis was managed away. But that is not all that happened or even the most important thing that was accomplished. The public argument over desegregation tested the districts and communities but ended reaffirming their legitimacy by having passed the test put before them. The question of whether to bring children from different races together in the same school was hotly debated but “resolved” with changes that were modest in scope but historically unprecedented. Putting little brown and pink babies together in some of the same classrooms for part of every school day hadn’t destroyed or bankrupted the two districts. Indeed, school districts were punished for their misdeeds with money, new programs, and upgraded facilities. A little later in the book we will see that while all the public arguing, legal maneuvering, busing, and school makeovers were happening an even more unprecedented change was taking place. Many black adults and their families were moving into formerly all-white communities on a full-time and year-round basis with little or no public pushback. Many white people simply moved away. They “exited” rather than show “loyalty” to their town or use their “voice” to complain.24 The crisis occasioned by school segregation was contested through the courts, not on the streets. A “ritualized crisis” was managed away by people making “ritualized reforms.” School officials pulled it off by turning their momentarily upended world right-side up by recommitting themselves to the very practices that had seemingly brought them to the edge of collapse or dissolution. People found conventional ways to absorb, work around, and acknowledge the rightness of the challenge that had been made without having to undo everything some people had found upsetting and unfair. Ritualized moments of crisis and reform reaffirmed the rightness of everything else people do that make their community work even as they find ways to bring new people into their deliberations and more agreeable ways of talking about them and treating them in public. This is why children from different races in and around St. Louis attended school together. Mixing them in the same schools was how people could certify the “Other” was more like us, even though they already were.

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The customs and values followed by all manner of displaced and excluded people present themselves in displays of cooperation and have a strong moral quality to them.25 But this is no less true of the customs uncertified but aspiring Americans use to challenge their exclusion and raise doubts about the legitimacy of whatever authority has been used to keep them socially penned in and culturally distant from the rest of us. The customs we use to keep the world working as we know it are the same customs we use to pull ourselves together after we threaten to break the bonds we have fashioned with each other. We certify the good these customs do by celebrating and commemorating them in important public rituals. The customs to which we ascribe the greatest significance and moral weight are more than habits we practice so we can make it through the day. They become acts whose ritual enactment and reenactment transform the customary ways we handle ourselves and manage each other into something bigger, something we are publicly commended for doing and punished for not doing. Three classes of rituals – rituals of restoration, renewal, and reform – keep our communities together. They do so by showing how important the practices and ideas they endorse are to our continued well-being. They also remind us of our obligation to follow these practices and embrace the principles and values they reflect. These rituals are sometimes codified in law but even when they aren’t we are expected to show our commitment to live with them by voluntarily consenting to live by them. There are occasions, however, when people are not willing to assent to living with these practices or endorse the principles and values implied in their use. On those occasions, people call upon a fourth ritual – a ritual of disconsent – to show their unwillingness to live with certain practices everyone else thinks are important or subscribe to the principles and values reflected in their use. People can withdraw their assent privately and quietly. They can move away.26 Or, they can temporarily withdraw their assent publicly and loudly, as so many have in the past and continue to do so today.27 In this latter case, their behavior has ritualistic qualities no less important than the ones those people follow when they follow rituals that pull the community together or celebrate and commemorate its successes. Popular unrest and violence are the principal rituals people call upon to show they are not willing to leave but also unwilling to assent to the way things are. Rituals that restore us undo acts that have the potential to undermine our traditions. Rituals of restoration reinforce what had been the customary ways we dealt with our differences, collaborated, and worked on our disagreements. In community conflicts, rituals of restoration are frequently associated with efforts to return to more traditional ways of dealing with each other, especially in public.

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Rituals that renew us keep people from slipping back into old habits they would prefer not to be reminded of or now may even be seen as dangerous and destructive. The work these rituals do has the effect of reinforcing how we currently talk about and treat each other in public. Rituals of reform create brand-new ways of carrying on our lives or amending our old ways, so they do not offend us as much as they did before we worked our way out of trouble. Rituals of renewal and reform are typically paired with efforts to treat people differently and presumably better in public than they were talked about and treated in the past. People pushing rituals that would renew or reform us are anything but enthusiastic about turning the clock backwards and restoring older ways of talking and acting in public. All three rituals are implicated in the way we commemorate important moments in our lives by either affirming and reinforcing what has kept us together in the past or by enabling us to do more and act better than we were accustomed to in the past. Either way, these rituals are supposed to help us soldier on together and keep our communities from falling apart.28 Meetings and marches – ritualistic public acts with rich histories – can show how members of a community can change their mind on a sensitive matter. A crowd of 2,500 community members from the Francis Howell School District, which is located two counties west of the City of St. Louis, packed a 2013 town hall meeting with the idea of protesting a decision to integrate their schools with black children from a suburban Saint Louis County school district. Their concerns notwithstanding, the Francis Howell schools were desegregated. Seven years later, nearly as large a crowd – this one composed of both white and black students and adults – marched through part of the district to show their support for Black Lives Matter protests.29 In this case, the earlier public meeting reenacted a ritual of restoration to maintain the non-desegregated nature of the district’s schools. The march in support of Black Lives Matter seven years later was a ritual of renewal, which effectively reaffirmed the district’s new desegregated status. A piece of reactionary unrest was replaced by a piece of progressive unrest. Both showed how rituals help a community stay together in the face of new challenges and potential threats to its integrity. The fourth ritual – a ritual of disconsent – makes an entirely different contribution to community life. It prompts us to address a big problem we have been ignoring or to ask a question we would rather not ask ourselves. Rituals of disconsent do not have the affirmational or ameliorative power of the other three. Their only purpose is to act as a kind of cultural trigger and shock to the system designed to drive us to one or more of the other three types of rituals for the remedial assistance they provide. The work accomplished by rituals of restoration, renewal, and reform is also important because it bridges and connects the conventional and

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comfortably unconventional parts of our everyday lives. The work accomplished by a ritual of disconsent is qualitatively different. It makes us singularly uncomfortable and alerts us to the existence of a breach or bad fit in pieces of our world we need to work on together. When called upon, rituals of disconsent surprise and alarm us by calling into question the legitimacy and long-term viability of the community. At the same time, rituals of disconsent usually do no permanent damage to the practices people rely on to keep the community up and running in a predictable if not entirely satisfactory way. They are more a temporary i­rritant than a complement to what passes for conventional everyday customs and more popular rituals. The cultural work rituals of disconsent accomplish make us pause and take a serious look at how we view and treat each other in public. Social unrest and violence are especially well-designed to accomplish this important cultural end. How effectively rituals of disconsent do their job is open to debate, of course. One way to measure their effectiveness is seen in the kinds of unrest and violence our communities experience. On the one hand, if violence is more destructive and deadly this tells us different groups are not making much, if any, progress accommodating other peoples’ points of view and involving them in the larger life of their community. It is more likely telling everyone that we’re not even thinking about being accommodating or inclusive. Elias and Pinker would say such people weren’t acting in a civilized manner. On the other hand, if a community’s violence is less deadly and destructive than it was in the past, this tells us people are doing better at being responsive and accommodating to the different groups living around them. They are behaving in a more civilized way. In either case, we need to see people fighting to figure out how their relations are coming along and how well or poorly our community is doing in staying united. Rituals of restoration, renewal, and reform need not be called forth and employed in an enthusiastic and completely effective fashion for them to work. Indeed, adopting and using them in more half-hearted and only partially effective ways is a crucial element in making ritualized reforms responsive to the ritualized crises people used to make their grievances and demands look fiercer and less easily addressed than they really are. The absence of unrest and violence would not mean all our differences have disappeared, we will not have serious disagreements in the future, or our disagreements will never again turn violent. It only means we will be less likely to kill each other over our differences, to destroy each other’s property, or insult government officials and community leaders to make a point. Our unrest and violence would have become more civil. We would have become more accommodating and civilized than we were in the past. The same ideological flexibility is built into the way we think about and organize our communities.30 The world we live in (not the intellectually

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pristine world liberal and conservative philosophers imagine, and ideologues fantasize about) combines liberal and conservative values into predictable and effective patterns. The way governments, ethnic and religious groups, businesspeople, and shoppers and investors make communities and sense of the world reflects predictable and effective combinations of liberal and conservative values that have been practiced and amended for hundreds of years. They work surprisingly well, given the tough and confusing problems sometimes thrown our way and we make for ourselves. Marches, demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, walkouts, and boycotts, bug bites that never happened, and many other unscheduled, intemperate, and upsetting public displays of peoples’ willingness to suspend their consent to be held to “normal” standards and customary ways of getting along with others make a temporary mess of the world.31 They display ways of mixing liberal and conservative values that contravene, run afoul, parody, and mock the way people – including the ones doing the contravening, running afoul, parodying, and mocking – typically work together and disagree in public. Displays of peoples’ disconsent are a surprise and do not last long because the mix of liberal and conservative values they reflect do not fit the world we live in every other day we are not acting out of bounds and sounding crazy. We cannot act in dramatically disruptive ways for long, not because other persons might be hurt or property damaged, though for many of us that would be reason enough to stop, but because these acts do not help us do all the other hard work we must do to keep our world and lives together… together. Notes 1 https://www.stltoday.com/eedition/page-a6/page_32b056ae-a5f7-5e63-8b3f407c752d1776.html 2 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking Penguin, 2011), p. 477; Hirschman, Albert, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 3 For a more detailed discussion of these questions and the way Americans typically answer them, see Daniel Monti, The American City: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 4 Anderson, Carol, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Mickey, Robert, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972 (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Katz, Michael, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 5 Roediger, David, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants ­Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 6 The philosophies behind more liberal and conservative ways of imagining and putting social worlds together are as varied, complicated, and at times as unavoidably contradictory as the minds of the persons who compose them. A pretty good clue to which way a particular philosopher leans into his or her, but mostly his,

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liberal or conservative views is to see how much room and agency they make for individuals. Philosophers who leave more room and agency for individuals lean liberal. Philosophers who leave less room for individuals and pay correspondingly more attention to the determinative power and authority of groups over their individual members lean conservative. See, for example, Glenn Morrow’s book Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) for a good layout of a more conservative perspective. See Philip Selznick’s The Moral Community: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) for a more liberal take on the subject. My less supple and compromising rendering of liberalism and conservatism is more insistently consistent than most of the works of social philosophers I have read. You’re a conservative if you want to recognize only certain kinds of people as eligible members of the community, think people should follow the rules, and should be accountable to others for what they say and do in front of others. You’re a liberal if you think membership in the community should be open to more persons and different kinds of people, rule following is negotiable, and people should be allowed to do their own thing. For a more detailed treatment of how this works out in the four principal ways Americans present themselves as members of the polity, shoppers and investors, as businesspeople and members of distinctive racial, ethnic, and religious groups see Monti, The American City. 7 See endnote 22 in Chapter 9. 8 Phillips, Patrick, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017); Hayes, Robert, A Night of Violence: The H ­ ouston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Gillespie McRae, Elizabeth, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Jackson, Kenneth, The Ku Klux Klan in the City: 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 9 Lancaster, Guy, ed., The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819–1919 (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018); Wendt, Simon, The Spirit & The Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010); Cobb, Charles, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement ­Possible ­Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Winston, Jay, Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black ­Protest Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); Capeci, Dominic, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); Hirsch, Eric, Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth ­Century Chicago ­Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Doug ­McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); Graff, Daniel, “Race, Citizenship, and the Origins of Organized Labor in Antebellum St. Louis,” in Thomas Spencer, ed., The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes and Regular Folk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), pp. 50–80; Henry, Deborah, “Race, Power, and the Building Trades Industry in Postwar St. Louis,” in Thomas Spencer, ed., The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes and Regular Folk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), pp. 81–114. 10 Havercroft, Jonothan, “Why Is There No Just Riot Theory?” British Journal of Political Science. (2021): 1–15. 11 Monti, The American City; Daniel Monti, Engaging Strangers: Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism, and Public Order in Boston (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson ­University Press, 2013). 12 Again, see Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, pp. 91–118 and 170–199. For theories positing that modern urban societies have a less-than-whole or unified civic

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culture see: Michael Borer, “The Location of Culture: The Urban Culturalist ­Perspective,” City & Community. Vol. 5 (2) (2006): 173–198. 13 D’arcy, Stephen, Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy (London: Zed Books LTD, 2014); Clayton, Cornell and Richard E ­ lgar, eds., Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2012); Havercroft, “Why Is There No Just Riot Theory?” 14 Turner, Ralph and Lewis Killian, Collective Behavior (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, Inc., 1972), pp. 21–25 and 407–425. 15 Havercroft, “Why Is There No Just Riot Theory?,” p. 12. 16 Susan Olzak provided a small but quite telling illustration of this point in her article entitled “Does Protest Against Police Violence Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1990 through 2019.” American Sociological Review. Vol. 86 (6) (2021): 1066–1099. She found that protests against police violence were correlated with a reduction in police-involved fatalities for blacks and Hispanics and increased the likelihood of a civilian review board would be created. But the creation of these boards did not reduce the number of police-involved fatalities. The establishment of an organization was less important than the use of non-violent challenges to authorities. There was obvious growth in the formal power of minorities to the extent that the number of black mayors and elected municipal officials increased dramatically between 1968 and 1981. How effective they were in making program and policy changes demanded by minority activists is not known. However, their presence, availability to minority constituents, and ability to bring needed public services to minority residents no doubt had a calming effect on the communities they served. See: Horowitz, Donald, “Racial Violence in the United States,” in ­Nathan Glazer and Ken Young, eds. Ethnic Pluralism and Public Policy: A ­ chieving Equality in the United States and Britain (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1983), pp. 202–204. Further evidence of the importance of unrest in creating “softer” changes in local community cultures and organizations rather than obvious program and policy changes agreeable to local people is found in Ince, Anthony, Thomas Boren, and Llda Lindell’s article “After Riots: Toward a Research Agenda on the long-term effects of Urban Unrest,” Journal of Urban Affairs. Vol. 45 (2) (2023): 84–101. 17 Tilly, Charles, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 18 The two best books on this subject are: Horowitz, Donald, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Varshney, Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 19 Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie. 20 The New York Times, April 22, 2019. “There Should Be More Rituals!” David Brooks. 21 The New York Times, August 28, 2020. “March on Washington 2020: Protesters hope to rekindle spirit of 1963.” Michael Wines and Aishvarya Kavi; The New York Times, September 2, 2020. “‘They stand on the shoulders of giants’: the next generation to march on Washington.” Zach Montague. 22 Gluckman, Max, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, Ltd., 1991), pp. 109–136. 23 Monti, Daniel, A Semblance of Justice: St. Louis School Desegregation and Order in Urban America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985). 24 Hirschman, Albert, 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 25 Sennett, Richard, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

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6 Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. 2 27 Havercroft, “Why Is There No Just Riot Theory?,” p. 11. 28 Miller, Geoffrey, “The Legal Foundation of Ritual.” Chicago-Kent Law Review. Vol. 80 (3) (2005): 1181–1233. I am indebted to Professor Miller for his writing on rituals of restoration, reform, and renewal. 29 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 26, 2020. “A new reckoning over racism in schools.” Blythe Bernhard. 30 Monti, The American City; Monti, Engaging Strangers. 31 Eugene Robinson made this very point in a column he wrote as Black Lives Matter protests were spreading across the country in 2020. He argued that the protests were best understood as expressions of peoples’ unwillingness to consent to carry on and be governed the way they had been in the past. Here I argue that the unwillingness is temporary. Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, June 4, 2020. “A rainbow of outrage.” Eugene Robinson.

4 CROWDS, STRANGERS, AND CITY LIFE

If violence is among the last and most dramatic sumptuary privileges ­Americans still practice, it is clear fewer Americans today feel obliged or sufficiently privileged to practice it. However true this may be for most individuals; it is even more true for groups of Americans and organizations whose members act up in public. All kinds of Americans these days are ready to take their private grievances and concerns public. They are also less willing than ever to use deadly and destructive violence when they do. This is quite a turn of events. Americans living in towns and cities have long shown they can make trouble for each other, attack and sometimes even kill each other, and more often destroy each other’s property and symbols of public authority. Throughout the 19th century, there were many times when white people felt especially privileged and even obliged to attack and kill black persons and people with nationalities and religions different from their own. They also destroyed or stole property belonging to such people. Sometimes white people even succeeded in running them out of town. Attacks such as these in smaller Southern towns persisted into the early20th century. The custom of attacking blacks extended to cities where they migrated after leaving the South in large numbers in the first half of the 20th century. This custom was repeated later in the 20th century when some black people made their first tentative moves into suburban communities outside the cities to which some of them had migrated only decades earlier. Black people weren’t the only people assaulted in urban areas, of course. Members of other minority and ethnic populations made a lot of trouble for each other, too, and fought from time to time. But blacks caught more of these beatings than other people did. DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-5

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However, as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, these fights diminished over time and became less vicious. Increasingly, whites relied on realtors, banks, and school districts to minimize the contact they would have with their new black neighbors. Police departments, like the one in Ferguson, made a point of actively discriminating against black residents, harassing, and intimidating them, fining, imprisoning, and sometimes killing them.1 Whites also worked hard to limit the effects of legislation and court decisions that favored blacks and other minorities.2 The single biggest piece of recent evidence showing how far white ­Americans had come in denying themselves the privilege of assaulting and killing black Americans was apparent in all the smaller places where Black Lives Matter protests were held. White counter-protesters might have glared and hollered at Black Lives Matter protesters, but they didn’t attack them. ­Attacks by counter-protesters and government agents only happened in ­cities, and not every city at that. We have grown accustomed to cities being places that have widespread social unrest and violence. In the past, however, urban unrest and violence was more often associated with efforts to reinforce widely shared community standards and conventional institutional practices rather than undermine or replace them. The imaginary and sometimes real but almost always overblown threat black residents posed to white people in towns and cities were used as a pretext for whites to attack them. The very real and ongoing harm done to blacks and other persons of color rarely inspired individual blacks to a­ ttack individual whites much less gang up and attack whites in great numbers. Black people have never enjoyed the sumptuary privilege of attacking ­persons of higher social status. How we imagine and make sense of popular unrest and violence surely has changed over the last couple of hundred years. In this chapter, I intend to go even further back in time to explore how the ancient Greeks pioneered the ways people put their crowds to much different and better use than we have most of the time. I do this so we might better understand how much our use of unrest and violence differs from the way the people who pioneered how to put crowds to good use figured it out and how we screwed up their invention. Along the way, I will make occasional flips back to our American way of bickering and hurting each other to illustrate just how smart the ancient Greeks were. I will also do it, however, so I can show how some of their ideas about crowds were carried forward more than we could have imagined, if we ever thought about it, which we haven’t. Had we thought more about where our customary ways of using unrest and violence had come from, Hugh D ­ avis Graham would never have had to worry about the seemingly paradoxical pairing of unrest and institutional stability.3

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Crowds in Ancient Greek Cities

Some two thousand or so years ago, the Greeks had a plan for making cities and how all the different kinds of people in cities might be cajoled into working better together than we think possible today. Their plan spoke to what sociologists have long referred to as “the problem of order” and inspired them to use crowds to make their ideal city or polis work to everyone’s advantage. Let’s begin with something obvious but important. Crowds are the most prominent social feature of life in cities. Cities make crowds, but only rarely do crowds make trouble. It was the Greeks’ singular insight to use crowds to keep trouble at bay and life in their cities more orderly and peaceful. In fairness to contemporary Americans, we have not completely abandoned what the Greeks had in mind and how they used crowds to foment their version of domestic tranquility. All one need do is look at the way people crowd sporting events, enjoy somebody else’s ethnic festival, attend a Fourth of July parade, stand in long lines at schools and churches to cast their votes, push their way into stores to buy goods that have gone on sale before Christmas, wait on crowded subway stations and bus stops at rush hour, and only once had people try to halt the peaceful turnover of one presidential administration to another. These events provide us with a peek behind the curtain of the Greeks’ very public and sometimes theatrical way of bringing different kinds of people together in crowds and doing so in ways that kept their cities more orderly than not. The other side and harder edge of the Greeks’ use of crowds and the legacy they bequeathed us about how to use them was apparent in the way they used crowds to point out wrongdoing and punish wrongdoers. This is the part about making and using crowds our English and European ancestors bungled. Granted, English and European crowds a couple of hundred years ago confronted challenges the ancient Greeks never faced. But our more immediate ancestors made two big changes in the Grecian formula for making crowds and putting them to good public use. First, more privileged people removed themselves as active participants, leaders, or enablers of crowds. Second, they also gave themselves a pass from crowds publicly rebuking them for their misdeeds. The second feature, the one that has the wealthy, well-born, and powerful doing their utmost to avoid being held accountable for their misdeeds and publicly shamed, has been elevated to something approaching an art form in American politics. The infamously unapologetic Donald Trump may have exploited this custom, but he didn’t invent the non-apology. Much earlier public figures did. He also hasn’t escaped being held accountable for his misdeeds, a fact that I will return to in the chapter about the Capitol insurrection and attempted Presidential coup d’état.

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Megan Garder, a writer for The Atlantic, did a good job laying out the consequences of never having to say you’re sorry or making amends in public life.4 As she put it, I’m sorry, said sincerely, is supposed to be the first step toward forgiveness. But forgiveness is difficult…when justice is so unevenly distributed – when there’s no meaningful consensus about who deserves redemption, or under what conditions. And when humility gets confused with humiliation, defiance becomes a point of pride. And a shield against being held accountable for even grievous public transgressions. It is not at all clear that a community’s elites and leaders ever worried about what it might mean to excuse themselves from public ridicule and shaming. If they did, they certainly put their concerns off to the side quickly. The downside to excusing or insulating themselves from public rebukes and punishments quickly became apparent to local elites. Now, less privileged and “civilized” city dwellers could take it upon themselves to pick and choose who deserved to be publicly admonished for committing an offense against the community. And when that happened, crowds turned into something less predictable, more threatening, destructive, scarier, and much deadlier than they had been up to that point. Today, Americans draw on the ancient Greek custom for making and using crowds for celebrations or commemorations. We also draw on more recent English and European customs for using unrest to point out wrongdoing and admonish and punish wrongdoers. Furthermore, as the Black Lives Matter protests showed us, we have shared our new-old way of using crowds with people living in places much smaller, more ethnically and religiously homogeneous, and more racially monochromatic than cities. The peaceful Black Livers Matter protests were a dramatic public apology for white people’s current and earlier “uncivilized” behavior toward black people. They also were a way of showing that a big cultural change had happened in the way white people across the country viewed and would treat black people in their town. The protests that turned violent, almost all of them in bigger cities, made a public show of what could happen if authorities didn’t reform their own bad behavior and that of police officers when it came to the way their black citizens are spoken to and treated in public. The non-violent and violent crowds in Black Lives Matter protests ­complemented each other’s work. The fact violent and non-violent crowds appeared across the country at the same time shows how much our American way of urban life was shared in places much smaller and more homogeneous than cities. Americans living in all kinds of smaller, medium-sized, and big places know about urban ways of arguing and acting out in public. They all

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practice the Greek art of making life-affirming crowds. Many also are familiar with the less ennobling kinds of crowds and social unrest made in English and European towns and cities that began a couple hundred years ago. But what is it about cities and the urban way of life practiced there that lends itself to social and political unrest? The reasons bear repeating. Crowds are the most prominent social feature of life in cities, and sometimes crowds behave badly. But here and in earlier chapters we have begun to see how infrequently we call upon troublemaking crowds, how briefly they last, and how much their work complements more orderly ways to make city life corrigible, worthwhile, and even fun. Places smaller than cities can make crowds, too, of course. People living in smaller places must just work harder to pull sizable numbers of people together to make a crowd. The difficulty of assembling enough people notwithstanding, Americans who live in smaller communities are every bit as familiar with rudimentary ways to upset a community’s “normal order” using unorthodox petitions, protests, and violence to make a point or draw attention to themselves. If we are seeing citified ways of acting out in public displayed these days in smaller communities such as all the ones that had Black Lives Matter protests, it can mean only one thing. Important pieces of an urban way of life, including how to be unruly, have been replicated, practiced, and embraced by people living in much smaller places. People who do not live in cities share important cultural understandings and sympathies with people who do, even though they live in places with few of the individuals and problems we associate with big city life. Meetings, demonstrations, parades, petitions, protests, and other displays of collective dissatisfaction and celebration have a common origin. If we are to understand their origin and historical uses, we must look to cities for ­answers. That is where residents learned to reckon with the challenges presented by having a great many and different kinds and classes of people living and working in the same place. It is in cities where we will find clues to how and why people learned to use unruly and sometimes quite destructive and deadly acts to give public expression to their private concerns and aspirations. No matter how violent and obnoxious these acts may be, they enforce public reckonings where and when one might not otherwise expect them. Momentary inversions of order into head-spinning, off-putting, and challenging usurpations of elite people’s customary rights and privileges let usurpers make claims they would not ordinarily make in front of people more privileged and powerful than they are. The crucial challenge the Greeks passed on to every city-building people who followed them is this. It’s one thing to build a city. It is quite another to fill it with a great many people who may have little in common but manage to carry on together despite their differences. Every sign to the contrary

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notwithstanding, what happens in cities is no less culturally relevant and vital today than it was several thousands of years ago.5 Part of the Greek’s legacy is seen in the ruins they left behind. The other part of their urban legacy, and to my thinking more important part, was more social or cultural in nature. The ancient Greeks made crucial contributions to how city people arranged themselves so that they would get along. To that end, they created free and independent city-states, communities in which the different classes and kinds of people could live, work, and practice the art of politics together. Mind you. I didn’t say they lived, worked, or practiced politics as equals, just together. All the cities they created testify to the success they enjoyed in creating a viable civic culture in those places. The Greek’s singular legacy to us is the way of life – unmistakably urban in all its public glory and shame – that city people make and to which they recommit themselves every day. It was the Greek’s urban way of life that brought their cities to life. It is what continues to breathe life into our cities today. The Greek’s greatest gift was the very orderly way they put the disorderly potential of city people to work so they would not make war on each other. This still matters to us today and, at other times, also makes us scratch our heads and want to run and hide.6 For the problem they left to all the city builders who followed them, including us, was that they built their cities around a large and potentially unstable mix of classes, races, men, women, and children, resident aliens, and slaves. These people could easily have turned all the good and hard work that went into building the Greek’s polis into a mess. But they didn’t. The reason why they didn’t is that the Greeks took the most prominent and potentially disruptive features of social life in cities – crowds and strangers – and invented ways to harness their power for the good of the city. These cultural inventions were intended to make and keep Greek cities orderly in the face of all the distractions and opportunities cities make for people to misunderstand, misjudge, annoy, and provoke each other. Keeping people out of each other’s face and off each other’s back is a test of society’s ability to push through moments when people cannot or will not get out of each other’s way. This problem is clearly on the mind of every historian and social scientist who has ever written about public unrest and violence in modern societies. Observers and analysts of urban life often make plain their wish that people would treat each other better or at least leave each other alone. Standing behind this wish, however, is a much stronger urge to find ways to keep city people from insulting, abusing, damaging each other’s property, and, ultimately, from killing each other. The Greek’s solution to the problem of order was to take moments with great potential to become disorderly and make them into moments that

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brought different people together rather than drive them apart. Unlike some contemporary thinkers, the ancient Greeks understood that civility and harmony were different.7 Keeping the peace may be what distinguishes a successful urban people from people who cannot make cities that work. But keeping the peace is not the ultimate test of a people’s ability to fill cities with a way of life that matters and will persist. Fighting over one’s differences with others in ways that enable everyone to continue living and working there together after they have been in each other’s face and on each other’s back is the ultimate test. This is a test urban people pass every time they take to the streets to scream and fight, destroy property and sometimes each other, and then return to the world they built together for another shot at keeping it working and, if possible, make it work even better. The Greek’s solution to the problem of order was to make customs and build moments into the everyday lives of people that drew on the one necessary feature of urban life they could find only a few ways to command and after that had no obvious or good way to control: crowds. As sociologists have often noted, crowds are composed of people who do not know each other well, have comparatively little in common, and might not like each other more were they to become better acquainted.8 The Greeks found a workaround for their crowd problems so strangers might contribute to the city’s order. Why the Problem of Order Is Difficult to Solve

Principal among the reasons why the problem of order was so difficult to solve were two features of urban life that will receive a great deal of attention in this book. First, cities display all the ways certain classes and kinds of people can be treated unequally. While all societies have inequities built into them, differences in the life chances their several classes, races, religions, and ancestral groups experience are played out most often and vividly in cities. Second, people in all societies and especially in the cities of those societies invent ways that enable them to live with these inequities, soften or reinforce the impact they have on people’s lives, or repudiate them when people can no longer bear their weight. The leaders of Athens between 500 and 300 BCE pulled this off better perhaps than the leaders of other free and independent city-states of Greece. What wealthier and more powerful citizens did was show everyone beneath them – women, children, foreigners, slaves, and laborers – how to hold the city and its way of life as a sacred trust. They were of the city. The city was them. People who lived in cities but were not considered citizens had little or no wealth or power still had important parts to play in the Greek city. But just as they do today, these other people accepted their diminished status and the limitations it imposed on their lives. They were not part of

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the people – an “ethnie” or ethnic group – who mattered most and ensured the city would be kept in good working order.9 Only elite people were obliged to do this. Everybody else was supposed to follow their lead. The central problem illustrated by the events discussed here – the part unrest plays in the long and difficult process of bringing newcomers and outsiders into some larger and more inclusive moral community or “people” – is that we forget how often we use crowds to integrate different people into a way of life or culture that matters to everyone. The crowds we remember are the destructive and deadly ones. This may be an unavoidable consequence of having so many different and unequal people living and working in the same big place. We do not see how our public fights will bring us much closer together than we were before we started annoying each other, throwing sour looks and sharp elbows each other’s way, took to the streets, and made all “hell break loose.”10 Social unrest of the sort we saw played out on the streets of Ferguson and in so many other communities in the 1960s and early-1970s challenged our commitment to becoming a more inclusive people. The fact our crowds are less deadly than they were not too long ago shows we may be relearning how to use crowds in less socially destructive and more culturally edifying ways. Our public fights are not as nasty as they once were and are easier to pick ourselves up from afterward. These are signs of the progress people are making in trying to come back together and working out their differences after they have a big public fight. Such changes, however agreeable, might not look much like progress when the best thing you can say is your city was torn up less than the last city where people rioted. But it is a clue the ancient Greeks would not have missed if we had the chance to compare notes with them today. The Greeks knew about crowds and how to turn them to some good purpose. That kind of crowd is hard to make, however, when people have little or no personal knowledge of each other.11 It is harder if they do not have similar values, a shared sense of what constitutes good and bad public behavior, and little or no experience at working together on big problems. It is harder yet when people do not have a common culture, which is exactly the issue city leaders and fearful onlookers had with urban life in 19th- and 20th-century cities and sought to remedy.12 There were other places and moments in cities when people from different social classes and non-citizens were brought together more purposely. This was done so they might see they had more in common or something in common besides being different and unequal. There were theatrical ­performances in public, sport competitions in public, any number of celebrations, commemorations, and even trials and punishments meted out in public for the pleasure and edification of people amassed in public as part of a crowd.

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The value of crowds is readily apparent in these settings and cannot be overestimated. What crowds make possible is the bringing together of p ­ eople who are anything but equal in terms of their wealth, power, and prestige but can act and be treated more like social and cultural equals when they are together in public.13 Making these kinds of crowds is a big cultural accomplishment. All the crowds for which the ancient Greeks made room allowed people who were otherwise markedly unequal act and think of themselves as equal in important and very public settings. The order and equality accomplished through crowds did not undo all the other ways in which Greek life was unequal. What the ancient Greek crowds managed to do was soften the appearance and significance of the inequality people saw when they looked above and below where they typically stood. They did this by superimposing over all the obvious ways in which people were unequal big moments when these same people were effectively elevated to the same level as the city’s trustees. This explains why city leaders and reformers in the 19th century worked so hard to make moments when their city’s very different classes, races, ethnic groups, religious bodies, and genders could come together as equals.14 Many of the traditions they invented were designed with this problem in mind.15 It also helps to explain why people living in a community with well-marked social classes do not have to shatter all the rungs on the ladder that put some of them higher than their neighbors. Historians such as Anthony D. Smith, Edmund S. Morgan, and David Hackett Fischer understood that big trouble and bad things happen when enough people are openly spoken of and treated as being less than equal or have the pretense of equality diminished, systematically violated, or stripped from them. One of the unanticipated and unheralded accomplishments of how ­American has become more “democratized” is that white people are showing they now “get it.” They know how it feels to be treated in ways they believe are disrespectful and unbecoming to fully accredited members of their own community. The way white act out in public demonstrates they believe they must now use unrest to make themselves heard just like black people have had to do in the past. All the white people in jail for what they did in Charlottesville and ­Washington, D.C. are object lessons for another element of the democratization process. The last of the crowd-like assemblages I listed above – those dealing with trials and punishments – have an especially important place among the crowds that make unequal people more like equals. Athenian crowds, ­Danielle Allen has written, imposed fines, imprisonment, public humiliation in the stocks, some loss of political rights, disfranchisement, exile from the city, property confiscation, razing the convict’s house, and even death.16 I have a fourfold purpose for drawing attention to all the public ways people were accused, tried, and punished in Athens and other Greek cities.

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First, “citizens” – people who had more property, status, and power than most other persons – could be held accountable for their misdeeds. They stood accused, were tried, and punished in public. They could be stripped of their wealth, power, prestige, and, on occasion, their life. Second, crowds were invited to assemble and witness the public rebukes, shaming, and punishments meted out for persons who had broken rules. Third, persons who had done bad things were often allowed to leave the city and escape physical punishment. Damage done to property owned by more prosperous persons or taking signs of a more powerful person’s power and authority from them were preferred over imprisoning them, injuring them, or killing them. (The same would not be true of the punishments meted out to less well-to-do and powerless persons, such as slaves. They had little to lose besides their life.) Fourth, a private misdeed could have very public consequences that would be made clear to the whole community or at least anyone who cared to watch. It is a short step from crowds being assembled to watch such proceedings to having a direct hand in assigning blame and carrying out punishments. (Crowds today forego the trial part of public rebukes on most occasions and move straight into punishing the people and institutions that did them wrong.) But it would take a long time for members of “the public” with ­decidedly less wealth, power, and prestige to be ceded the right to carry on that way by persons with more wealth, power, or prestige. In any event, the protocols people used when they met in public for the purpose of rebuking, shaming, or injuring someone for their bad behavior were staged. Furthermore, the manner of their staging was understood by everyone either attending the performance or who would have heard about it afterward. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, every element of what has just been described became part of the customary ways in which people in our time show their public disdain for people and agencies that overstep their authority or an unwillingness to accept how they were being governed or treated in public. The origins of the way we engage in popular unrest today – in demonstrations, protests, mobs, riots, and other displays of public disapproval – are found in the crowds of ancient Greece, with one notable difference. The mass gatherings promoted by the ancient Greeks were obviously and intentionally carried out in such a way as to bring different people together rather than drive them apart. Their crowds were supposed to show the ways people were equal rather than all the ways they were unequal. The use of disorderly gatherings with less apparent interest in bringing different classes or kinds of persons together and more destructive and deadly consequences is a more recent turn in the customary uses of crowds that were invented by the Greeks. What modern people came to call “mobs” and “mobocracy” was invented by the Greeks and referred to as “ochlocracy” in their time. They had no

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more love of mob rule than most persons do today. They viewed “ochlocracy” as the opposite of “democracy.” It was to their thinking a “perverted” version of the popular will rather than its complement.17 This idea that “mob rule” is a perversion of democracy is a view many people share today. But it is a point of view that is wildly inconsistent with the way most crowds have acted in American history: in reactionary ways designed to uphold the status quo rather than upend it. Crowds only became perverted in matters involving crime and punishment when more elite persons withdrew their active support for crowds and engagement in them.18 Crowds also became perverted when the process of accusing, trying, and especially of punishing wrongdoers became less public and elites were better shielded from the process altogether. It was not at all coincidental that this happened only after less prominent people and groups were ceded more control over the means to ridicule and punish others in public. As I develop the argument laid out in the book further, it will become obvious I view “mob rule” as an important complement to democratic rule, customs, traditions, and institutions. Mob rule is not a perversion of democratic beliefs and practices. It only calls the way we practice them into question, albeit publicly and dramatically. I am hardly the first person to assert that unconventional ways of arguing and fighting in public complement more conventional ways of accomplishing the same ends or serve as a substitute for them when conventional approaches do not work.19 Here, I showed more clearly how particular types of unruly behavior match up with more conventional types of corporate activity and how complementary their moral makeup is. Popular unrest has become one of the more frequently used and certainly more dramatic examples of a social invention that helps people draw attention to and argue about their differences. This is especially true of the unequal ways they are treated in public and in the constraints different groups are allowed or forbidden to impose on each other. Violence has come to be used by groups against each other or against people and institutions with a great deal of power and prestige. People marked as more worthy and less worthy have engaged in unrest. It has taken place in a multitude of social settings in different societies. It continues to be used even though it is hard to see what big or lasting good it makes in the lives of less powerful groups that use it or are targeted by it. Indeed, depending on the circumstances, the mere threat of unrest can make groups reluctant to push harder for changes people really want or think are necessary to make their lives better.20 Much of what we have learned about crowds and popular unrest so far speaks to the utility of this kind of behavior. At the same time, the ­versatile and readily adaptable character and often destructive impact of crowds,

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especially the violent ones, make it hard to identify a greater social good that would be served by their intermittent use. I contend popular unrest might again be used to draw people’s attention to and make a bigger deal about all the ways different kinds of people might be viewed and treated more as equals. Such an outcome is not at all unprecedented in American society, as the conflicts leading up to the American Revolution established and the ones before the Civil War tried to reclaim. Other kinds of public demonstrations that have turned ugly in the past are used today to celebrate a people’s heritage and bring people together who do not know each other very well so they might come to know each other better, if only for a little while or on ceremonial occasions.21 It happens the ancient Greeks had the same good idea about the greater social good that might be accomplished by crowds. We forget or ignore all the ways and moments we still use crowds to bring different classes and kinds of people together in cities. Today, for the reasons I identified above, we only see the ways popular unrest drives people apart. The original purpose served by crowds and the ways they once were used to make communities more orderly were turned on their head and in the process of being turned upside down also turned ugly. There are signs today Americans are turning crowds – especially the ones where some of most sensitive racial sore spots are on display – more right-side-up than they have been in a long time. Popular unrest is not as ugly as it used to be, sometimes much less destructive, but certainly not as deadly. If history is any guide to what we look forward to, this is not an accident. Making Better Sense of Unrest and Violence

Neither of these ways of making sense of riots and rioters brings us any closer to an explanation for why people sometimes act out and take their grievances to the street and what if any good they think will come from behaving this way. And, as I have made clear, neither will be drawn upon here, if for no other reason than most of us could not come up with a credible explanation for half the things we do on any given day much less on a day when someone thought we were not acting “like ourselves” or appeared to be “out of our mind.” A more promising or at least not yet well-explored set of explanations revolve around answers to three questions first addressed by Greek philosophers more than two thousand years ago and I raised earlier in the book. Who can be a member of the community? (And who cannot?) How closely do people have to follow the rules laid down by members of the community? (Or when can rules be ignored, bent, broken, and amended?) How accountable are people to each other? (And when, if ever, are we free to do whatever we please?)

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The answers to these questions provide us with a cultural roadmap to what people value, the way they organize their affairs, deal with each other, and make sense of the world they have created together. Nothing about the map is permanently fixed. But the fact people have a map at all indicates some paths to making a community have been chosen more often than others. That roadmap and the answers people have used to draw it do something else. They also provide a window into the moral universe their behavior serves. Who can be a member of the community: most anyone, only a welldefined and credentialed few, or some mix of the two? How closely are people supposed to follow the rules practiced in the community: scrupulously, with a knowing wink or nod to their partial or selective enforcement, with an eye to their ability to be changed, or a bit of each? What do people value more: their freedom, that they be held more strictly accountable to each other, or some combination of the two?22 These are questions whose answers speak to the moral world people make for themselves in the places they live and work. Peoples’ answers to these questions tell us what the community values, the kind of people they are right now, and perhaps more importantly the kind of people they may become in the future. Here’s the thing. I have argued the building blocks for these answers are not fundamentally different from the answers and values built into their disorderly customs. People simply combine these same values differently when they behave in an unconventional manner. This helps explain why disorderly behavior does not happen as often as conventional actions do, cannot be sustained for long, and is so upsetting.23 It just doesn’t fit. And unrest doesn’t fit the everyday lives of the people who are upset any more or better than it does the people who have been talking about them and treating them badly. Given the ideological spin we put to the words “liberal” and “conservative,” one might have expected progressive unrest to reflect only liberal values and reactionary unrest to reflect exclusively conservative values. Similarly, the word pictures painted by social philosophers, activists, and political agitators would almost certainly and reflexively portray conventional acts as conservative and unconventional acts as liberal. But that is not at all how conventional and unconventional acts are put together and used in the world Americans have built. The mixing of liberal and conservative values in both conventional and unconventional activities reflect the subtle and important contribution both liberal and conservative values make to all the ways people pull themselves together and sometimes threaten to push each other apart. Rule breaking, unpredictability, and the unconventional qualities of unrest are the flip side of many conventional practices people use every day to deal with each other in public. Ritualistic inversions of normal practices and rules show our quilled and sharp-edged world will not crumble when it is publicly and dramatically turned on its head.

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In an odd and unexpected way, which is very much part of the reason people turn their world upside down from time to time, these same inversions acknowledge the legitimacy of that world even as aggrieved persons give vivid testimony to the possibility it could be organized quite differently and still work.24 The mix of liberal and conservative values in unconventional acts makes it easier to rework the conventional actions people will need to put their world back together after it has been challenged. Writing for the first national commission dedicated to understanding the impact of cities in the United States, sociologist Louis Wirth argued the size, density, and heterogeneity of cities told us everything we needed to know about an urban way of life.25 And there was nothing about these facts about cities to make one think the lives of people residing there would come to anything but a bad end. City people were prone to committing every kind of aberrant behavior one might imagine and more than a few yet to be invented or discovered. Riots along with many individual expressions of deviant, norm-breaching behavior would have been included on the list of outrages committed by city people.26 As Donald Horowitz pointed out in his exhaustive survey of ethnic riots, (r)iots are initiated in urban areas because…processions, strikes, protests, demonstrations of strength and of mass are all more likely where population is concentrated. Urban areas are also more heterogeneous, facilitating reciprocal insult, sacrilege, and cheek-by-jowl confrontation.27 It is inevitable that cities will have riots and other forms of outrageous, ­illegal, or distasteful behavior committed by individuals and groups. Rulebreaking is endemic. People are prone to doing their own thing rather than being preoccupied with the wellbeing of other people. This is much more likely to happen in places like cities where there are diverse kinds of people who do not know each other very well and are thought not to share a common way of looking at the world or valuing what is in it. Or so it has been said. I know it does not look that way, but our civic culture – the way everyday people get along in public and make sense of each other, arrive at something passing for a consensus on matters troubling or engaging them, or figure out how to ignore their differences so they can push on with their lives – is surprisingly robust. Indeed, it is probably more accommodating and effective today than it was a century ago, which was the last time we had this many foreign people show up unannounced and had to work through big changes in our economy at the same time. The “Domain of the Unenforceable”

We have been trained to think and act better than we were expected to think and act. We are creatures of custom, not merely of habit, and are bound by

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rules, but not hamstrung by them. Most ventures we enter reflect a regard for others more deeply embedded than we think or acknowledge. The spaces we carve out for ourselves and each other are filled with more public feeling than we allow ourselves to see or can recognize. And those public feelings find expression in both liberal and conservative beliefs and values. Lord John Fletcher Moulton said nearly a century ago that these customs, rules, ventures, and spaces were part of a “domain” where people act well despite the fact nobody is looking over their shoulder and act much better than their appetites would dictate.28 He thought this “domain of obedience to the unenforceable” was broad, ran deep, and was vigorously practiced. It popped up in corners of our world we would not expect to find it and was embraced by people we would have thought incapable of appreciating civility, much less practice goodness. Life in cities shows this special domain is not only alive and thriving but works better than it did a hundred years ago. It has persisted despite the best efforts of people like me – highly educated, literate, moderately prosperous, and privileged men and women who think, write, and talk for a living – to ignore and defame it. And, most surprising of all, the “domain of the unenforceable” has thrived even though the people responsible for leading the rest of us into this realm and teaching us how to embrace it never really believed the lesson would take. Like it or not, we are a bourgeois people whose communities reflect both a belief in the idea of becoming prosperous and habits that are orderly most of the time. The connection between doing well and doing good or simply trying to do better is real and has come to be widely practiced. It may not be practiced by everyone who has done very well, but over the course of the last century it has been picked up and embraced by a great many people who have enjoyed a certain amount of economic security and even by many people who are not close to prosperous. That is because the way of life ­Americans in cities have built eventually opens for more of us than not, encourages people to adopt steady habits, and has us act as if we are accountable to each other even if we would rather not be. My explanation for part of the reason is that all kinds of people have learned to mimic and embrace ways of looking at the world and being in it together once thought to be the special province only of people from more privileged backgrounds and higher social classes. Over the last century, all these diverse kinds of people have learned to share their communities. And, importantly, they have done so even though they may not know or like each other very much and probably will never become anything like equals or own more than a little piece of the land upon which it has been built. If I am right, the chances are good more people today have become more culturally alike, too. They also may have been watching and learning how to fight in less destructive but no less pointed and effective ways. If this proves

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to be the case, then all the violence people in the United States have visited upon each other in the past will not have been committed in vain. The Greeks would have understood. Notes 1 We will see in the next chapter how the great suburban exodus whites initiated after World War II postponed the date of racial reckonings in the St. Louis area. By doing so, it also avoided many neighborhood confrontations and fights in cities that had already turned violent as blacks started to move into formerly white neighborhoods. This happened in other metropolitan areas as well. See: Kruse, Kevin, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Whites effectively ceded neighborhoods they no longer considered worth fighting for. For white people, exiting, avoiding a fight, proved more effective than using either than using their voice and vastly more a­ ttractive than remaining loyal to their community. See: Hirschman, Albert, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/us/politics/republican-election-objectorsdemographics.html 3 Grimshaw, Allen, ed. Racial Violence in the United States (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969); Lane, Roger and John J. Turner, eds. Riot, Rout, and Tumult: Readings in American social and Political Violence (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1978); Graham, Hugh Davis and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 475; Brown, Richard Maxwell, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 4 Garber, Megan, “No Apologies: Why public figures stopped saying ‘I’m sorry.” The Atlantic. (December 2019), p. 24. 5 For a regretful statement of how contemporary cities seem to fall short of realizing the social and cultural accomplishments of the Greek polis, see Long, Norton, “The Citizenships: Local, State, and National.” Urban Affairs Quarterly. Vol. 23 (1) (1987): 4–14. 6 Morrow, Glenn, Plato’s Cretan City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Hasanovic, Jasmin, “Ochlocracy in the Practice of Civil Society.” Studia Juridica Et Politica Jaurinensis. Vol. 2 (2) (2015): 56–66; Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1961). 7 Bannister, Jon and Anthony O’Sullivan, “Civility, Community Cohesion and Antisocial Behaviour: Policy and Social Harmony.” Journal of Social Policy. Vol. 42 (1) (2013): 91–110. 8 Hanson, Victor, “The Wisdom of Crowds – In Ancient Greece,” Forbes (­December 4, 2008). 9 Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986). 10 Collins, Ann, All Hell Broke Loose: American Race Riots from the Progressive Era Through World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012). 11 Milgram, Stanley, "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity," in The Division 8 Newsletter, Division of Personality and Social Psychology. Washington: American Psychological Association (1972). 12 Lofland, Lynn, The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998); Lees, Andrew, Cities Perceived: Urban

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Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1985); Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in ­America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Though he does not pay attention as such to the importance of cities as places where these concerns are best seen being worked on, Alexander, Jeffrey, The Civil Sphere (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 265–291, does dedicate a whole chapter to the experience of black Americans and their efforts to create a viable civil society. It’s made clear from the examples he uses, that Alexander is describing a process that is more urban-based and likely to be found first in black ethnic enclaves and only practiced later and more broadly across the whole of whatever community they lived in. 13 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, p. 266. 14 Delgado, Melvin, Celebrating Urban Community Life: Fairs, Festivals, Parades, and Community Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Boyer, Urban Masses. 15 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 16 Allen, Danielle, “Punishment in Ancient Athens,” Demos: Classical Athenian Democracy (March 23, 2003). http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_ punishment?page=5. 17 Polybius, Histories. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, translator (New York: Macmillan, 1889). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plb.+6.4&fromdoc=Perseu s%253Atext%253A1999.01.0234 18 Horowitz, Donald, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 343–348. 19 See, for example, Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in European Perspective” In Violence in America. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. (Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, 1979): 83–118; Varsheny, Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 20 Shapiro, Fred and James Sullivan, Race Riots: New York 1964 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964); Flamm, Michael, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Katz, Michael, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot. 21 Delgado, Celebrating Urban Community Life. 22 On this last point involving the choice between liberty and order, see: Keller, Lisa, Triumph of Order: Democracy & Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 23 For a book-length treatment of ideas presented here, see Monti, Daniel, The American City (Blackwell Publishers: Malden, MA, 1999). In peoples’ everyday lives the behavior of individuals can reflect any one of the liberal or conservative answers to these three questions or combine them in many ways. I suppose a confused or conflicted individual could even act in a way that reflected the liberal and conservative answer to the same question. Compared to the much larger and potentially contradictory ways individuals can mix and match the values informing their behavior, the conventional behavior of groups and large numbers of persons is built around the four basic ways of “doing” community I introduced in the last chapter. Each one combines a complementary array of conservative and liberal values. It was easy to see how the array of values built into conventional ways of “doing” community are different from those built into unconventional ways of “doing” community presented in the diagram presented in the last chapter. As I observed in the body of the text, unconventional acts draw on the same values

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revealed in conventional behavior but combine them in ways markedly different from the ones practiced by consumers, citizens, businesspeople, and ethnic groups. 24 Clement, Matt, A Peoples History of Riots, Protest, and the Law (London: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 94–95. 25 Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 44 (1) (July, 1938): 1–24. 26 Lees, Cities Perceived. 27 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 382. 28 Moulton, Lord John Fletcher, “Law and Manners,” The Atlantic Monthly (July 1924).

5 THE OTHER “FERGUSON EFFECT”

Ferguson, Missouri is not a city. It is a suburb of St. Louis, not quite 10 miles north and west of a city which, owing to substantial losses in its population since 1950, has slipped behind Kansas City to become the second-­largest urban center in the state. Ferguson also is an example in many non-St. ­Louisans’ minds of all the good and bad things associated with city life today. Prominent among them – after you get past the Arch, zoo, and a revitalizing midsection holding the region’s most important commercial and institutional caretakers and a handful of stable mixed-race and income neighborhoods – are black people who have made great strides in becoming players in the city and region’s future but also bear the most prominent scars left by the area’s shameful racist past. The 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri put a dramatic exclamation point to a game of “hide-and-seek” white and black people in the St. Louis area had played for nearly a half-century. White people did most of the running away and hiding. Black people did most of the seeking and chasing. Variations of the same game were played in many metropolitan areas across the United States in the second half of the 20th century, and many of them, ­perhaps most of them, did not have a riot. As other chroniclers of unrest and violence have argued, events of this sort are not an inevitable outcome of big demographic changes or economic inequality. They are a response to the way local people and institutions take up the social and cultural challenges presented by different people’s contacts with each other. Ferguson’s leaders and public institutions weren’t the only ones in Saint Louis County that responded poorly to these social and cultural challenges. But they were among the County’s most ardent and successful municipal screw-ups. DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-6

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The overall effect of the white and black migrations from the city can best be likened to what it would look like if you were standing on the edge of a pond and dropped two stones into it: a good-sized stone first and then a smaller stone a moment or two later. Ripples from the larger stone would reach farther out in the pond. Ripples from the second, smaller stone wouldn’t go as far out into the pond. Whites were the big stone. Blacks were the smaller stone. Ferguson, until 1960 a “sundown city” where black people were not ­allowed after dark,1 caught the full effect of the two stones. In the years ­between 1970 and 2020, Ferguson saw most of its white residents move out and a smaller number of black persons move in to replace them. By 2020, Ferguson had lost about one-third of its 1970 population of nearly 29,000. Today, it has fewer than 19,000 residents. Nearly 100 percent of its residents in 1970 were white. Today, less than 23 percent of the town’s population is white. Demography isn’t history. But it sets the stage for the way people make history by responding to changes going on around them. In earlier times, even the hint of blacks making any kind of move that might threaten the contrived balancing act between themselves and whites would have invited a violent reprisal by whites. In the case of Ferguson and other municipalities north and west of St. Louis, the social shock of so many black people moving in was softened only because so many white people were moving out. This was a different and unprecedented moment. Old barriers keeping white and black people at a socially safe distance were crumbling. More importantly, there didn’t seem to be anything white people and the institutions they had relied upon to keep blacks at bay could do to stop it. This was true even in Ferguson whose white leaders worked hard to keep new black residents in a subordinate position by harassing and fining them for trivial and made-up offenses. What happened in the wake of the great demographic transition St. Louis area experienced might best be characterized as mopping up exercises in which institutional caretakers who couldn’t leave had to deal with a new class of citizen customers. Public institutions such as school districts and ­local governments were subjected to their own version of a cultural stress test as they reckoned with black families, their children, and less tax money for the services they provided. That’s another reason why the Ferguson police department had its officers file so many criminal charges and fines for black persons. They needed the money. Lending institutions and real estate companies would come under scrutiny later for what they did or were alleged to have done to help keep black persons and families from moving too close to whites and their families. The reckoning for Ferguson’s public leaders and police department would come in 2014. As I noted earlier in the book, racial unrest is more likely to happen at the beginning or end of a big transition. This was the case when blacks

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were leaving the South and first settling into Northern cities at the beginning of the 20th century. It happened again in the 1960s after blacks had completed their biggest moves into Northern cities and were struggling to make a ­better and more secure place for themselves in the places to which they had moved. The unrest in Ferguson happened at the end of the big transition blacks made from being city people into becoming suburban people, just like whites. People across the city and many suburban communities took it as a wakeup call. The immediate social and cultural conditions precipitating unrest in ­Ferguson were present in many suburban municipalities. They certainly were in the City of St. Louis as well. But none of these other places had mass unrest. The question addressed in this chapter is “Why?” The other big question addressed in this chapter involves what happens in a community after a big racial or inter-racial fight has occurred.2 What happened and didn’t happen in Ferguson and St. Louis after young black men were killed by police officers is important. It also has implications for what happened and didn’t happen in Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection. When Cops Kill Young Black Men…

Meetings between white police officers and young black men have long held the potential to turn ugly in a hurry. The black person in question does something ill-advised, reckless, wrong, or maybe nothing at all. The police officer over-reacts or does exactly what one would expect them to do under those circumstances. The young man ends up in a morgue. Variations on this theme – crowds of white people with guns convinced a black person committed an unspeakable offense – have played out in cities, small towns, and plantations for several centuries. Until the beginning of the 20th century, black resistance was all but non-existent. That began to change in places like Houston during World War I and in Chicago after the war’s conclusion when blacks finally started shooting back. The black people in East St. Louis in 1917 mostly ran away or tried to run away from marauding whites. Destructive outbursts don’t always happen after police shoot young black males. But such killings have been a crucial “precipitating event” in many outbreaks of rioting from the mid-20th century onward, and not just in the United States. In recent years, it has worked out that way in England and elsewhere in Western Europe as well. Here I offer an additional line of inquiry most historians and social scientists have not pursued: adding the story of riots that don’t occur and what happens after one has taken place. I describe tense moments that did not become particularly violent or violent at all alongside events which did.

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The non-riotous events transpired in places near where violence occurred, around the same time or right on top of the moment when violence broke out nearby and had the same precipitating spark that already had ignited violence someplace else. There were protests and loud confrontations in 2017 after other police shot black men in St. Louis, but only limited vandalism. Some protesters were abused by police officers. Some officers were abused by protesters. But no one else was shot or killed. Little property was looted or sent up in flames. Greater violence certainly could have occurred and in the eyes of some people probably should have occurred. But it didn’t. It is my hope that in laying out this kind of comparison we might better understand what is going on when people make something that can be mistaken as war on their own community. The contention here is when people take to the street and “act out” in ways surprising to even their most ardent defenders they are drawing a very clear line between what they are willing to accept in how they are talked about and treated in public and what they will not tolerate. People make abundantly clear what can happen when this line is crossed by temporarily withholding their assent to the ways they are typically governed and/or have their affairs managed with people of a different race. This includes temporarily withdrawing their assent from the rules around which goods are purchased, which the rest of us call looting, and denying other persons and public authorities the ability to move unmolested through an area. In this book, I refer to people withdrawing their assent as disconsent. Not quite a century ago such public displays were considered a necessary, if regrettable, correction to breaches in public etiquette involving matters of race, religion, or ethnicity.3 Less than a half-century ago racial unrest was likened to a predictable, if regrettable, consequence of mistreatment black persons and other minorities would no longer tolerate at the hands of white people and the institutions white people ran.4 How much the world was kept intact or changed by violence of this sort remains a matter of much interest and concern to many people who have had no direct involvement with it. More recent displays of racial discontent such as the events taking place in and around St. Louis and reviewed here provide less clarity and fewer definitive answers than we would like and perhaps should have expected by now. Some things change, but usually not as much as some people wanted or other people feared. The one thing that had most obviously changed in St. Louis by the second decade of the 21st century was the success black people had in copying the way whites had settled in broad sections of the ­metropolitan area. They had found ways of fitting in better than anyone would have guessed a half-century earlier. They moved into communities that had blocked their admission for a long time.

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By 2010, the jobs held by people from different races were a great deal more alike than they were a half-century earlier. Minorities had made big gains in their schooling, too. Even the differences in their incomes while still obvious had begun to close a little.5 There are two things about these changes that should be noted. First, closing the distance between themselves and white people further on these important indicators of current and future economic wellbeing won’t make an appreciable difference in their respective levels of wealth. White people will continue to have much more wealth than black people and other nonwhite people for a long time. Second, economic disparities aren’t what drive people who come up short to use the kind of unrest and violence we saw in ­Ferguson, Charlottesville, all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, or the Capitol insurrection. More interesting to us here is that people’s economic wellbeing wasn’t raised as a problem requiring immediate attention in Ferguson or across the St. Louis area until after there was unrest and violence. Notwithstanding the good job many minority people have done in replicating the accomplishments of whites, neither black nor white people talk about it in public. Both white and black people are much more likely to speak as if nothing’s really changed. They get a lot of help talking this way from alleged experts like me, public authorities, and each other. Two other things had changed much more obviously. Both involved the blameworthiness of the black people who had long been viewed as outsiders in Ferguson. First, black people demonstrated they were no longer willing to put up with standards for public behavior that were applied mostly to them. Second, after the rioting and protesting were over, black people were held no more accountable for the violence they made than whites had in the past when they attacked black people and their property. For the first time since they moved into Ferguson, black people were treated the same way white people were. Violence had made them equal, if only for a little while. Which is exactly what ritualized rebellions are supposed to do. They show that the arrangement of social classes and races in a town or city is not fixed and can be challenged. The biggest challenge made by black people in Ferguson was to the sumptuary privilege police officers thought they enjoyed over the use of force. The offenses committed by local officials and their police department were serious and all too common in Ferguson and elsewhere. Police in suburbs north and west of St. Louis had for years charged blacks with trivial or made-up charges and tried to fine them into a state of peonage for offenses for which few, if any, white persons were ever charged. These were minor or non-­existent driving violations, lawns whose grass was too long, and the like.

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Ferguson’s municipal court supported this effort. Ferguson’s city budget was fattened by it.6 It is important to note that the mistreatment of black residents by their police department and municipal court did not stop until after rioting occurred. The taking of black lives, no matter how mean, on top of that proved to be the line black people in Ferguson would no longer stand by and watch being crossed. The violence that happened after Michael Brown was killed and didn’t happen after the courts refused to prosecute white police officers who had killed other young black men was evidence of how far black people had come. Their inability to do much about the way many other black people were still taking each other’s lives is evidence of how much further they must go before they will be accepted and treated as full-fledged members of the communities where they live. This includes Ferguson. What businesses did not do about the grievances black people were ­articulating publicly spoke to their critical role as guardians and leaders of the communities they ostensibly served. They had minded their own business, but not the community’s. Before mass unrest happened, business leaders had forgotten how their enterprises had once been viewed as a public trust. After mass unrest happened, local and regional businesses became more a­ ctive in dealing with problems minority persons were pointing out. Knowingly or not, and probably much less knowingly than not, rioters and protesters were acting out a custom by now long forgotten by everyone in Ferguson and across this and other metropolitan areas. Business owners and by extension commercial leaders generally were looked upon historically not so much as profit makers but as community institutions accountable to their customers who also were their neighbors. Business owners, once incorporated into a town or city, also were supposed to act as a check on public authorities. In Ferguson and any other community where businesses were attacked during unrest, businesspeople had forgotten that their doing well carried an additional expectation to do good by taking care of the communities supporting their enterprises. Violence and protests in the St. Louis area reminded all kinds of people about the obligations and duties of more well-to-do and powerful people. Looting and arson are holdovers of this historical tradition of aggrieved people temporarily withdrawing their assent to be governed and engage in the marketplace in conventional ways.7 The world black people in Ferguson knew before Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in 2014 has changed in some ways. In other ways, however, it’s still pretty much as people back then knew it. The economic standing of black residents hasn’t improved markedly. They hold more public offices but have yet to grow into their role as stewards for the town.

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As of 2023, several town managers had left their position at least in part because new black members of the town council were thought to be abusing their power and looking for favors. Blacks’ political clout had grown, but they had not yet learned how to wield it responsibly. “Underlying conditions” such as poverty, which analysts look to for their explanations for why people riot, haven’t changed so that anyone would notice.8 Whatever complaints local people may have had before all kinds of hell broke loose have not been dealt with in any way one would call serious. The state legislature turned its back to virtually all the “Ferguson initiatives” brought before it. There is now a civilian review board that is supposed to monitor how police deal with the public. It has both white and black persons on it. More than a few police officers left the Ferguson police department in the aftermath of the riots. Replacing them has been hard. Ferguson has hired and lost several chiefs of police and town managers. The municipal court works better but still isn’t working as well as it should. The town is perpetually short of the revenues needed to keep its government working satisfactorily. Black adults organized a team of male mentors for young black students in Ferguson. Several non-profit organizations built new headquarters on the most burned-out blocks in the riot area.9 Most of the fines and outstanding warrants hanging over the heads of local black residents were based on citations issued by the police department and have been forgiven and tossed out. The same thing happened in the City of St. Louis and other suburban municipalities.10 The judge who ran the municipal court that squeezed black citizens for money, wouldn’t release impounded cars until fines were paid, and sometimes incarcerated people who didn’t have the money to pay the fines was replaced. Police officers aren’t handing out citations to people over for minor violations – for “driving while black” or “walking while black” as in the case of Michael Brown – nearly as often and by all accounts not charging them with a crime when they do pull them over. But local people weren’t responsible for making most of these changes. Federal officials were. Many of the black residents whose behavior might have created another “precipitating event” or been the target of police harassment have removed themselves. Canfield Gardens where Michael Brown was shot is a lot emptier today than it was before the riots. The vacancy rate “jumped from just over 10 percent to 75 percent in the year after Brown was killed.” As late as June 2018 it was half-empty.11 The people moving in are predominantly low-income. There are now three black members on the city council. The white mayor who had overseen the police department’s mistreatment of his black constituents was reelected after the riot. He has since been replaced by a black woman.

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Put too simply, perhaps, there are not many signs that would make black people think they have become much better organized and more effective stewards of Ferguson than their white predecessors were. Whatever effect people thought the riots should have and good the violence might have done, has not yet been shown in the way Ferguson’s local government operates. And most of the positive changes that have been made in its organization and operation were called for by the federal government. Local people have struggled to implement them. This doesn’t mean the riots weren’t important or the protests following the dismissal of charges against other white police officers won’t reveal things we should think about. It only means the events were important in ways people ordinarily don’t consider. My intention is to draw attention to the larger lessons we can take from two riots that happened in Ferguson in 2014 and two that didn’t happen in the St. Louis area after white police officers shot and killed other young black men. I am hopeful but not convinced I will be able to pull it off. Part of the problem I face here begins with the storyline itself. The chronology of these shooting events does not line up neatly with the riots that did and did not happen. Michael Brown’s shooting wasn’t the first in this series. All the violence and protests that would occur in the St. Louis area, however, wouldn’t start until he was killed in 2014. The first shooting death took place in the City of St. Louis in December of 2011. A white police officer shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith following a car chase in which Smith tried to elude police officers. The police in question would report they had observed Smith trying to sell someone heroin. A packet of heroin was found in his car afterward. Smith drove off when he was approached by a squad car. One of the ­officers, Jason Stockley, would end up shooting and killing Smith at the end of the officers’ pursuit through the City of St. Louis. He said Smith was reaching for a gun. Smith’s defenders claimed afterward the gun was planted by the officer who shot him. No one ever claimed the officer planted the packet of heroin in Smith’s car. There was no public outcry at the time of the shooting in 2011. There were protests but no rioting following Stockley’s acquittal of murder charges in September 2017. The second shooting involved Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black male, who was shot by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014. Brown and a companion were stopped by the officer while they were walking in the middle of a street within a block or two of where Brown lived. Brown picked a fight with the officer and their confrontation quickly spiraled out of control. Brown died within several feet of where their ill-fated meeting took place.

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There were two major rounds of rioting in Ferguson. The first occurred in August in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s shooting. It made news all over the world, no doubt in part because Brown’s companion claimed Brown had raised his arms over his head in a sign of surrender before the officer shot him, which proved to be untrue. The second round of rioting occurred several months later when a Grand Jury failed to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who shot Brown. A third round of protests, violence, and looting, much more limited in its scope and duration, occurred in 2015 at the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing. The third shooting occurred in October of 2014 and involved another 18-year-old black male, Vonderrit Myers. The young man and two companions ran away from an off-duty police officer, Jason Flanery, after being ­observed walking through the St. Louis neighborhood the officer was being paid to patrol at night. Flanery shot Myers after the young man allegedly shot at him. A gun was retrieved at the scene, and it had been fired. It was identical to a gun Myers had been photographed handling, a photograph posted on-line presumably as a display of bravado or a warning to other young men who might challenge him. Myers was by all accounts was a young man looking for trouble. ­Students of my late wife who knew him said he’d been “left off his chain too young.” Still, coming less than two months after Michael Brown was killed in ­Ferguson, this shooting garnered a great deal of media attention. ­Community ­people and activists, including some from Ferguson, came down to the City of St. Louis and led protests in the neighborhood where Myers was shot. ­Authorities contained the protests for a while but allowed the crowd to march to a part of the city with an even bigger and more prominent commercial presence than the one where protesters had gathered. For the reasons described below, these protests never turned violent. My immediate task in this chapter, then, is to show how the rioting in ­Ferguson informed events that did not turn violent in the City of St. Louis and Saint Louis County after other younger black men were shot and killed by white police officers. A related challenge, one I have begun to address, is to show how earlier violence in the United States fits and doesn’t fit with what happened in the St. Louis area. Rioting that Happened in Ferguson

The way Michael Brown and his companion walked down the middle of the street attracted the attention of Officer Darren Wilson and set into motion a series of events no one could have predicted or wanted to occur. The question of “whose streets” these were at the root of the confrontation between Michael Brown and his companion on one side and the white police officer on the other side.

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This would not be the last time this decade the question of “whose streets” was loudly and violently raised in St. Louis. It would be amplified and expanded in 2020 and 2021 to “whose country” this was. The rhetorical and violent answer to these questions was given in Charlottesville, in cities whose Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, and, of course, in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. The answer to these questions was more rhetorical in the case of the Capitol insurrection. That it was raised at all in Ferguson speaks to the unresolved or only partly resolved answer to the question of blacks’ status as full-fledged members of that community. The violence in Ferguson was the start of an answer to the question of who was accountable to whom when it came to the way local authorities spoke to and treated the town’s black residents. The arrests and trials of people who stormed the Capitol and made the storming possible is the start of an answer to the same question at the national level. In the aftermath of Brown’s killing, black protestors and their supporters would make a dramatic but very conventional point about who had the right to use a public street or sidewalk. It was an issue raised in the other St. Louis protests and quite publicly and loudly by the police in one of their subsequent confrontations with protesters following Jason Stockley’s “not guilty” verdict in September 2017. The protests, looting, and arson in Ferguson were an elegant inversion of the way popular unrest had been used in US cities until the 1960s. Much ethnic and racial violence until then had been used by cultural insiders against newcomers and people viewed as cultural outsiders. This would include early-20th century race riots in which blacks were attacked and sometimes killed by mobs composed of white residents who took violent exception to the black people who had moved to their cities during the First World War.12 Rioting in Ferguson was evidence that blacks had “graduated” or progressed to the point they could assert the same kinds of privileges whites had long considered exclusively theirs. This now included the right, perhaps even the obligation, of blacks to push back against people who made great public displays of their antipathy and contempt for them. Black people had begun asserting their claim to this kind of sumptuary privilege in the first half of the 20th century and acted on it even more in riots that occurred in the second half of the 20th century.13 Local people in Ferguson showed more restraint than was seen on the streets of cities that had riots in the 1960s and 1970s. This was especially apparent at night when protesters, looters, and arsonists had their confrontations with police. In much the same way people had tried to “cool things down” during the riots of the 1960s and 1970s, there were men and women in Ferguson who worked hard to limit the amount of violence once it began. Many of them were clergy.14 They held serious talks with local authorities before and during street protests in the hope street confrontations would be kept as nonviolent

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as possible. At times, clergy even stood between protesters and lines of police officers to ensure, as best they could, neither side would attack the other. On at least one occasion, the black police captain in charge of officers assigned to confront and control protesters did the same thing. There were many videos made by news organizations showing people hollering at the police and throwing objects at them, of tear gas being lobbed in the direction of protesters and rubber bullets being fired into their ranks, and the police pushing protesters away from some businesses and government buildings. They captured the back-and-forth movements of police and protesters up and down the same blocks near the police department, young men breaking into stores, looting goods, and then torching the same establishments. The national and international press paid less attention to all the ways local people tried to limit the amount of violence and the impact of looting and arson. As I just pointed out, this would have included the way that local clergy and community leaders at one point in August stepped between police officers and several hundred protesters who had charged the officers and how on other occasions a black police captain did the same thing to calm people down. The media photographed the heavy-duty weapons the police carried and the military vehicles the police drove into the streets. But they didn’t make enough of the fact that the presence of military gear only made the protesters angrier and failed to stop people from vandalizing stores. The parading of military gear was all for show. Of course, so too was a lot of the marching, protesting, hollering, fist raising and finger pointing going on in Ferguson. There was much theatricality as well to protest activity taking place away from Ferguson. There was a noisy gathering seven miles away in Clayton, Missouri where the county prosecutor’s office is located. Protesters briefly disrupted a concert at Powell Symphony Hall in a prominent entertainment district in the middle of St. Louis, just around the corner from where I work. Baseball fans and protesters had something of a chanting duel outside of Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis. A similar duel between protesters and police officers occurred a couple of years later after Jason Stockley was found “not guilty” in the shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. All this was for show, too. Whatever trouble local people in Ferguson were inclined to make at the time of the unrest was exacerbated by groups of outsiders whose ideology was more radical and tactical impulses less constrained than those of people from Ferguson. Local gangs also made the violence worse. The show they made was not part of the script most local people were trying to follow. Local people in Ferguson spoke disparagingly about both the more radical agitators who came to their community looking to score ideological points from their stand-offs with police officers and the local gang members who

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were only on the streets to cause trouble and to loot. These were outsiders local people pointed out to police authorities, hoping the police would arrest them. Local people also worked hard in other ways to limit the damage being done to their community.15 Notable among their efforts were the voluntary clean-ups Ferguson residents – whites and blacks, adults, and children – did after a night’s worth of vandalism, looting, and arson. Efforts to limit the damage done during a popular disturbance are very much part of the “traditional” way people in communities fought centuries ago. Looking at this kind of behavior without the benefit of knowing how it fits into a much older set of customs or traditions would make it easy to see all of this as something brand new. It certainly looked that way to Ferguson’s residents, local authorities, and the media companies that spread what happened in Ferguson to a national and international audience. Community clean-ups are a good example of something that really was brand new to this generation of Americans. To the best of my knowledge, the grass-roots clean-ups in Ferguson were the first recorded in the United States. The only other clean-up operation undertaken by local people in a riot area before Ferguson appears to have occurred during the 2011 riots in and around London. It’s unlikely that people in Ferguson knew about what happened in England, which only makes the parallel creation of the same innovation more interesting. It suggests however different the situations might have been, local people in both settings had begun to develop very similar ideas about their responsibility to their respective communities. These ideas also would have spilled over in the way they viewed people on one or the other or both sides of the lines facing off on the street. I will have more to say about this later. In the meantime, it is important to note other clean-up efforts like the one in Ferguson have been recorded since 2014 in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Portland, Oregon, and again in Minneapolis in 2017. The idea of creating a more civil kind of disorder has been catching on in more than just the St. Louis area. The engagement of black and white persons in the clean-up during the rioting in Ferguson extended into community meetings led by federal officials sent in to see what could be done to bring the community together. These meetings were held in the period between the two disturbances in August and November of 2014. There would be many other community discussions after the violence was over. These sessions complemented more formal hearings conducted by the commission appointed by the Governor of Missouri and the investigation made by the US Department of Justice. The participants in these meetings struggled with what had happened in their town and what they could do to bring their community together. Federal officials brought legal muscle to efforts to make the local government more accountable to its own citizens. The report made by federal

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officials was instrumental in showing how the local government and municipal court had for years raised revenues by stopping black motorists for minor violations or for no violation at all and making them pay for the privilege of having their car or driver’s license returned. Based on this report, the city was required to create a civilian-police review board to keep an eye on how police officers were treating local citizens and to pay for a monitoring team that would check-up on the progress the city was making to address other problems that had been identified. The work of the monitoring committee or rather the lack of work done by the monitoring committee came under scrutiny itself in November of 2017.16 The involvement of local people in community meetings did not make much difference in the town’s management, at least not at first. Two additional black aldermen were elected in the 2017 municipal elections. This was the same election in which Ferguson’s white mayor, who had held that office before Michael Brown’s shooting, was reelected. He beat a black councilwoman who tried to unseat him. She didn’t have to point out the current mayor had been much criticized for overseeing Ferguson’s police department whose budget depended on fines from offenses that were declared problematic if not downright racist and the municipal judge who sanitized those fines. Everyone knew it, and still he won. She made another effort to become Mayor in the next municipal election and won this time. As far as the official response to the rioting is concerned, authorities had worked hard not to provoke further violence against people even as the riot was occurring. They figured out quickly that flashing military-grade weapons and assault vehicles was not a good idea. Local police authorities also ­allowed protesters to stand in the streets as long as they were peaceful. The police tried to discourage outside groups from using Ferguson as a prop for their own political agendas and action programs. This included both agitators who wanted to assault the police and armed “security guards” from the Oath Keepers, the large group of former law enforcement officials and military veterans that espouses far rightwing political views. Several members of the organization stood guard on store roofs one evening in D ­ ecember after most of the rioting was over. They never fired the weapons they carried. Local law enforcers monitored and corrected their own behavior, too. The police took less aggressive steps to confront protestors as the rioting continued. Police officials suspended officers who made provocative comments about the protesters. Troops from the state’s National Guard, called in by the Governor to protect businesses and make a show of force that would discourage rioters, weren’t used on the streets of Ferguson at the height of the riot. They were stationed closer to areas that were not attacked, including public buildings in St. Louis and Clayton, Missouri, the seat of government for St. Louis

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County, both miles away from Ferguson and where nothing close to violence happened.17 A black captain in the State Highway Patrol, who was a Ferguson native, was put in charge of the police response despite the fact his officers had no jurisdiction in this case. His presence angered many local and county police officials who felt they should have been leading the response. At some point during this second period of unrest, he kept his people from interfering with looters and arsonists, even as the National Guard was standing ready for action in a nearby shopping mall parking lot. Local businesspeople are still trying to come back from the losses they experienced and make sense of why they were left unprotected after being promised they would be. To this day, business owners are deeply resentful of the then-Governor’s broken promise. Coming up with an explanation for why police acted the way they did and allowed so much damage to be done to local businesses is not hard. Police may have not beaten up or shot protesters and persons who vandalized shops or looted items from store shelves. But officers did move or, if you like, push protesters and people who wanted to act more violently away from the older historic commercial center of Ferguson on the “good side of town.” These same persons were allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted in the commercial blocks on the “not so good side of town” where more black ­persons and lower-income people lived. The herding of protesters and rioters in Ferguson anticipated more ambitious and effective attempts three years later to corral or “kettle” people on the streets of St. Louis who were protesting the “not guilty” verdict of former O ­ fficer Jason Stockley. As I already mentioned, however, the police in ­Ferguson didn’t make much effort to stop looting and arson. They let it happen in the part of Ferguson many residents would have viewed as problematic. The hurt feelings of local police officials notwithstanding, the black captain placed in charge of the response to unrest in Ferguson put himself between the men under his command and the protesters on several occasions. Some of the people on the street were gang members and from well-organized groups whose politics were as radical as their tactics were provocative. The captain’s performance was impressive and calming. There were other faces of restraint officials tried to show rioters and the world. But this was an important one. The question of “who owns the streets” or should have access to public settings just as whites do was an important element in the confrontations between police officers and protesters. Ferguson wasn’t the first American community in which minorities have made noise about wanting to be held accountable to the same standards used for whites when it came to using public spaces or public institutions such as schools.18 Nor, I suspect, will it be the last. What is at risk in public street demonstrations where this question is raised, however, is the possibility the higher claim being made by minority

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activists and their supporters will be lost in the dint of all the noise made during protests or in violent exchanges. The violence in Ferguson was out of control at times. At other times, people on both sides of the protest line did their best to ensure that there wasn’t more “out of control” violence. One of the ways that protesters accomplished this was by using T ­ witter and other social media to keep each other aware of what was going on in different parts of Ferguson and of each other’s activities. America’s first “­twitter riot” was captured, shared, and subjected to on-the-spot analyses and commentaries by many persons on the streets of Ferguson even as events were unfolding. It wasn’t just activists and protesters who used social media. ­Government actors such as the police and representatives of non-government organizations did as well. Messages from these sources came continuously and at times furiously during the unrest. The shared information enabled people to think about what was going on in a far more informed and organized fashion than would have otherwise been possible. Preliminary as these findings undoubtedly are, some people on social media appeared interested in creating a sense of community among themselves even as other people among them were outlining specific threats to their opponents and detailing attacks on their fellow crowd members. There was concern about finding peaceful alternatives to violence.19 Given the way people on the streets have been characterized in past protests and riots as being irrational and subject to rumor mongering, this was a revelation. Social media communications will doubtlessly play a part in future disturbances. The question is how much or in what ways they may end up complementing work initiated by otherwise well-organized groups or make it irrelevant. In the Ferguson riots, “social media” provided the means to call out and assemble large numbers of persons in something akin to a roving “smart mob” or “flash mob.” Falling somewhere between rumor mongering and intelligence gathering, but probably a lot closer to the latter, “social ­media” such as Twitter already have become part of an important innovation in the way people protest the actions of public authorities.20 I just mentioned the two other innovative features in the way protests and violence in Ferguson played out. One was the grassroots clean-up operation. The second was the way in which both protesters and authorities tried to limit the violence that was occurring on the streets of Ferguson. These innovations have the look and feel of something historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called “invented traditions.”21 Taken together, the three new “traditions” observed in Ferguson may help to create a different kind of public disorder in the United States, one more obviously civil than anything we have seen before in racial violence. If events in Ferguson provide any clue to how black Americans and police will work out an answer to the question of “who has a right to assemble” in public, the “ownership”

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of public streets and public spaces will be managed less violently than it has been in the past. This is not what people who know the history of popular unrest in American towns and cities would have expected or perhaps even wanted. No less an authority on public challenges to authority than Martin Luther King said when Malcom X was assassinated in 1965 that people in the United States had yet to learn how “to disagree without being violently disagreeable.” He did not see an easy and non-violent path to follow for Americans who wanted to make more change. Arthur I. Waskow offered an almost identical assessment of the failure of black leaders to find less-than-violent ways to agitate for social, political, and economic change.22 He argued their inability to invent “new forms of disorder that would appeal to adolescent youths and young men without jobs or education” was a singular problem. Indeed, he asserted “the absence of new inventions in creative disorder that appeal to young men in the North” might make violence more likely. King and Waskow, the civil rights champion and activist scholar, might have had difficulty imagining what a less violently disagreeable way of fighting in public would look like. But what happened in Ferguson, we all might be surprised to learn, was not the invention of a more provocative but less violent form of disorder. It was the toning down and tempering of violence itself: the reinvention of civil unrest as it was practiced centuries ago when angry residents and their town’s business and civic leaders acted as if they had an equal stake in their community’s wellbeing. Today, more restraint is being shown on both sides of the line drawn in the street by law enforcement officers and angry citizens. On the one side, agents of the government are displaying and using less deadly weapons in their confrontations. In some cases, they hold serious discussions with protest leaders well before they confront each other on the street and are allowing demonstrators to commit low-grade but clearly illegal acts such as breaking windows and occupying spaces people would not otherwise be allowed to crowd and jam. On the other side, people taking to the streets represent a broader crosssection of the population than was the case during the 1960s. They include people from different races, generations, and social classes. Young people have not been kept from being involved; but their presence and influence have been contained or diluted much more than it was in the 1960s riots. As we shall see, some of the places where protesters take their complaints also have comparatively fewer young, unattached males, persons who often cause more trouble than older men and women would be inclined to make. The cultural significance of these changes in public disturbances will be explored later in the chapter. What we can say with some certainty at this point is these three innovations – community clean-ups, social media-driven

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communication, and making popular unrest less violent – have already made a difference in how people in the St. Louis area are working out their answer to the question of “who owns the streets.” Again, what happened in Ferguson had elements of popular unrest one can trace to demonstrations and even rioting centuries ago. What was different in Ferguson, at least in comparison to the racial disorders of the 1960s and 1970s, was more people appeared to be outraged over the use of military hardware than they were about looting and arson. This does not mean local people liked the mess left on their streets or celebrated the damage done to local businesses. Otherwise, they might well have left streets, sidewalks, and storefronts alone after every evening’s protests, looting, and arson. Residents were trying to make up their minds about how much or little they wanted to depend upon violence to make changes in the way that black Americans would fit in places such as Ferguson. For their part, police officials worked hard to keep channels of communication open with protest leaders. It didn’t stop violence from happening. It did, however, reduce the chances one side or the other would make a mistake and make a bigger mess than the one they already had on their hands. The on-the-ground training acquired by both protesters and police during the riots in Ferguson was put to good use in 2017 after Jason Stockley was found “not guilty” in the shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. It did not come into play in the other big 2014 protest that occurred in the City of St. Louis when an off-duty officer killed Vonderrit Myers. The task of calming that volatile situation fell unexpectedly into lap of Fred Pestello, the brand-new President of Saint Louis University. Pestello could have had the protesters who showed up uninvited and loudly after midnight one morning thrown off the campus. Many people ­certainly thought he should have and took strong exception to his decision not to. Some alumni reportedly stopped contributing money to the university. Yet it was the decision to welcome protesters and allow them to camp out in the middle of the university for over a week that saved the city from what might have turned into the region’s third riot of 2014. What Pestello didn’t do made all the difference. Riots That Didn’t Happen in the City of St. Louis

Six years separated Anthony Lamar Smith’s death in 2011 and the 2017 ruling finding the officer who shot him not guilty of murder. Lots of protests but no rioting occurred after the 2017 decision. Brown’s death and the rioting in Ferguson took place in the middle of the six years it took to charge and try the officer who shot Smith. The shooting of Vonderrit Myers occurred in October of 2014. His death fell between Brown’s shooting in August and the November grand jury

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decision not to try the officer who shot Brown. Myers’ death might well have led to unrest in the City of St. Louis where he was shot. It certainly looked for a time as if there could be violence. But there was no rioting in the city after Myers was killed. The question is why? Why wasn’t there rioting after Myers’ death in ­ October 2014 and after the officer who killed Smith was found not guilty of murder in 2017? The rioting in Ferguson and the riots that didn’t occur in the City of St. Louis in 2014 and 2017 show these events are very much local events. Violence in one place doesn’t necessarily spring up in another close-by place, even when the circumstances that led to violence in a place such as F ­ erguson resemble more than a little the events that occurred in St. Louis. But riots aren’t a disease. These events don’t spread the way colds do. Just because you’re near someone who sneezes doesn’t mean you’ll catch whatever is ­afflicting them. They are not contagious or nearly as contagious as some theorists have long maintained.23 Social scientists have enough trouble figuring out what people do. Describing what they don’t do, listing alternative courses of action that are not taken and identifying their social and cultural significance, usually does not enter our consciousness much less make it to the top of the analytic parts of our brains. A riot is a big puzzle with lots of missing, oddly shaped, and moving pieces. The study of moments that don’t turn riotous involves a search for missing pieces without knowing how many there are, or which pieces are the more important ones. You must discover parts of stories about riots missing from the stories of riots that didn’t happen. Alternatively, you look for things in the non-riotous event that weren’t present in the riots that took place. ­Either way it’s a tough puzzle to piece together. Before we do that, however, we will return to the St. Louis area and settings where the social and cultural circumstances are all but identical and yet didn’t always produce mass unrest and violence. The Vonderrit Myers Shooting and Protests

The protests surrounding Myers’ death, like those associated with Michael Brown’s death, began almost immediately after the shooting. In fact, people from Ferguson drove to the city so they could participate in the protests over Myers’s shooting. There were questions about whether Myers had a gun and shot at the off-duty officer. These questions were settled quickly when photos of Myers holding the very gun found at the shooting scene were found on social media. Nearly 1,000 protesters marched through the Shaw neighborhood on the evening of October 12th four days after Myers had been killed. The police

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made no effort to stop them until the marchers made it clear they wanted to walk out of the neighborhood and head north, closer to the middle of the city. The police blocked them for a while. After talking with the protest leaders and the protesters’ legal advisers, the police let them pass. Protest organizers led their people to the campus of Saint Louis University a little more than two miles and a 20-minute walk from where the protest had been focused. Hundreds of people made a noisy but otherwise peaceful entrance to the mid-town campus around 2 AM. They called to surprised students to join them. Many did. The number of protesters would shrink over the next few hours. But those who made it through the night were treated to a spontaneous “teach-in” right in the middle of the campus beneath the university’s bell tower. The original “occupation” of the university was purposeful. Organizers thought their sit-in would attract lots of attention, and they were right. What came to be called “Occupy SLU” lasted nearly a week. University officials never considered having the protesters run off campus. They allowed the uninvited guests to camp out, hold rallies, and use the bathrooms in nearby buildings, including the one where my office is. People treated the protests and encampment as a learning experience. Many instructors addressed questions raised by the “Occupy SLU” people in their classes. Negotiations between campus protest leaders and university representatives led to an agreement that called for more support to be given to the retention of black students, the African American Studies Program, and special consideration for students living in the Shaw neighborhood and Normandy, where Michael Brown had attended high school.24 Part of the plan was to erect an appropriate piece of statuary right by the university’s bell tower. The campus has numerous statues. Several years after the campus was occupied, however, there still is no statue. This no doubt pleases a great many people, including wealthy alumni who had been critical of the president’s decision to let protesters “take over” the campus. No one is complaining that the statue hasn’t been built. University officials did a good job working with protest leaders. What is most noteworthy about what happened at the campus, however, is what didn’t happen less than three blocks away in the center of the city’s entertainment district. Exactly nothing happened there. The encampment at Saint Louis University kept many hundreds of protesters and their student supporters from interfering with theater productions, the symphony, several bars and restaurants, and all the traffic running in all four directions at one of the city’s busiest intersections. Apart from blocking major highways at rush hour, which protesters briefly did on several occasions in September and October of 2017, there would have been few places to shut down in the city more important than this intersection.

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Protest leaders made a lot of principled noise after the Stockley not-guilty verdict about making people and businesses uncomfortable. And there is no doubt the business losses caused by protesters who broke windows and forced businesses to close for a couple of days hurt. However, protesters could have wreaked havoc at one of the city’s main transportation and cultural centers had they chosen to do so. They chose not to and camped out on the campus of Saint Louis University instead. No buildings on the campus were damaged by the protesters. No one trashed the bathrooms in the building where I work. Some students may have lost valuable sleep during the mid-term exam week. But no one was hurt. Neither students nor the faculty were kept from their classes. The business of the university was not interrupted. Indeed, a strong argument can be made the protests and encampment helped the university give voice to its core mission and live up to an important institutional and Jesuit value: learning and service to others. One cannot fully appreciate the underlying message embedded in the grievances brought to the university or the broader cultural significance in how they were addressed and “resolved” without dealing with why the ­university was targeted at all. At no time after Vonderrit Myers was killed did anyone assert the university bore any responsibility for the shooting. It wasn’t university police officers who shot and killed him. To the best of my knowledge, no university official ever uttered a word condemning the young man or, for that matter, the off-duty policeman who shot Myers. There had been no public complaints about the university and its treatment of minority employees or students that the protesters could have hung around the institution’s neck and used as an excuse for marching onto the campus. All we know is protest leaders decided to plant themselves on the campus and consciously decided not to “invade” or otherwise interfere with traffic, businesses, or entertainment venues located not more than a block away from the campus. Negotiations between the university and protest leaders were conducted in a respectful manner. They were completed in a matter of days. And the agreement they struck didn’t have the institution’s leaders agreeing to anything alien to the university’s mission or outside of its ability to perform. Protesters did not demand, for example, the university make public statements condemning either the mayor or police department. Nor did they insist the university use only minority vendors when it bid out projects that needed to be done or put a protest leader on its board of trustees. What protest leaders accomplished was less materially impactful than it was culturally significant. They didn’t let the institution’s leaders, faculty, and students sit on the sidelines during an important public argument over the way minority persons were to be treated in the city where Saint Louis University is located. They drew the institution’s caretakers, employees, and

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“customers” into the public dialogue and made it clear to anyone watching and listening that the institution had a stake in the outcome of that conversation. I submit very much the same message was being delivered in the way l­ocal businesses were vandalized. Why an institution of higher education or a clutch of local businesses should be engaged that way says a great deal about the role these kinds of institutions and enterprises have played in the life of cities in the past. It makes an even bigger statement about how they are ­expected to remain engaged in the future in those same cities. The Anthony Lamar Smith Shooting and Protests

Eric Greitens, still in the first and next-to-last year of his brief tenure as Missouri’s Governor, met with “black faith leaders” and “first responders” in the week before the judge handed down his decision on September 15, 2017. Anticipating a “not guilty” verdict, the governor made a public appeal for calm and non-violence. He also would mobilize the National Guard and vow lawbreakers would be arrested and punished. Lyda Krewson, not yet six months into her new position as Mayor of St. Louis, tried to be measured in her public comments. She expressed support both for her police department and for peaceful demonstrators. But once the protests began, she also criticized the Acting Chief of Police and officers who made public statements about “owning the streets” and vowed that violence and vandalism by protesters would not be “tolerated.”25 In doing so, she didn’t make many fans among either police officers or the protesters who splashed paint on her house and broke a couple of its windows. Neither the governor nor the mayor appeared to have had any kind of on-going discussions with protest leaders before the “not guilty” verdict was issued. They didn’t try to bring would-be protesters and police officials together in the hope violence could be avoided. If faith leaders were holding meetings with protest leaders, which I’ve been told didn’t happen, word of those meetings never made it into the media. The absence of media accounts detailing a dialogue with protest leaders or any mention of planning sessions between would-be protest leaders and anyone in the weeks leading up to the judge’s verdict was no accident. But it wasn’t because public authorities would have resisted holding them. It is because, as police officials reported to me, there was no well-organized set of leaders. There was no one with whom the Governor, Mayor, or police officials could have spoken and work out agreements about the protests, even if they’d wanted to. The “leaders” who emerged did so only during the protests. There were “Black Lives Matter” signs but the people carrying them generally remained as anonymous as the groups with which they marched, chanted, and at

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times vandalized storefronts. Persons identified as “activists” and “protest leaders” were named in newspaper stories from time to time. They would grant occasional television interviews and make short unrehearsed speeches for the cameras. But the only public faces and names that routinely showed up in these accounts belonged to well-known black politicians and religious leaders. Religious leaders from a host of faith traditions played an especially prominent role in these protests. At one point shortly after the protests began, they held an Interfaith Prayer Service for Peace and Solidarity at a large downtown plaza. After the protests had fizzled out, the prayer service would lead to a series of meetings between Archdiocesan leaders and black faith leaders from North St. Louis. They united around a call for social justice. The protests that occurred after Jason Stockley received his “stay out of jail card” from St. Louis Circuit Court judge Timothy Wilson were all but leaderless. Marches and demonstrations lasted for a month. The early ones were quite large. Protests grew smaller and were more sporadic by the end of September and early October. Older people began to take a more prominent role in the later protests. That kind of cross-generational collaboration probably helped to keep confrontations from becoming more violent. (Frankly, middle-aged, and older adults aren’t as likely to be looking for trouble, invite aggressive responses from police, or be able to run far and quickly away from trouble were it to happen.) The important point to be made is that all the while these protests were taking place no one among the civilians on the streets was accountable for any mistakes people might make once they were marching. There were no counselors to tell people how to react to unforced errors made on either side of the shifting scrimmage line between protesters and police in the city and county. There were no behind-the-scenes channels of communication in the event of an emergency that no one saw coming. On the streets, however, there were occasional and congenial conversations between some protesters and police. Protest leaders might have anticipated police in the City of St. Louis would behave more aggressively once peaceful demonstrators went home for the night and left the streets to people with more on their mind than marching and chanting. But police couldn’t guarantee how they would react after so many days and nights on streets where they were being taunted, abused, and injured by people itching to pick a fight or wanting to provoke them into overreacting, which they eventually did. What people on both sides of the protest lines accomplished was even more remarkable precisely because of all the poorly scripted and unplanned challenges and unexpected reactions to provocations made by both sides. They did not make a riot.

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People on both sides were injured. Police probably felt as good about tear gassing, bouncing rubber bullets off protesters, and indiscriminate arrests as “activists” felt about disrupting traffic, interrupting people’s shopping, canceling entertainment events, and having the police assault and arrest one of their own undercover officers. Very little was broken, and no one was killed. Given the response of protesters and police officers to some of the tactics each used on the streets and in shopping malls, it’s clear there was a big element of “figuring it out and making it up” as events unfolded. Some parts of their “figuring out and making it up” worked out well. Other parts didn’t. The present summary of what transpired in and around St. Louis during the 2017 protests is drawn from many newspaper stories published between September 12 and October 20 in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis American, other media accounts, and conversations with persons who were familiar with what happened at the protest sites.26 The record shows there were protests in different parts of the city but by no means across the whole city. Where people didn’t march or behave in a disorderly manner tells us a great deal about the strategy and goals of protest leaders might have had in mind but could just as easily not have given any thought to. For instance, marchers and demonstrators did not show up in most residential areas and especially not in residential areas in North St. Louis with large black populations. Had they marched into North St. Louis, they could have generated a great deal more energy and interest among all the young people who live in that part of the city. They probably would have created many more heated confrontations with the police and a great deal more violence as well. We should recall here Arthur Waskow’s warning that young men might well be driven to violence in “the absence of new inventions in creative disorder.”27 The more restrained kinds of civil disorder being created in the St. Louis area may work precisely because young black men, the very ones who so often run afoul of police officers, were largely excluded from the 2017 protests. The areas targeted in 2017 were in the city’s central corridor which begins at the Mississippi River and extends to the western border of St. Louis, a little more than seven miles from the riverfront. This is the city’s principal transportation and institutional spine. It has two major commercial centers, one in the immediate downtown area – the central business district – and a second smaller shopping and institutional headquarter area a little more than five miles west of downtown. That’s the one where Saint Louis University is located. There are residential neighborhoods in the central corridor. Most of them are more racially and economically mixed than neighborhoods in other parts of the city. A few are gated and inhabited by prosperous families who are

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far more likely white than black. The protesters didn’t target these neighborhoods either, except the one where the mayor lives. And it merits being repeated, no one else’s property on that block was touched. Protesters weren’t angry with prosperous people. They weren’t out to make a point about economic inequality that might have been made more convincing by calling out people whose wealth and social standing was undoubtedly greater than most black people in St. Louis. In the days following the verdict, protesters would shift their attention farther west to other shopping and entertainment areas in St. Louis County. They even spent an evening in the City of St. Charles, which is in an entirely different county some 27 miles west of St. Louis. Protesters disrupted traffic, marched, and chanted their way through the city’s old historic town center which today has many more restaurants, boutiques, and sightseeing venues than it has full-time residents. All but two of the places where protesters marched and made noise in 2017 were well-known commercial districts and up-scale shopping or entertainment areas like those in St. Charles. Two suburban malls in St. Louis County were among the sites targeted by protesters. There was vandalism – mostly broken storefront windows – but no looting or arson at any of the business sites. This stands in marked comparison to what happened during the unrest in Ferguson. There, as I noted earlier, police pushed much rowdier crowds from the town’s historic shopping center into the commercial center serving more of the community’s black and low-income residents. In that commercial area, people weren’t stopped from looting stores and burning down buildings. Police officers in the City of St. Louis and University City, on St. Louis’ western border, let crowds congregate, make a fuss, and leave some mess behind. Police officers from the municipalities where protesters targeted shopping malls left noisy crowds alone as long as they kept moving. When they stopped moving, the police stepped in and arrested people. No stores were vandalized or had goods stolen. One of the two non-commercial protest sites was Saint Louis University. Protesters made a loud but otherwise non-violent march through the campus. Protesters made a loud but not quite so peaceful visit to the mayor’s house and neighborhood early in the protests. The trek through the university was noteworthy because protesters had camped peaceably in the middle of the campus for nearly a week in the aftermath of protests in Ferguson and the shooting of Vonderrit Myers in 2014. The visit to the mayor’s house in 2017 was understandable. She was the City’s chief executive officer and oversaw the operation of the police department. Protesters brought their complaint about police misconduct to her front door, through a couple of windows in her house, and to a couple of places on the exterior of the house.

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City protesters in 2014 had been carrying on in a commercial area near the then-mayor’s residence in a neighborhood south of the central corridor. If they had planned to target his house, they never made it there. At some point, a decision was made to unblock a major thoroughfare and let protesters walk north and toward an even larger commercial and entertainment district right in the middle of the city, well away from the mayor’s neighborhood. That’s how protesters came to visit and camp out at Saint Louis University. During the 2017 protests, the number of persons demonstrating at any one time or place varied. Sometimes it was in the hundreds. On several occasions, it was in the thousands. Both men and women were well represented in the crowds. It was hard to tell what portion of the protesters were white or black; but both races were well represented in the crowds. Some middle-aged and older adults participated. Most of the protesters and virtually all the persons who committed acts of vandalism later at night probably were in their 20s or 30s. It didn’t appear many teenagers were involved. Unlike what happened in Ferguson, there were no reports of gang members or many out-of-town persons participating in the 2017 protests. There certainly are gangs in nearby areas north of the downtown area and the neighborhood where the mayor lives. But they weren’t invited to participate or didn’t feel a need to make their presence felt. The lack of an invitation – conveyed by where the protesters didn’t march – was purposeful and if not purposeful then certainly culturally revealing. Otherwise, there was nothing especially novel about the protest marches or the kinds of demonstration taking place in them. People chanted and carried banners declaring their displeasure with the police. As I just reported, the protesters’ choice of venues made it clear they intended to disrupt traffic and commercial activities, not turn parts of the city into something resembling a battlefield. Streets were blocked for a time wherever they showed up. Only later in the evening, after much of the demonstrating crowds had dispersed, did people looking for more trouble vandalize some businesses, the mayor’s house, and one library branch. There is little doubt what happened in Ferguson three years earlier was on the minds of people on both sides of the shifting line separating protesters and police officers in 2017. The posturing, shows of strength, and street noise they made for each other’s benefit notwithstanding, no one wanted another Ferguson. And that, as I pointed out in a Guest Commentary piece in the September 26 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is exactly what they got: “something that reminded people about Ferguson but managed to avoid virtually all of the bigger mistakes that were made there.” The police, with a few notable exceptions, let protesters protest, demonstrators march, and upset people holler. After working 12-hour shifts and taking a fair amount of abuse from some late-evening crowd members, some police officers responded to taunts by chanting and taunting the protesters

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back and used their cans of pepper spray more liberally than was necessary. Officers arrested hundreds of persons for becoming rowdy rather than violent, for not moving quickly or at all when they were told to move, for vandalizing property, and, if the reports are to be believed, sometimes simply for being in the wrong spot at the right time. A black officer working undercover and looking for troublemakers was just one of several innocent bystanders treated rather brusquely by officers whose patience was well spent by then. It wasn’t the police department’s finest moment. But it didn’t stop city voters in November 2017 from easily passing a proposition raising a sales tax that is to be spent on police and firemen’s salaries. That might have been the voters’ way of telling everyone what they thought about the protesters who had continued to disrupt traffic and shopping for more than a month after the Stockley decision was handed down. It is worth noting more than a majority of the voters in North St. Louis, virtually all of whom are black, supported the tax increase. Yes, rapping their batons on the pavement and chanting “Whose streets? Our streets” at the protesters was unnecessary, provocative, and frankly stupid. Protesters who were beaten later sued the City of St. Louis and won. The plaintiffs received checks between $28,000 and $150,000. An undercover cop surveilling the protests and was beaten by fellow officers got a $5,000,000 payout.28 But there were other things the police didn’t do that were just as important. As I observed in the newspaper column I wrote, at least in the city “there were no displays of military hardware or high-powered weapons. There were no reports of officers drawing their guns, much less firing them. No one was shot. No one was run over by a vehicle.” One heavily armored military vehicle did make an appearance outside one of the county malls where protesters visited and were arrested. But no one had to use it. It was for show. Protesters mocked it. City officers didn’t push late-night protesters from one part of the city into other parts as the police did in Ferguson. Instead, they encircled groups of protesters, didn’t let them leave, and summarily arrested the lot of them. Some people complained about having been treated roughly and blinded temporarily by pepper spray even after they had been arrested and cuffed. The black undercover police officer was one of them. Lots of people were upset by the tactics police used for crowd control. The ACLU filed a suit against the St. Louis police department on September 22. It laid out all the excessive tactics police officers had used. Less than two months later, a federal court ruled against the police department and laid out rules that officers would have to follow in any future protests.29 As in Ferguson, a non-local agent of the government had compelled local authorities to clean up their act and behave less aggressively in their confrontations with angry citizens.

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There was no doubt the police had overreacted on several occasions during the protests. Still, as I observed at the time: “For all the caterwauling done by cops and protesters, all the handwringing about lost sales…and all the hard feelings about what had brought them to the streets yet another time,” this time people did not riot. However accurate and obvious an observation this may have been, it didn’t undo the damage done to vandalized businesses. Some windows were smashed, “including a couple at the mayor’s house. Something like red paint was thrown at buildings, including the mayor’s house.” At the same time, “no other houses on the block where the mayor lives were damaged. No cars parked on the street were dinged or splashed with anything the protesters may have been carrying. A private school catty-corner from the mayor’s house was passed by the protesters as they marched to the mayor’s house and left untouched again when they left the neighborhood.”30 Compared to past displays of public unrest, this was a tame affair. Protest leaders had said their goal was to disrupt business and cause economic discomfort, which speaks strongly to the point I have made about trying to reengage business leaders. They should have been well pleased with their efforts. The economic pain for individual business owners was real enough. There was no way to recoup money lost from canceled performances, items that weren’t sold because a store was closed, and from meals that hadn’t been purchased. Municipalities and the state revenues would shrink as well. Money set aside by police departments to cover emergency overtime payments to their overworked officers was drained from their budgets. Attempts to restore damaged businesses so they might again serve their customers began almost as soon as windows were smashed. Customers and clients came out to help clean up the mess done to their favorite shop or restaurant, just as people had done in Ferguson. There wasn’t enough damage to warrant the intervention of area business associations. If activists had wanted to pick a bigger fight, they surely could have done so. But that wasn’t their goal. If they had wanted to rant about the “1 Percent,” they could have done that, too. But that wasn’t part of their plan either. Protesters in 2017 had set out to show area leaders the old way of doing business, especially the kind involving the ill-treatment of black males by local police, would no longer remain unchallenged. Whether the damage done to area businesses was sufficient to make that point stick or they could do anything to change the behavior of local police remained to be seen. After most of the demonstrating had ended, protest leaders and supportive clergy tried to inspire businesspeople to become more engaged in their incipient “movement.” They did this by calling for an economic boycott of some larger area businesses. The boycott didn’t appear to draw many consumers away from its intended targets, and it didn’t appear local businesses changed their behavior because of the pressure being directed their way.

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Though the boycott failed, the effort wasn’t at all misdirected or illogical from a historical perspective. After all, business leaders had played a crucial part in bringing new participants into the process of governing across ­England and Europe. They “opened” up government and pushed through many laws and regulations protecting the most important set of outsiders ever to make the transition into cultural insiders and major players in every city they set up shop. It’s unlikely the citizens of Ferguson or the greater St. Louis area were aware of this important tradition. They certainly didn’t mention it apart from the “no peace no profit” chant they used on the street. And even if businesspeople understood the challenge dropped at their feet, it didn’t appear they made much effort to force local government officials to rein in their police officers. As an organizational accomplishment, it must be acknowledged that boycotts are difficult to mount and sustain. It’s clear in this case the local population that was supposed to carry out the boycott was not especially well organized or highly motivated or at least as organized and motivated as they needed to be. It is possible and even likely all the effort made to keep the protests out of neighborhoods with large black populations might have inadvertently hurt the prospects of the boycott by keeping those people away from the fight their would-be leaders had taken to the streets on their behalf. All these factors along with several others I mention below had the effect of limiting the boycott’s effectiveness. The Other “Ferguson Effect”

As of 2019, books about Ferguson had a predictable cast of good guys and bad guys. The police or black people were served up as one or the other depending on the author’s point of view.31 The lessons taken from Michael Brown’s death and the rioting that occurred afterward also fit into predictable black-and-white boxes. Black people continued to be victimized by white racism and future outbreaks of violence were inevitable. Or police officers have an impossible job to do and are demonized for trying to keep communities safe and orderly. These storylines don’t take us any closer to understanding what happened in Ferguson or St. Louis. They defend certain parties and defame others but provide little or no information that would reveal something useful about the conditions under which collective violence is likely to occur or not occur. They tell us even less about how this kind of behavior might help us change the world we have into one we hope will be better but cannot yet see clearly. Those changes are coming, albeit slowly, which is consistent with other historical features of unrest.

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For instance, there was much speculation that crime rates would climb across the United States in the wake of Michael Brown’s death and the rioting that followed it. Police officers feared that they’d get into trouble for enforcing the law. This was referred to as the “Ferguson Effect.” A study of crime rates in Missouri in 2014 and 2015 shows there was no appreciable change in reported crimes except in traffic stops.32 The authors observed that police departments “serving jurisdictions with larger African American populations conducted fewer stops and searches and made fewer arrests in 2015 than in 2014.” But the stops and searches that were made produced more contraband, “meaning officers were making better searches.” In the opinion of the authors, the change represented a “correction to poor policing tactics, particularly those in minority communities…such as ­Ferguson that were using fines and citations to generate revenue.”33 Another more recent study I referred to in an earlier chapter suggested that the reduction in police aggressiveness might have had another unanticipated effect. Namely, some black persons, more likely younger than not, felt less restrained. As a result, there was a noticeable uptick in the number of blackon-black homicides. There is yet another kind of “Ferguson Effect” to which I would draw attention. This “Other Ferguson Effect” finds minority activists, their supporters, and the police making less threatening noises at each other and having far fewer violent exchanges. The federal court’s decision in the suit filed by the ACLU laid down some rules or guidelines that would limit the police department’s discretion over the way it treated protesters. Violence by protesters and abusive police tactics were both being reined in. Police departments outside of Ferguson had learned an important lesson, too, and apparently changed some of their routine practices.34 No matter where the inspiration for restraint is coming from, it’s unlikely protesters and police will take to dropping their weapons and signs or stop shaking their fists and replace them with big group hugs any time soon. What they’ve already begun to do, however, is figure out ways to act less provocatively when their disagreements go public and threaten to turn ugly. The federal court’s decision was intended to reduce the chances ugliness would happen and not just in the St. Louis area. Other steps the protesters and police had already taken showed they were amenable to such an outcome, even if they were reluctant to admit it out loud. Several of these steps reflected ideas proposed by the researchers who suggested how violence might be kept from happening at raucous and potentially damaging public assemblies.35 Two of their proposed fixes clearly didn’t help. There was more collaborating, planning, and bridge building between protest leaders and law enforcement authorities in the period between the two riots in Ferguson than there was in either of the other incidents that didn’t lead to violence. Ferguson also

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was the only place where troublemakers were called out by their fellow protesters who didn’t want more violence to occur. This suggests people learned to adjust their behavior after the rioting in Ferguson and didn’t need to hold face-to-face discussions with their supposed opponents to figure it out. They avoided making some of the bigger mistakes evident in Ferguson. They restrained themselves that much. But they still had a way to go and additional lessons to learn, which is why the mistakes made by the police in St. Louis were scrutinized by a court. The police were publicly admonished for their bad behavior. Everyone would have to wait until the next time people had reason to pick a fight with ­local police for the way they treated minority persons and protesters to see whether the lesson took hold. This is a good example of what Steven Pinker and others have called the “civilizing process” they imagined has accompanied the long historical movement away from violence in community and state affairs. Core elements of this “process” include appeals to self-control and empathy for one’s adversaries. Another is the willingness to pay greater attention to the rights of people whose presence we might have barely tolerated in the past.36 Together they show the parties to even extremely sensitive racial disputes are capable of fighting in public in more respectful and less dangerous ways. Several hypotheses provided by sociologists Robert Shellow and Derek Roemer who studied an annual motorcycle rally that had a lot of illegal ­activity and upset community members, but no brawling or rioting, rang true here.37 Fairness Mattered

Police and protesters made a distinction between the non-violent people who were on the streets and those individuals who were looking to make more trouble. The non-violent people were treated a lot better than the troublemakers. Distinguishing between the two was hard to do sometimes, especially later in the evening when non-violent protesters and protest tourists didn’t get out of the way of police sweeps quickly enough or weren’t allowed to leave the area. Treating the good guys better than the bad guys works, but only if you can tell them apart. In general, however, the strategy of letting people who aren’t interested in making more trouble peel themselves from late-evening confrontations was effective. Tolerance Counted

Police were not indifferent to law breakers, but they did allow some laws to be broken. Damage to property was ignored. Protesters vandalized some buildings, but by no means all the buildings that could have been damaged.

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They limited themselves to breaking windows. They didn’t loot or burn properties as people had in Ferguson and every riot in the 1960s. Damage to people wasn’t ignored, especially when the people being damaged were police officers. No one was killed. Discretion Counted, Too

It was a good idea for law enforcement agencies to keep their bigger, more intimidating weapons off the street. It was a bad idea to keep officers on the street who were physically tired or tired of being insulted and physically abused. The good news is the presence of over-tired, jacked-up police officers wasn’t enough to push protesters into becoming rioters. We will see later that abuses of state power were a crucial feature in all the unrest described in this book. So, too, were efforts to curb it after unrest was over. And Sometimes It Really Is Better to Be Lucky than Good

Just ask anyone in the city who isn’t the President of Saint Louis University about what happened after Vonderrit Myers was killed. The city was lucky because Saint Louis University President Fred Pestello did a good job by not overreacting. What these non-riotous events show most clearly is the riots in Ferguson had an impact, though not so large or obvious an impact that most persons who don’t live or work there or in North St. Louis County would have noticed. The municipality’s much-maligned police department and court system have changed most. The city waived $1.8 million in suspect fines and dropped nearly 39,000 municipal court cases. Some 1,381 persons had signed up to perform community service instead of paying fines. Across St. Louis County, municipal court fees dropped 53 percent in two years. This has forced two municipalities to merge and “a handful of others to consolidate their police departments.”38 Less clear are the effects of other changes brought on by the rioting. A new “empowerment center” that is supposed to help local people find jobs and businesses to grow was opened. Regional business associations chipped in more money to help rebuild some of the businesses that had been damaged in the riots. Programs for young people were opened, though their impact has been tough to gauge. Many businesses could not reopen. Most of the ones that did were on the “good side” of Ferguson, not on the side to which rioters had been pushed and did more damage. It is important to note that three black-owned businesses are among the new enterprises that have helped to refill the commercial blocks on the “good side” of Ferguson. It is clear local and regional businesses stepped up and tried to reassert their traditional role as community leaders. As one spokesman of the community’s

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only international corporation put it, they wanted to establish corporations such as his “as the arbiters of social equality and justice in America.”39 This was exactly what they should have been doing all along. Rioting had brought them back to the table, but mostly on the side of the table where Ferguson’s better shops and historic shopping area were located. It also is apparent there is much work left to do. For instance, it will be hard to make right all the damage done to individual citizens who collected trumped-up charges and fines from police officers. Protesters reacting to the ­Jason Stockley not-guilty verdict thought it important enough to remind people in Ferguson and Saint Louis County just how work still needed to be done that they marched along Ferguson’s historic business boulevard in October 2017.40 The symbolism was telling, because until recently most of the rebuilding and new development work that’s been done in Ferguson since the rioting, as I just noted, has been done along the historic business corridor. It hasn’t happened nearly as much along the less attractive business corridor on the blacker and poorer side of town, which needed it more.41 Part of the reason why, one well-informed source told me, was that city leaders weren’t willing to approve taking on more debt to improve a second business area, which this time ­happened to be on the “bad side” of town. The absence of tax incentives notwithstanding, there was one initiative to redevelop properties on Ferguson’s poorer side that was noteworthy. In the fall of 2023, a large project mixing profitmaking and non-profit-making enterprises on this side of Ferguson was finally initiated. The work was going to be done on a large parcel that once had a large grocery store as its commercial anchor.42 All the fragmented conversations inspired by the Smith, Brown, and ­Myers’ shootings are unlikely to make changes that will help black persons in Ferguson who are less accomplished become more wealthy and powerful. They are more important to the ongoing arguments people have about how to treat each other in public. The changes inspired by these conversations and arguments end in dropped charges, waived fines, fewer arrests, and more civil public fights. The dropped charges, waved fines, and fewer arrests involved rituals that reformed the way municipal governance worked in Ferguson. To the last point about learning how to have more civil public fights, persons on both sides of the argument over the 2017 protests were having public and private discussions about what happened and how to limit the damage to persons and property in future engagements even as protests were winding down. One public discussion involving the mayor was raucous. It accomplished little apart from giving people who were angry with the police an opportunity to vent. A lawsuit by the ACLU seeking to put limits around what the police can and cannot do during protests might prove more productive in the long run. At some point, however, legislators might well be inspired to prescribe what

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protesters can and cannot do during a “spontaneous” public display. If history is any guide to how these deliberations will turn out, future street confrontations will be guided more by custom than by laws dictating how people are supposed to act.43 Discussions held away from the glare of the media are likely to be more effective in bringing all sides involved in public fights closer to something that would pass as “mutual understanding.” But the innovations in disorder described here were created on the ground during the protests, not in a courtroom, board room, or retreat center. Evidence of their potential but not-yet-more-then-rhetorical impact can be seen in former St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s challenge to city leaders and residents to take up the reforms outlined in the Ferguson Commission report and her appointment of a black, male judge to become the city’s ­director of public safety.44 It also was apparent in a hopeful announcement by ­African-American clergy and activists that they were calling for people to boycott a dozen national businesses with important St. Louis outlets and other l­ ocal businesses.45 In addition to demands for better treatment by police and shop owners, minority contracting, and improved public amenities in north St. Louis, their checklist of reforms included fixes to residential “redlining” and political redistricting that dilutes black representation and power. The changes called for in the boycott are more aspirational than realistic. Businesspeople have no part to play in addressing several of the action items that were raised. Political boundary lines are altered by the state. The state also would have a big hand in coming up with funds for infrastructural improvements in North St. Louis neighborhoods. Redlining suits are filed by federal agencies had already been filed against several St. Louis area banks. Boycotters might succeed in having more minority contractors hired, but steps in that direction also have been in place for some time in the St. Louis area. Local businesses certainly can address concerns about the way black shoppers are treated. But this problem, to the extent it affects a great many people today, would show how little progress has been made in race relations since the 1950s. Solving it now would be an important gesture but not proof black persons had seen much improvement in their economic clout or political power. The boycott’s less-than-dramatic accomplishments speak to a process of making more civil kinds of disorder that has a lot of trial and error built into it. But revisiting the lists of factors working to discourage more violent displays of unrest assembled by Breihan and Horowitz suggest there’s room for optimism. After all, the presence of identical precipitating events didn’t lead to violence in 2017. There were abundant targets to attack, and they were left alone. Most importantly, perhaps, by 2017 police departments were anything but indifferent to the possibility of unrest and knew whatever they did might

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make the bad situation they faced appreciably worse. They weren’t always successful in curbing their officers’ behavior, but the mistakes officers made in 2014 were largely avoided in 2017. Police didn’t exacerbate the situations they faced to the point protesters and their supporters were provoked into committing even more violence against either property or persons. One could make identical statements about the learning curve protesters and their leaders went through between 2014 and 2017 and reach an almost identical conclusion about the lessons they took from their experiences on the streets. They learned to do the kind of self-policing before and during disorder that presents itself as restraint. They could have made the situation they faced worse but didn’t. Violence was contained. Damage to property was kept to a minimum. So, too, was the damage done to human beings. There was a demonstrable lessening of social support for violence between 2014 and 2017. It was most apparent in the “invented traditions” I have been discussing and will return to now in summarizing my argument: the use of social media; community clean-ups; and fighting nicer. Using Social Media

Persons who studied and wrote about racial unrest in the 1960s saw creation at work. Old ways of thinking and acting reinforced deeply embedded racist practices and ideas. New ways of thinking and acting would challenge, if not erase, the effect of the longstanding racist practices and racial animus. Nonroutine forms of collective action helped push reform efforts forward. The protests were legitimate. Violence was regrettable but understandable under such circumstances. People in crowds could no longer be portrayed as crazy. They were aggrieved, the targets of their anger predictable and legitimate. If crowd behavior wasn’t mapped out with military precision, it was anything but aberrant and disorganized. The use of Twitter and other social media by people involved in more recent protests and rioting showed how they made sense of these events even as they were in the middle of them. It also helped to reveal how people were mobilized, their protests were organized, and how tactics were chosen. There is no small irony in comparing these protests and riots to “smart mobs.” Those seemingly “spontaneous” shows of dancing and singing that people put on at shopping malls and city intersections only appear spontaneous. A lot of strategizing and practicing in private is built into the creation of such spontaneous public events. It is no less true of the customs that are built into protests and riots. Right now, I only will focus on the customary practices and organization built into seemingly spontaneous and irrational “collective” actions that have been chronicled here in the United States. The first I already discussed in

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some detail and involved a mysterious outbreak of bug bites that happened in a North Carolina fabric mill back in the 1960s.46 The second dealt with religious services in the late-1950s whose appearance was a lot less conventional than their message.47 The shutdown of the mill that was caused by bugs no one could find was as damaging to the owners’ bottom line as it was confusing to everyone except the sociologists brought in to unpack the mysterious outbreak. The researchers figured out the people who claimed to have been bitten were more often women than men, working in some parts of the plant more than others, and had been putting in a lot of overtime work. This time of the year was always busy because manufacturers needed fabric for their new clothing lines. The researchers also learned that the whole plant had just recently come under new ownership and management. No one had planned to come down with a bug bite. But becoming ill was a not unreasonable response to the exceptionally stressful work situation they couldn’t have easily escaped otherwise. The fact that workers became ill together suggested that people who already knew each other and worked together could also extract themselves together from the situation they could not bear. The contagion looked crazier than it was. The collective behavior exhibited by workers was better organized and could be made sense of, if not at first and maybe not ever by the very persons who had participated in it. Just how conventional an underlying message can be built into a customary display of excessive behavior was apparent to the sociologist who attended services in the churches of so-called “holiness sects” which, as it happens, also were in the South. The people who were members of these churches and attended services were not at all well-to-do. Many, perhaps most of them, were poor. The people in these churches weren’t anything like people the sociologist knew in the church he belonged to. The services he knew weren’t anything like the expressive displays of fervor he witnessed being made by members of the sects he observed. People didn’t speak in tongues, stand up and wave their arms, or roll around on the floor in the churches he knew best. The parallels between the church services he knew and the ones he witnessed only became apparent to him when sect leaders stood up and began making impassioned sermons about the advantages of hard work, thrift, and, if you can believe it, self-discipline. Being conveyed from behind the mask of uncontrolled exuberance was a very conventional, middle-class message about how to make one’s way in the world. The texting that occurred during protests and riots reflects some of the same elements of hyperbole and conventional sense-making inside events that don’t look very conventional. More conventional ways to register just how upset persons are about the way cops kill young black men were either

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unknown to protesters or had been shown to be ineffective. The way they chose to make their point was overly dramatic but not unrestrained in many instances. Social media helped protesters communicate with each other and keep tabs on what other people were doing. The texting explosion that accompanied the riots in Ferguson and two riots that didn’t happen in the City of St. Louis made a difference. Informal leaders with no group standing behind them managed to keep these latter events from raveling further. The number of personal injuries and damage done to property was much smaller in the non-riot events. And lest we forget, no one else was killed. Community Clean-Ups

It was years and sometimes decades before many of the buildings and whole blocks of inner-city neighborhoods damaged during riots in the 1960s and 1970s were repaired and rebuilt. More recently in the City of St. Louis and in parts of Saint Louis County local people came out each morning to clean-up as best they could the damage been done the previous evening. It was, in a manner of speaking, an inversion of a custom that was itself an inversion of the typical way in which local people relate to their employers and the places where they shop. The voluntary contributions and grassroots organizing built into such activities would not happen in a community that didn’t have its collective act together or was making strides to putting its collective act together better. The connection people felt and expressed toward the businesses in their communities was an impressive counterpoint to the damage done to them by other people. These shops and stores were more than places where goods and services could be proffered, money exchanged, and credit of a financial sort offered and accepted. The credit bestowed upon them was more than monetary. They all belonged to the community and had a serious stake in its well-being. People could make no bigger show or clearer point about how much these businesses belonged to the community than by helping to clean them up and make their re-opening happen sooner rather than later. The men, women, and children who were part of these clean-ups also were making a show of their commitment to each other and a promise to the next generation of residents, store owners, and shoppers. Their community was worth cleaning up. They weren’t going anywhere. The assistance damaged businesses in Ferguson received from regional business associations and public funds was another expression of support. It didn’t compensate for the failure of the National Guard to show up or the police who did show up but didn’t stop the looting and arson. But it helped. The riots in Ferguson have also driven businessmen on the not-so-goodside of town to form their own alliance. Its membership is limited, however,

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and collaboration with the association of businesses on the better side of town has come to nothing. Businesspeople in Ferguson are organized far better now than they were before Michael Brown was killed, but only on the “better side” of town. People who shop on the side of town most badly damaged during the riots tried to change the business climate there but failed. Residents were willing to publicly shame one business vandalized during the riots. They alleged that business – the one from which Michael Brown allegedly bought marijuana – was involved in drug dealing. They wanted the city to pull its license. In the end, however, the city refused to pull that license and the public shaming stopped. Lower-income and black residents had learned they could organize but hadn’t yet developed the capacity to make their will matter. Here I will return to one of the questions I posed earlier in the chapter. Why were businesses attacked at all? People were outraged by Michael Brown’s shooting and the way his body was left on the street where it could be viewed and photographed by anyone who just happened to be passing by. They had grown accustomed to being abused by the police and gouged by Ferguson’s municipal court. It wasn’t hard for them to connect those dots and see Brown’s death as an extension of their government’s mistreatment of them. At no time during the first riot, in the months between it and the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for murder, or during the rioting that came on the heels of that ruling did anyone express anger with their ­local businessmen and women. Businesspeople weren’t implicated in Brown’s death; and no one had been complaining about local businesses over-­charging them, selling them shoddy goods, or for not employing local people. Only one business was singled out for drug dealing, and that came after the ­violence was over. We have noted local people helped clean up damaged business sites. Their efforts would not have been necessary, of course, had not people, especially younger people, vandalized, looted, and set on fire several local businesses. One building that was not subjected to arson sat between two others that were. It was left alone when the men sitting in the black-owned barbershop on the first floor told young rioters to keep moving down the road. Many other businesses weren’t that fortunate. They suffered sales losses that continued to hurt them several years after the rioting. What had businesspeople done to deserve such mistreatment at the hands of individuals who probably shopped there or maybe even worked there? This is another instance when I could wander back to the historical roots of popular unrest in England and Europe. I could show how their businesspeople came to lead and be abused by members of their own communities, and then describe how the custom had traveled to America. I will note here only that racial violence in the 20th century was often directed at local

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businesses that had in fact not hired local black people and had sold black customers less than first-line goods and given them less than sterling service. But this wasn’t what happened in Ferguson or elsewhere in the St. Louis area. At least it wasn’t part of the argument activists made in prosecuting the case against local police departments and municipal leaders in 2014 and 2017. Charges minority customers were being mistreated by white-owned businesses only came after the protests were over. Protest leaders in the City of St. Louis and towns in Saint Louis County visited by demonstrators did make loud declarations about how they hoped their actions would cost local businesses money and cause them embarrassment. The chant “No peace No Profit” made that point clearly and loudly; and apparently local businesses took a pretty good hit because of the protests. But no one on the protesters’ side of the table ever made a connection between peace on the streets and rudeness at shop counters. Area businesses made a much better indirect object of the activists’ disaffection. The limited vandalism might be best understood as a warning shot of sorts. Businesses were publicly reproached not for anything they had done or said, but for their disengagement. They had done or said nothing about the public abuse directed by the “state” against some of its citizens and their customers. The logical precedent for business engagement in matters of racial injustice is found in history. Beginning in the 18th century, businessmen began playing a crucial role in defining and enforcing the bundle of rights, privileges, duties, and obligations all citizens of cities today take for granted or should have been able to take for granted long before now. The engagement of businesspeople in all parts of city life was important. But it was most important in those parts responsible for answering three crucial questions. Who could be a member of the community? How closely did people have to follow rules? And, how accountable were residents supposed to be to each other? Business owners historically and today have been open to new people moving into their communities. They like having more customers and a larger pool of employees. Businesspeople have tended to be more conservative on matters related to following rules and public accountability. They also have been engaged in a variety of public-spirited initiatives that show they are interested in more than making money. The question dealing with accountability falls especially hard on persons and institutions that already benefit from what the city has to offer. They have an answer they helped to compose and the means to enforce it. People with less wealth, power, and prestige have yet to acquire the means to make and enforce an answer they would find more agreeable. That’s a big part of the reason why businesspeople give back to their communities. Their lack of engagement and unclear view of what their communities should be like spoke to a business community that didn’t have its collective act together. Businesspeople on the two sides of Ferguson didn’t talk

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often and didn’t see themselves having much to do with the way their local government operated. Only one of the survey respondents mentioned doing anything that might have been viewed as “giving something back to the community.” Businesspeople in Ferguson generally liked being businesspeople. Beyond that, they didn’t have much to do with the larger community or the lives of area residents. After the rioting in Ferguson, businesspeople from the two sides of town began meeting and discussing how to become more involved in the community. Regional business leaders also became involved in Ferguson and other parts of North St. Louis and Saint Louis County.48 The riots woke them up. A decade later, observers pointed out that most of the money invested in Ferguson’s post-riot development has gone to the better-off and nicer side of town instead of the blacker and less well-off side of Ferguson where most of the violence happened. The wake-up call heard by metropolitan area business leaders was acted on selectively. What happened on the streets of St. Louis and Saint Louis County in 2017 was the protesters way of engaging business leaders (and other major institutions) so they might become part of the conversation again or take an even bigger part than they had been playing until then. Tacking a complaint about the way black people allegedly were mistreated in stores onto the public mistreatment of young black men was at best a stretch. A kinder and perhaps more historically defensible view would be that better-regarded black and white persons had found a way of moving a fight about violent street confrontations indoors to a place where an argument about “public” mistreatment could be continued more safely.49 I concede this may be a too generous or too-scholarly-by-half stretch on my part. Fighting Nicer in Public

Americans are trying to learn how to fight nicer in public and are pulling it off. The use of social media by protesters and activists may not have made their fights with public authorities nicer. It certainly made the fights fairer, however, by helping the protesters’ side to be better organized and informed about what was going on. Social media made mobs smarter, or at least no less smart than the police and other non-governmental organizations that used social media during the disturbances and protests. Community clean-ups had nothing to do with how well or cleanly the two sides fought with each other. But it put both sides on notice there were many other people with a stake in the outcome of their street battles and those other people didn’t appreciate the way their community was being used and abused. Both sides were being held accountable for their actions in a very public way.

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These two innovations added a measure of sobriety to the customary ways in which city people had been staging public arguments and fights for the last couple of hundred years. They re-introduced limits on the uses of public violence that had been sorely missing since the end of the American Revolution.50 The idea of self-restraint was very much part of the tradition of civil disorder in late-medieval Europe. Generations of urban residents went out of their way to loudly mock and parody authorities when they weren’t pulling apart some offending person’s house, negotiating down the price of bread, tearing down fences on the town common, and doing their best not to kill somebody. Self-restraint bled away from local disorders only gradually. As the number and variety of contestable issues, detestable groups, and unfulfilled wishes grew, so did the number and variety of groups that found reason to dislike each other, to squabble about who should get what, and why they should get more. Adults either encouraged or didn’t try to stop younger, unattached males from taking an active part in street demonstrations and riots. People living in cities have never come close to realizing Thomas Hobbes’ vision of what a short, nasty, and brutish existence might look like. They could be excused for thinking that was where they were headed, however. For a long time, certainly for the last two hundred years, the violence they used on each other confirmed some of their worst fears about the future. And the worst of those fears involved people very different from themselves.51 The riots of the 1960s and 1970s were particularly nasty and destructive affairs. Arson, vandalism, and looting were rampant. With very few exceptions, the vandals, looters, and arsonists were black or Hispanic. Most were younger. Police and National Guardsmen used high-powered weapons against minority residents who were rarely and barely armed except for bottles and bricks. A great many persons were killed, most of them by the police. The 1992 rioting in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King was as bad as any of the riots that had occurred two and three decades earlier. What happened in Ferguson was nothing like these outbursts. The protests, even more limited violence, and riots that didn’t happen in the other St. Louis cases reviewed here were even more restrained. By 2017, the protesters and police who squared off in St. Louis and Saint Louis County made noise, lots of it. Property was damaged. People were injured. But no one was killed. Citizens and police were learning how to fight in more restrained ways. They could have continued attacking each other as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. But we all know how well those fights turned out. All the on-the-job training they were getting on how to fight nicer belied the loud noises they made at each other and the injuries some of them took home after their confrontations on the streets. We know from studies of other kinds of collective behavior that the participants may be the last people to figure out what was going on. Indeed, the very public dance people do with

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each other may work out better than expected precisely because they aren’t aware of all the customs and traditions built into their wild dance routines, which keep the routines from turning more violent and deadlier more often. We don’t know if the lessons learned on the streets of St. Louis will find receptive audiences elsewhere. If they do, however, then we should expect to see a lot more civil disorder in the future, especially if younger people are kept from it. We are left wondering what such a change would tell us about the state of the American people today and the kind of people we are to become. Here there is nothing but good news. Public authorities would have learned accountability is a two-way street and black Americans have no less right to it than police officers and the rest of us do. Embedded in this better solution to the problem of accountability are more agreeable answers to the other two questions I posed earlier. People who are not treated in a capricious and altogether inappropriate way in public would have every reason to follow the same rules that more well-regarded people follow. There would be no need for them to pick fights or to act violently if they weren’t being mistreated. People who treat each other respectfully in public are much more likely to get along better, even if they don’t know each other well or like each other very much. Why they would act that way isn’t hard to figure out. Put quite simply, more public displays of regard for black Americans would show they had been accepted as members in good standing in the communities where they already live and work. It is hard to imagine that most of us wouldn’t find that kind of world more agreeable. I also think it’s fair to say Martin Luther King would not be pleased so many young black men had to die before we learned these important lessons. Or, that it had taken so long for the rest of us to learn how to disagree in public without becoming violently disagreeable. He wouldn’t be happy about that. He also wouldn’t appreciate the irony that we had discovered was a “tradition” invented several hundred years earlier. But I suspect he would be pleasantly surprised by how black and white Americans had finally begun to figure it out together. Notes 1 Los Angeles Times, “Ferguson’s white mayor wins reelection in his first race since 2014 unrest.” April 5, 2017. Matt Pearce. “By a margin of 56% to 44%, Knowles defeated his lone challenger, Councilwoman Ella Jones, who is black. If Jones had won, she would have made history as the first black mayor of a city that was once an overwhelmingly white ‘sundown town’ where, until the 1960s, African ­Americans were banned after dark.”

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2 Much to their credit, the question of what happens after riots happen has recently been taken up by Ince, Anthony, Thomas, and Llda Lindell in their article “After Riots: Toward a Research Agenda on the Long-term Effects of Urban Unrest.” Journal of Urban Affairs. Vol. 45 (1) (2023): 84–101. 3 Collins, Ann, All Hell Broke Loose: American Race Riots from the Progressive Era through World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012; Barnes, Harper, Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker & Company, 2008). 4 Breihan, John, “Why Was There No Rioting in Cherry Hill?” in Jessica Elfenbein, Thomas Hollowak, and Elizabeth Nix, eds. Baltimore ‘68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011): 39–50; Shapiro, Fred and James Sullivan, Race Riots: New York 1964 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964); Schneider, Cathy, Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Flamm, Michael, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Fogelson, Robert, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Berkely: University of California Press, 1971). 5 Mosquito, Rodney, “Income Inequality in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1980–2010.” Unpublished dissertation (Saint Louis: Saint Louis University, 2022). 6 Norwood, Kimberly Jade, “Foreword” in Kimberly Jade Norwood, ed., ­Ferguson’s Fault Lines (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2016), pp. xviii–xvix. A “scathing” report on municipal court abuses was published two years before the unrest in Ferguson by an organization known as Arch City Defenders. Its findings were subsequently corroborated by a Department of Justice report after the riots. “This report found excessive targeting of Black drivers (stopped for speeding, for failure to have special stickers, for nonfunctioning brake lights, for sitting in their parked cars looking suspicious.” “People were even ticketed for baggy pants, ‘manner of walking,’ and other “quality of life” violations.” 7 Quarentelli, E.L. and Russel Dynes, “Looting in Racial Disorders: An Index of Social Change,” The American Behavioral Scientist. 5 (March 1968): 7–10; ­Osterweil, Vicky, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020). Quarentilli and Dynes’ argument about looting as an expression of peoples’ willingness to temporarily withdraw their support and cooperation with conventional but often punitive market practices is entirely consistent with the history of this and other forms of property destruction developed in England and Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Osterweil’s complementary observation that looting is a “communal practice” and a display of “communal cohesion” (p. 4) is a nice addition to the Quarentelli and Dynes’ argument. So, too, are her observations about the emancipatory looting carried out by slaves who fled their owners as a form of “property” theft executed by the slaves who, of course, were pieces of property themselves (pp. 39–69). 8 The Verge, August 6, 2019. “Ferguson, five years later.” Ben Westhoff. 9 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 2, 2018. “Ferguson heads in a positive direction.” Delrish Moss; St. Louis American, May 17–23, 2018. “Men of honor mentors male students in Ferguson-Florissant.” Jessica Karins. 10 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 29, 2020. “St. Louis winnows thousands of warrants.” Bryce Gray; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “7 years later, Ferguson victims still waiting on their day in court.” Tony Messenger. 11 The Washington Post, June 21, 2018. “The forgotten Ferguson.” Tracy Jan; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 14, 2018. “Ferguson court system has made some progress, auditor reports.” Kurt Erikson; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ­August 9, 2021. “Ferguson leaders remain optimistic.” Taylor Tiamoyo Harris; St.

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Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 2021; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 25, 2022. “Monitor: Ferguson PD faces ‘extreme’ officer shortage nearly 6 years into consent decree.” Katie Kull; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 2021. “Seven years: ‘we are working diligently to change Ferguson,’ mayor says on anniversary of Brown’s death.” Robert Patrick and Taylor Tiamoyo Harris; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch. ­ October 11, 2022. “Let the managers manage. Ferguson city council should learn from St. Louis school board’s past mistakes.” David Carson; St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, October 12, 2022. “Ferguson residents urge support for city manager.” Taylor Tiamoyo Harris. 12 Jackson, Ku Klux Klan; Waskow, Arthur, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967); Tuttle, William, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. (New York: Atheneum, 1974). 13 Tuttle, Race Riot; Haynes, Robert, A Night of Violence: the Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). 14 Francis, Leah Gunning, Ferguson & Faith (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2015). 15 Boyles, Andrea, You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), pp. 25, 39, 44, 74–75, 79, 82–83, 89–91. Boyles does a good job showing how local community people tried to keep the unrest less violent and put peoples’ anger to some good and larger use. 16 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 23, 2017. “Ferguson leaders question if monitor worth cost.” Jim Salter. 17 Roorda, Jeff, The War on the Police: How the Ferguson Effect Is Making America Unsafe (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016). 18 Driskell, Schooling Jim Crow, pp. 169–174, 187–189; Daniel Monti, Engaging Strangers: Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism, and Public Order in Boston (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 177–198. 19 Bonillia, Y. and J. Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States,” American Ethnologist. 42 (2015): 4–17; LeFebvre, R.K. and C. Armstrong, “Grievance-based social movement mobilization in the #Ferguson Twitter storm.” New Media & Society. (2016): 1–16; Sandoval, Juan, Ricardo Way, Hyunmin Lee, and Amber Hinsley. “Urban Resilience and Social Media: A Study of Tweeter Content, Urban Unrest, and the Ferguson Movement.” Unpublished manuscript. (Saint Louis University, Department of Sociology, 2017). 20 National Public Radio. August 11, 2016. “The butterfly effects of Ferguson.” Gene Demby. The New York Times, August 10, 2015. “They helped make Twitter in Ferguson Protests.” https://nyti.ms/1lyWvXh. 21 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 22 Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, pp. 285–287. 23 Myers, Daniel, “The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 106 (1): 173–208. 24 U News, October 23, 2014. “Administration, DPS attempt balance between mission, safety.” Vivek Goruala; U News, October 23, 2014. “Ferguson captivates SLU classrooms.” Tim Wilhelm; U News, December 4, 2014. “Pestello weighs in on grand jury decision.” Paul Brunkhorst; U News, December 4, 2014. “Protests on Grand: demonstrations close med school.” Hannah Wiley; U News, October 23, 2014. “Clock tower contention.” Jessica Winter; U News, October 23, 2014. “Dispatch from the clock tower.” Isaac Singleton. 25 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 20, 2017. “Krewson calls interim chief’s comments ‘inflammatory.’” Doug Moore; New York Times, September 21, 2017. “Amid Protests, Balancing Act for the Mayor in St. Louis.” Mitch Smith.

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26 St. Louis American, September 21–27, 2017. “Week of protests follows Jason Stockley verdict.” Jessica Karins and Kenya Vaughn; St. Louis American, ­September 21–27, 2017. “Message to Mayor Krewson and white moderates.” ­St. Louis American Editorial Board; St. Louis American, September 21–27, 2017. “Jason Stockley and white supremacy.” Jamala Rogers; St. Louis American, ­September 21–27, 2017. “St. Louis still hasn’t learned its lesson.” Malik Ahmed; St. Louis American, September 21–27, 2017. “ACLU to sue over policing of protests.” Sandra Jordan; St. Louis American, September 21–27, 2017. “Message to young activists involved in work of social change.” Mike Jones; St. Louis A ­ merican, September 21–27, 2017. “Delmar Loop businesses take damage in stride.” Camille Phillips.; St. Louis American, September 28–October 4, 2017. “Local small business owners express support for protesters.” American Staff; St. Louis American, September 28–October 4, 2017. “Protesters demand firing of O’Toole.” Kenya Vaughn; St. Louis American, September 28–October 4, 2017. “Protesting with privilege.” Kenya Vaughn; St. Louis American, September 28–October 4, 2017. “Protesters disrupt St. Charles during Oktoberfest.” Kenya Vaughn; St. Louis American, September 28–October 4, 2017. “Where did all the money from Ferguson go?” Jessica Karins; St. Louis Post–Dispatch, October 30, 2014. “Near site of fatal shooting, Shaw neighborhood market continues to reach out.” Doug Moore; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 6, 2017. “Ferguson striving to meet challenges.” Doug Moore; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 2017. Lessons from Ferguson should not be lost to revisionist history.” William Lacy Clay; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch, September 12, 2017. “Greitens, clergy meet in advance of Stockley decision.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 13, 2017. “Black police union calls for conviction in Stockley case.” Joel Currier. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 13, 2017. “Man who lost his livelihood sees charges abruptly dropped.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 15, 2017. “City Braces for Stockley Verdict.” Kevin McDermott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 15, 2017. “Two schools of thought on disruption.” Tony Messenger; St. Louis PostDispatch, September 15, 2017. “Judge is veteran of high-profile cases.” Joel Currier; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Tension threatens to boil at protests.” Staff Reporters; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Judge agonized over his verdict.” Joel Currier and Christine Byers; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “DOJ pivots on ‘collaborative reform’ policy.” Chuck Raasch; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Stockley Speaks.” Christine Byers; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Breakdown of ­ruling.” Joel Currier; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Security concerns stall downtown diversions.” Doug Moore; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Some schools sent students home early.” Kristen Taketa; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16, 2017. “Media role in protests discounted by ­experts.” Kurt Erikson. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2017. “Arrests made; Krewson calls for calm.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2017. “Protesters again march to sadly familiar refrain.” Tony Messenger; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2017. “Protesters head west.” Jacob Barker and Doug Moore; St. Louis Post- Dispatch, September 17, 2017. “U2, Ed Sheeran cancel concerts; other events called off.” Kevin C. Johnson; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch, September 17, 2017. “Verdict not a surprise for legal experts.” Joel Currier and Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 18, 2017. “Financial toll rises for vandalized businesses; Greitens visits Loop; volunteers chip in.” Bryce Gray; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 18, 2017. “Pastor reinforces ‘disruption, not destruction’ as goal.” Ashley Jost; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 19, 2017. “Day of marches ends outside St. Louis jail.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 19, 2017. “Protest chants, tone adopted by police,

The Other “Ferguson Effect”  189

officials.” Jeremy Kohler; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 19, 2017. “Economic toll from protests is felt now, will have aftershocks.” Lisa Brown and Jacob Barker; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 19, 2017. “Local high school students walk out of class to protest Stockley verdict.” Kristen Taketa; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch, September 20, 2017. “Clergy hold interfaith prayer service for peace.” Blythe Bernhard; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 20, 2017. “Police, not protesters. Scare one resident.” Tony Messenger; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 20, 2017. “Judge lauds progress so far on Ferguson consent decree.” Robert ­Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 2017. “Fatal shootings by police rise in 2017.” Christine Byers; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 2017. “Residents on chief search: ‘Do it right.’” Joe Holleman; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ­September 21, 2017. “Amid Clamor, board advances police body cameras; hurdles remain before 1-year trial.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 2017. “Pi pizza co-founder suffers backlash after posts criticizing police response.” Joe Hollerman; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 22, 2017. “Show goes on; Billy Joel performs despite protests at Busch.” Joe Holleman and Denise Hollinshed; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 22, 2017. “There can be no peace without justice.” Tony Messenger; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2017. “City resolution angers police.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2017. “Accounts from arrests.” Jeremy Kohler, Christine Byers, and Erin Heffernan; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2017. “Two targeted venues quiet; crowd gathers in St. Charles.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2017. “ACLU sues city of St. Louis over police conduct during protests.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 24, 2017. “Police on social media: departments make it a tool of their own.” Erin Heffermen; St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, September 24, 2017. “Misunderstood message: protesters’ voice muted by shattering glass.” Jesse Bogan; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 24, 2017. “22 are arrested at Galleria: rallies in Clayton, Brentwood.” Christian Gooden, Nassim Benchaabane, and Denise Hollinsned; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 24, 2017. “Public enemy no. 1: amid all the protests, why do Bob Momanik’s racist radio rants go unchallenged?” Tod Robberson.; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ­September 25, 2017. “Protesters arrested at Galleria are released.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “Body cameras for St. Louis police.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “Hawley to review claims of wrongdoing during Smith settlement case.” Jack Suntrup and Christine Byers; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “Protesters gather briefly at Busch after ‘silent’ march.” Staff Reports; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “Complaints arise over 22 weekend arrests at the Galleria.” Jesse Bogan.; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “The badge is not a license to administer street justice.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “The riot that didn’t happen.” Daniel Monti; St. Louis PostDispatch, September 27, 2017. Filmmakers sue St. Louis police for arrest in ‘kettle’ during protest.” Jeremy Kohler; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 28, 2017. “Mayor, chief seek probe into protest response.” Staff Reports; St. Louis PostDispatch, September 29, 2017. “Former prosecutor to look into Stockley settlement.” Jack Suntrup; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 30, 2017. “Police honor delayed.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 2, 2017. “Police Sergeant plays dual role.” Jeremy Kohler; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3, 2017. “Arrest, pepper-spraying of clergyman at protest decried.” Erin Heffernan; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3, 2017. “The Stockley verdict, change and the protesters.” Blake Ashby; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3, 2017. “The fly and the sledgehammer.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 4, 2017. “Independent team sought by Gardner to look into use of force.”

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Joel Currier and Christine Byers; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ­October 4, 2017. “Proposal would limit us of tear gas, pepper spray.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch, October 4, 2017. “De-policing, crime and the ‘Ferguson effect’ in Missouri.” Shjarack, John, Scott Decker, Scott Wolfe, and David Pyrooz; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 6, 2017. “Protesters briefly block busy south St. Louis intersection.” Nassim Benchaabane; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 6, 2017. “Police OT costs mount as protests continue.” Christine Byers; St. Louis PostDispatch, October 7, 2017. “Protesters return to Ferguson, march at police headquarters.” Nassim Benchaabane; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 8, 2017. “Request for probe of protest arrests sent to DOJ.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis PostDispatch, October 10, 2017. “Area judges get input in ‘listening session.’” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 12, 2017. “Teaching social justice.” Kristen Taketa; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 12, 2017. “Panel discussion on race, policing unravels.” Ashley Lisenby; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, 2017. “Shouting down Krewson.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board;   St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, 2017. “Facing racism is part of life in St. Louis. Now it’s art of my classroom, too.” Erika Whitfield; St. Louis PostDispatch, October 14, 2017. “Judge to lead public safety.” Kim Bell and Lisa Brown; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 19, 2017. “Judge calls police conduct during protests ‘very, very concerning.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 20, 2017. “St. Louis police call their protest response lawful and appropriate.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 2017. “Judge limits city police tactics used in protests.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 25, 2017. “Black Friday protests at the St. Louis Galleria lead to 7 ­arrests.” Denise Hollinshed. 27 Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, pp., 285–287. 28 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 5, 2023. “Settlement checks disbursed after mass ‘kettling’ arrest during 2017 protest in St. Louis.” Alex Vargas. 29 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 2017. “Judge limits city police tactics used in protests.” Robert Patrick. 30 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2017. “The riot that didn’t happen.” ­Daniel Monti. 31 Surreth, Tim, Ferguson: America’s Breaking Point (United States: Elwood Press, 2016); Lowery, Wesley, “They Can’t Kill Us All.” (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016); McSpadden, Lezley, Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil (New York: Regan Arts, 2016); Jaffe, Sarah, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016); Norwood, Kimberly Jade, Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake that Rocked a Nation (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2016); Roorda, War on the Police; Francis, Ferguson & Faith. 32 Shjarback, John, David Pyroozb, Scott Wolfec, Scott Decker, “De-policing and crime in the wake of Ferguson: Racialized changes in the quantity and quality of policing among Missouri police departments,” Journal of Criminal Justice, 50 (2017): 42–52. A report submitted to Ferguson’s police department by the Civilian Police Review Board in 2023 showed that the number of crimes in Ferguson had been rising for years, even before the rioting in 2014, and the clearance rates were going down. The clearance rate numbers were substantially lower than those in other suburban communities. Whatever had been going wrong in the police department predated the unrest in 2014. Rioting didn’t cause the crime problem in Ferguson to become worse. 33 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 21, 2017. “Police conduct in protests examined.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 4, 2017. “De-policing, crime and the ‘Ferguson effect’ in Missouri.” Shjarack, John, Scott Decker, Scott Wolfe, and David Pyrooz; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 14, 2017. “Use money to help N. County, HUD says.” Jeremy Kohler.

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34 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 2017. “Judge limits city police tactics used in protests.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 2018. “Jailing people for their poverty is wrong, cruel and illegal.” Blake Strode; St. Louis PostDispatch, February 3, 2018. “Judge approves consent decree in Pagedale.” ­Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 13, 2018. “Ticketing for ­dollars.” ­Editorial board; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 20, 2018. “Pagedale has gotten a bad rap over municipal courts.” Sam Alton; St. Louis American, June 7–13, 2018. “‘Finally, my nightmare is over’.” Jessica Karins. 35 Shellow, Robert and Derek Roemer, “The Riot That Didn’t Happen.” Social Problems. Vol. 14 (1966): 221–233. 36 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), pp. 169–171, 378–481. 37 Shellow and Roemer, “The Riot That Didn’t Happen.” 38 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 6, 2017. “Ferguson striving to meet challenges.” Doug Moore. 39 The Washington Post, June 21, 2018. “The forgotten Ferguson.” Tracy Jan. 40 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 2017. “Protesters return to Ferguson, march at police headquarters.” Nassim Benchaabane. 41 Reuters, August 6, 2015. “A year after shooting, Ferguson faces financial toll.” Fiona Ortiz; The Washington Post, June 21, 2018. “The forgotten Ferguson.” June 21, 2018. Tracy Jan; Annika Merrilees. “New health center coming to Ferguson with grocery and other investments to follow.” https://www.stltoday. com/­business/local/new-health-care-center-coming-to-ferguson-with-groceryand-other-investments-to-follow/article_5da10334-fc06-55e4-f17c53052.html. ­August 2, 2019; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 22, 2019. “Nonprofits, cities working to revive West Florissant.” Jacob Barker; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 15, 2019. “Ferguson searches for new brand identity.” Jesse Bogan; The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2019. “Five years after Michael Brown’s death, Ferguson still shows scars of riots.” Shayndi Raice; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 18, 2020. “Ferguson’s new mayor: ‘buckle up…we are on the road to prosperity.” Taylor Tiamoyo Harris; The Washington Post, September 11, 2020. “The forgotten ­Ferguson.” Tracy Jan. 42 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2023. “Economic, community hub opens in Dellwood.” Hannah Wyman. 43 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 12, 2017. “Panel discussion on race, policing unravels.” Ashley Lisenby; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, 2017. “Shouting down Krewson.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board; St. Louis PostDispatch, October 14, 2017. “Judge to lead public safety.” Kim Bell and Lisa Brown; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 19, 2017. “Judge calls police conduct during protests ‘very, very concerning.” Robert Patrick; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 20, 2017. “St. Louis police call their protest response lawful and appropriate.” Robert Patrick. 44 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 5, 2017. “Ferguson report gets renewed interest.” Celeste Bott; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 7, 2017. “Public safety goals for city: Openness and the right police chief.” Celeste Bott. 45 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 3, 2017. “African-American clergy announce boycott of Galleria, area businesses.” Kevin McDermott.; St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, November 25, 2017. “Black Friday protests at the St. Louis Galleria lead to 7 ­arrests.” Denise Hollinshed. 46 Alan Kerckhoff and Kurt Back, The June Bug: A Study of Hysterical Contagion (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968). 47 Benton Johnson, “Do Holiness Sects Socialize in Dominant Values?” Social Forces. Vol. 39 (1961): 309–316.

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48 St. Louis American, May 3–9, 2018. “Clean sweep of north St. Louis. Niara Savage; St. Louis American, May 24–30, 2018. “Business leaders invest $900k in North St. Louis.” Ashley Jones. 49 Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 50 Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 51 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Dominic Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); Arthur Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1933); John Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Smelser, Neil, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1962); Philip Taft and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome.” Riot, Rout, and Tumult: Readings in ­American Social and Political Violence, Roger Land and John Turner, eds. (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 218–250; Michael Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Robert Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Joel Tyler Headley, The Great Riots of New York: 1712–1873 (­Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill Co., 1970 (1873); Fogelson, Violence as Protest; Robert Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882–1936 (Knoxville: ­University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Tuttle, Race Riot; Waskow, From Race Riots to Sit-In.

6 CHARLOTTESVILLE

Erected in the early-1920s at the height of the Jim Crow era, the statue of Robert E. Lee was a monument to the Confederacy and a warning to black people of the insults and injuries awaiting them if they stepped out of line.1 That the statue of General Lee and another of Stonewall Jackson nearby might have outlived their usefulness apparently wasn’t talked about much until 2016 when a local high school student started a petition to have Lee’s statue removed. Then it seemed that people couldn’t talk about anything else, not just in Charlottesville but also in many communities that either had similar statues or citizens who had suddenly woken up to the idea that removing their statue might be possible. The Unite the Right rally on August 12, 2017, culminated a year-long campaign by numerous white supremacist organizations to keep General Lee’s statue where it had stood for nearly a century. What awaited Charlottesville’s residents and anti-racist groups on August 12, was hinted at the night before in the dramatic torchlit march across the University of Virginia campus by the same white supremacists. Screaming racist and antisemitic chants and ­insults, the marchers threatened and fought with outraged ­students and citizens who lined up against them. The fate of Confederate statues and what they represented to people was only one of the reasons so many people were upset. The other reason had to do with the organizations that were for and against removing them. On one side there were numerous alt-right and white nationalist organizations like the KKK and Nazis that wanted to preserve the statues. Against them stood anti-racist organizations and Antifa supporters who wanted the statues removed. Supporters of the organizations in these rival camps decided to fight DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-7

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over their ideological differences in the middle of a community where few if any of them lived but all of them proclaimed needed to be saved. There had been a lot of legal and extra-legal drama in the months preceding the Unite the Right rally. There was a great deal of unrest and no small amount of violence in Charlottesville on the day of the rally and the evening preceding it. In this chapter, I will try to make sense of what happened and didn’t happen in Charlottesville, how it fits with what we know about the history of unrest in US communities, and what new wrinkles the events in Charlottesville add to our understanding of collective violence. We know the rally turned out worse than anyone had feared or planned. The unrest and violence that happened on August 11 and 12, caught the attention of people not just in Charlottesville but across the country. It prompted many opinion leaders and public officials to opine about what happened and who was responsible for creating such a mess. Among them was Donald Trump who was serving his first year as President. Here we will see that the larger social and cultural lessons embedded in Charlottesville’s unrest and violence are similar in some ways to those conveyed in the story about unrest and violence in Ferguson and the Saint Louis area generally. We also will see how their similarities and differences anticipate what would happen and not happen in Black Lives Matter protests and the Capitol insurrection which followed the unrest in Ferguson and Charlottesville a couple of years later. By way of a brief introduction to what will be highlighted in this chapter, we will recall that Ferguson’s unrest and violence were progressive in nature. Black people insisted that the killing of Michael Brown was symptomatic of abuse they had suffered for decades at the hands of Ferguson’s police department and municipal court. Implicit in their violent protest was the idea that town leaders would have to reform the police department and municipal court. But people’s violent rebuttal to black mistreatment brought up other matters local officials would be challenged to address. Among them were the kinds of political and economic shortchanging black people had allegedly experienced, not just in Ferguson but across the City of St. Louis and Saint Louis County. The unrest in Charlottesville would bring up similar concerns about the economic standing of black people in Charlottesville. However valid, these concerns were not crucial to what happened in Charlottesville. Nor would they be treated as such after the violence was over and all the racist and antiracist groups returned to wherever home was for them. What happened in Charlottesville was much more reactionary in its ­origins and impact, though not as theorists and social historians have long imagined reactionary unrest would look like. If the fight over the statues had gone the way white nationalists wanted, older, more racially insensitive ways of talking about minority people and treating them in public would have

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been restored or at least less discouraged than they had become in the last half-century. Historically, that’s how reactionary unrest typically played out. People defended their community against the introduction of new values and people. Traditional ways of imagining one’s community and acting were reinforced, challenged for a moment, perhaps, but ultimately won out over new challengers and ideas. This kind of unrest was sometimes called “backward looking” because the last thing the people using it wanted to do was be dragged kicking and screaming into a world different from the world they already knew and liked.2 But that’s not how the reactionary unrest in Charlottesville played out. A new world, this one more accommodating to new people and ideas, had already taken hold in Charlottesville. Blacks and Jews, two of the kinds of people that KKK and Nazi sympathizers were especially keen on defaming and mistreating in Charlottesville, had already passed whatever membership tests had been thrown at them. They had made a place for themselves in Charlottesville and found ways to be included in the city’s civic life. In Charlottesville, local people weren’t defending their community against an invasion by new people and a more modern and accommodating set of civic virtues. They used unrest and violence to renew their commitment to people who had become members of the community but never would have made the cut in a world that embraced the kind of civic virtues favored by Nazis and members of the KKK. What happened in Charlottesville, then, provided an interesting twist to the way Americans had used reactionary unrest historically. Reactionary unrest always defends the status quo. The status quo in this case had already become more inclusive and accommodating. White nationalist protesters made painfully clear how unwelcoming they wanted Charlottesville to become again. Anti-racist counter-protesters made it even more painfully clear they weren’t buying the kinds of civic virtues white nationalists were selling. The fight that local people and their supporters picked in defending their community, as I just noted, was all about renewing their commitment to more inclusive and accommodating civic habits, not embracing, or restoring old racist and antisemitic ones. Different as the unrest in Ferguson and Charlottesville was, the unrest in those communities showed Americans are willing and able to embrace both liberal and conservative civic values when they give voice to what is bothering them and to the kind of community they want. This is not what social historians thought would happen. They imagined a world in which reactionary unrest would gradually diminish and be replaced by more progressive kinds of unrest. It would be something closer to what happened in Ferguson but initiated and led by organizations sympathetic to minority concerns rather than by groups of residents, which was the case in Ferguson.

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As I also have noted on several occasions, Americans have a complicated history with social unrest and violence. What transpired in Charlottesville shows how complicated “complicated” had become. What Didn’t Happen in Charlottesville and Why It Mattered

In retelling the story of what happened in Charlottesville on the day alt-right and anti-racist groups finally had the fight they had been itching to have, the brief meeting between Richard Preston, an avowed racist, and Corey Long, a black man who wasn’t fond of racists, was most notable for what the two men decided not to do.3 Preston, who was the leader of the Maryland KKK, was with a group of protesters trying to leave the area after the police called for rally goers to disperse. Long, whose home was in Culpeper, Virginia, an hour’s drive from Charlottesville, was with counter-protesters who stood on a path that effectively blocked Preston and his group from moving on. Long took an aerosol can that had been thrown at him and lit a spray that he aimed at the racists who were trying to leave. Preston hollered a racial epithet at Long and told him to stop, fired his pistol once into the ground in front of Long, and then walked away. Police who were present and under orders not to become involved in all the fights going on around them didn’t interfere with either man or stop the groups from moving on. Someone made a video of the encounter. In it, Long is seen shooting a long flame at a group of white protesters. Preston is off to one side of the confrontation but approaching the place where Long’s group was having its faceoff with some white supremacists. Preston is shown “drawing his pistol and shouting, ‘Hey, n—–,’ at Long.” He walked toward Long and the other counter-protesters, pulled out his pistol and shot once into the ground, put his gun away, and left.4 That was all of it. To be sure, Preston and Long weren’t the only individuals arrested ­after the rally. Leaders of the rally were subsequently tried and convicted for promoting hate speech and violence. Criminal and civil suits were also filed against other white nationalist supporters. These people were tried and convicted for assaulting and beating up counter-protesters. Several neo-Nazis ended up signing a consent decree that barred them from returning to Charlottesville as members of an armed group.5 Six other protesters would eventually be ­arrested and tried for their role in the infamous tiki torch-burning demonstration the night before the rally.6 Long may have been the only counter-protester who was arrested and tried for his actions on the day of the rally, aside from James Alex Field.7 The trials and convictions of Preston and Long were exceptional, given all the other criminal and civil offenses that were committed and brought

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to trial. One imagines the men were tried because there were few, if any, confrontations that day in which potentially lethal weapons were used. The exception to this exception, of course, was the killing of Heather Heyer, a counter-protester, by a car driven by James Alex Fields, a white nationalist. Based on the video evidence and personal testimony presented at their trials, Long was found guilty of “disorderly conduct.” He was sentenced to 20 days in jail and required to perform 100 hours of community service. Preston was sentenced to serve four years in a Virginia correctional center. Opinion on the difference in their respective sentences overwhelmingly favored Long. The reasons why had more to do with who was committing violence than differences in the severity of their acts. I will return to this idea later in the chapter. I had my own thoughts on why Preston and Long had purposely missed the opportunity to do more harm with the weapons they carried and got markedly different jail sentences. But I wanted to hear what the two men had to say. I tried to contact Preston first. I wrote to him in prison. I am reprinting a copy of the letter I sent to Preston here in the book. I am doing this so you can see how straightforward my introduction was. I wasn’t asking him anything he couldn’t answer, that was tricky, or ill-mannered. I had a tougher question to ask him, if he answered the one I led with. January 10, 2020 Mr. Richard Wilson Preston, Jr. I.D. # 1916593 Coffeewood Correctional Center P.O. Box 500 Mitchells, VA 22729 Dear Mr. Preston: I am a member of the faculty of Saint Louis University. I am writing a book in which I will compare what happened in Charlottesville in 2017 to the unrest in 2014 that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri. While I would be interested in learning what you and other people who were there think about events in Charlottesville, I have only one question right now. Why didn’t you shoot Corey Long? Thanks in advance for ­replying to my letter and answering this question. Sincerely, Daniel J. Monti, Ph.D.

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I repeat that I wasn’t nearly as interested in his answer to this question than I was in the follow-up question I had in mind to ask. “Why do you think you were the only person at the rally who shot a firearm that day?” I was prepared to write Corey Long. But when Preston didn’t reply, I decided not to write Long, thinking it would make Preston look even worse if I printed what Long might have written me. For what it’s worth, I was not particularly surprised when Preston didn’t write back. I was reduced to scouring news accounts and books about the rally for what Preston and Long might have been reported saying about why they acted as they had. That was helpful. I found some quotes I could use that answered my question. At the time of his sentencing, Preston offered an apology for his actions and provided a small but thoughtful answer to my query. In a voice that was described as “cracking slightly,” Preston said, “I am sorry.” He added, “I only had second to figure it out. … I didn’t want to hurt anybody.” Long, for his part, offered no apology. Indeed, he was “celebrated” in the press and seemed proud of what he had done. He defended his actions, saying “I went out to voice my opinion…(just) like the racist Nazis who took over my town.”8 I italicized the word “my” in the last sentence because Long’s claim that Charlottesville was his town was taken at face value. Preston made no such claim about having ties to Charlottesville and probably would have been roundly criticized if he had. We will recall that conflict in communities where people’s membership is in question tend to be more violent and destructive. Longer-term residents didn’t like newcomers and others who insisted on being treated just like a regular person. This was especially so when the outsiders were unlike everybody else and might have been considered objectionable because of their race, nationality, and/or religious identity. The very presence of newcomers who were demonstrably different constituted a challenge to the people whose claim for membership had been settled for a while, assuming the question had ever been raised for them. What happened in Charlottesville, however, had nothing to do with who was or wasn’t a member of the community. That question was never raised in the run-up to the Unite the Right rally. The town was already an open enough community that neither Long nor Preston or any of the other people like them would have been criticized or abused just for showing up. It is what they did after they showed up that would have made their putative claim for membership either credible or insulting to longer-term and full-time residents. Preston and Long’s imagined attachment to Charlottesville notwithstanding, the two men were affiliated with organizations whose members had markedly different views about the kind of community they imagined

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Charlottesville should become.9 We also know two other facts about these men and their presumptive claim to be taken as people whose opinions should matter. We know there were many fights between the 500 or so people who came to Charlottesville to protest the removal of the Confederate statues and the estimated 1,000 counter-protesters who wanted to see the Confederate statues carted away. We also know that numerous people brought firearms to the rally, but most people used their fists, clubs, and other less deadly weapons in these fights. Apart from all the people hurt in the car ramming, the number of p ­ eople who were seriously injured was probably small. But there is no reliable count of how many persons went home that afternoon bloodied and banged up ­after being punched, kicked, or hit by sticks, bottles filled with offensive liquids or water, or being sprayed in the eyes with chemicals and smoke bombs.10 That would have been a bigger number. Nevertheless, had Preston or Long thought to ask themselves why no one else had used more serious weapons, I didn’t think their answers would be anything like mine. That’s because I believe Preston’s decision not to shoot Corey Long and Long’s halfhearted attempt to caramelize a few white nationalists had nothing to do with their beliefs about white and black people or Jews, too, for that matter. Richard Preston may be a deeply conflicted racist and antisemite. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if he shares many of the same bad feelings and ill will toward black people and Jews that other white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and alt-right sympathizers do. They all belonged to organizations whose principal message was that blacks, Jews, and many other people who aren’t white or Christian do not deserve to be shown much respect when they are out in public. Corey Long had joined much larger crowds of people who took strong exception to the racist, antisemitic, homophobic, misogynist, and white ­nationalist views of people like Richard Preston. By all accounts, Long’s fellow counter-protesters delivered more beatings than Preston’s people did. The protesters were effectively run out of town, one of the few contingencies for which they had made no plan. The other thing they hadn’t planned for was law enforcement officers standing around and watching them be assaulted by the much larger number of anti-racists who came to Charlottesville. I have no idea how often Corey Long has returned to Charlottesville since August 12, 2017. However, the KKK and other White Nationalist types did return to Charlottesville a couple of months after the rally. Led by Richard Spencer, one of the principal architects of the Unite the Right rally, a quite small group of white supremacist sympathizers went downtown, shouted again that they would not be replaced, and left about 10 minutes later.11 Residents of Charlottesville mocked and otherwise ignored them this time.

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This says a lot about both sides’ willingness and ability to mount another mass confrontation in public. Neither was up for it, and they probably could not have pulled off another fight like the one they had in August even if they had wanted to. In a way that was reminiscent of what happened in the St. Louis area several years earlier, people learned they didn’t need to keep fighting to remind their fellow citizens why they had been upset. They didn’t need to riot again so they could relitigate the same grievance in public. And, besides, no one with any sense is going to go out of their way to have their asses kicked so soon after the first ass-kicking they received. How much the two sides had figured this out by the end of the Unite the Right rally on August 12, still wasn’t clear. Indeed, in their mutual retreat from Charlottesville both sides very much wanted to remind themselves why they had come to Charlottesville. That is why their noisy and disorderly ­departure wasn’t pretty or injury free. In what might now be seen as presaging both sides willingness and ability to learn, however, the retreat in Charlottesville happened quickly and was less bloody than some people expected. One well-informed observer had a view of the endgame that day he thought other local people shared. He said they had taken “a deep breath” after Heather Heyer was run down and killed. People feared the fighting would become even worse and more people would be hurt or killed. I understood why my informant was puzzled. I think the answer to his puzzlement is the same one I have called upon to explain Preston and Long’s surprising lack of murderous rage during their unexpected meeting. They never expected the fight to be as bad as it turned out. The problem in figuring out why they thought this and why taking a deep breath was both predictable and unnecessary is that people on both sides had nothing but ill will and contempt for each other. They had spent months plotting how they would make a show of how much they disliked the other side. The protesters and counter-protesters were both looking for trouble and found it. Observers could be excused for thinking there would be even more people hurt and killed after a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters. As I write this, I can recall my father telling me more than once, “Looks like you’re gonna have to learn things the hard way.” He’d say this with more resignation than anger in his voice. But the words stuck. The confrontation between protesters like Richard Preston and counter-protesters like Corey Long had that same “gonna have to learn things the hard way” look. Like them, I was old enough to understand the words but not experienced enough to foresee the consequences of actions I’d look back on afterward and shake my head for having taken. The protesters and counter-protesters who came to Charlottesville on ­August 12, 2017, were unable to mount a defense for how they acted that

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was anything remotely like my “too inexperienced to know better” excuse. They had rehearsed the Unite the Right rally in smaller protests and marches in Charlottesville not once but twice in the months before August. These dress rehearsals took place during legal wrangling over the right of Nazis, KKK supporters, and other white supremacists to protest the removal of the two Confederate statues they believed deserved more respect than black ­people and Jews. They knew exactly what they were doing. There was a disingenuous quality to the protesters’ upsettedness about being left unprotected by law enforcement personnel during the rally. After all, they had shown a willingness to misrepresent or hide their intentions from l­ocal authorities and to provoke counter-protesting groups with hateful speech. Of all the organizations that went looking for trouble in Charlottesville, the protesters’ woe-is-us complaining was the emptiest gesture made by any of the groups and institutions that participated in the violent rally. Law enforcement officials’ defense of their actions would have come in a close second. What would surprise both the protesters and counter-protesters on the day of the rally was the decision by the local police and other law enforcement agencies from outside Charlottesville to not intervene in their brawls. All manner of law enforcers that day let the would-be combatants “learn the hard way.” Law enforcement officers that day took discretion and tolerance for bad behavior and criminal conduct to levels few police departments would have matched. Local people had tried to alert town leaders that doing nothing would not end well. That is why everyone was angry at the police for not keeping the protesters and counter-protesters separated. All the nasty brawling and the quick departure of the protesting Nazis, KKK supporters, and other white supremacists on the day of the rally revealed how quickly they learned their lesson the hard way but also showed something even more important. They showed they had been less committed to a violent showdown than their overheated rhetoric had suggested. There were good historical and cultural reasons why no other protesters and counter-protesters used the most dangerous weapon many of them had brought to the rally. People involved in public unrest in the United States these days have cut way back on the damage they do to each other. The use of deadly violence has especially fallen out of favor. I doubt that Richard Preston or Corey Long is familiar with the research of people like Steven Pinker and Donald Horowitz, who could have told the protesters and counter-protesters they wouldn’t behave nearly as badly as everyone thought they would. Despite the presence of so many people carrying guns, people on both sides would restrain themselves. Their unwillingness to shoot up Charlottesville and their opponents was a bigger sign of

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their intent that day than everything they had said and done in the months leading up to the rally. I also think it’s a safe bet that neither Preston nor Long knows much, if anything, about the history of social unrest in the United States. The evidence of people’s unwillingness to act more recklessly and dangerously was hiding in plain sight. People on both sides were just too jacked up during the rally to notice. When it comes to understanding Long and Preston’s motivations that day, I suspect Corey Long couldn’t have come up with an explanation for his ­actions any more self-serving than the one he used after his trial. He felt vindicated. Preston’s apology, on the other hand, comes a lot closer to ­accounting for why the protesters and counter-protesters were less committed to using deadly violence once the rally started. Much of what happened in the run-up to the Unite the Right rally, on the day of the rally, and in the years since confirms some of what we already knew about popular unrest and collective violence in the United States and other Western democracies. As I have mentioned earlier in the book, people are becoming more discriminating and reserved in their use of violence than anyone imagined they would be before a street confrontation or appreciated afterward. As I lay out my argument below, we will see that events in Charlottesville had parallels with some of what happened and didn’t happen in Ferguson. But there also are elements of the unrest and violence in Charlottesville that distinguish it from what happened in Ferguson. Some things that transpired also don’t fit well with historians and social scientists expected unrest would look like in advanced democracies. I can only repeat what I said earlier in the book. Theories are neat. History isn’t. By now, the worst we were supposed to see was unrest and violence of the sort that happened in Ferguson: people whose membership in the community is grudgingly acknowledged still struggle to be treated like everybody else. Their unrest wasn’t necessarily expected to become tamer or less enthusiastic. It hasn’t. What it has become is less deadly and destructive. What we see in this chapter is evidence of how reactionary unrest has persisted and even thrived, if it’s fair to use that term, in contemporary America. People on occasion still find it necessary to defend their town or city’s civic culture against outsiders who insist they got important pieces wrong. As I warned earlier, what happened in Ferguson and Charlottesville shows that civic life in contemporary American communities is as complicated as the different races, classes, ethnic groups, and religiously minded people living there are. We still struggle to figure out how all the pieces fit. Some of us, a not insubstantial number of us, insist that all the pieces will never fit together well. What we need to do instead is cling or return to the older ways we used to talk to each other and act around each other in public and otherwise get out of each other’s way.

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The mix of progressive and reactionary unrest and violence we practice chronicles our larger struggle to find an agreeable mix of liberal and conservative ways of relating to each other in public. Several points embedded in my introductory story about Richard Preston and Corey Long hint at how unrest helps us clarify what an agreeable mix looks like to the people who live with it every day. Returning to my earlier observation about the unrest in Ferguson and Charlottesville unfolding very differently, it took years for black people in Ferguson to get around to rioting. It happened in a matter of months in Charlottesville. Ferguson’s unrest and violence erupted quickly in response to the killing of a young black man by a white police officer. Black people had long suffered at the hand of the town’s police department and municipal court. White people, especially those in positions of power, didn’t know or didn’t care how poorly black people had been treated. Either way, black residents had no good reason to trust their own government would protect them. They probably had lost faith in their government years earlier. The killing of Michael Brown was the proverbial last straw in a decade-long history of mistreatment. What happened in Charlottesville showed that people’s faith in their government could erode quickly when the challenges to it came faster and were better publicized than what happened in Ferguson. Charlottesville’s unrest and violence came only after a few months’ worth of calculated screw-ups and unforced errors made by the local leaders and organizations that wanted to keep or get rid of Confederate statues. All the time people in Charlottesville spent mobilizing, pushing, shoving, using incendiary rhetoric, making not-so-veiled threats, and petitioning the courts was not misspent, however. The organizations and institutions that would play a pivotal role in the Unite the Right rally used the time to explore what they might get away with and what was unlikely to work for them well before they amassed and fought on August 12, 2017. All the intelligence the various parties acquired about each other in the months leading up to the rally went to naught, however, when Charlottesville’s leaders made the one mistake researchers and people in Ferguson had learned would make unrest worse. Public authorities made no attempt to reclaim their lost legitimacy. They made no large but unthreatening show of force. They refused or took little help from law enforcement agencies that had no ties to the town and whose only stated interest was to keep people and property safe. In the case of Ferguson, the governor kept the National Guard on a hill some distance away from where people were rioting. They were protecting a nice shopping mall that never came close to being attacked. National Guardsmen also protected public buildings in the county seat many miles away.

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The governor had promised to use the Guardsmen to protect non-rioters and businesses in Ferguson. He did not make good on that promise. For their part, the rioters in Ferguson never had a chance to be impressed by a large and disciplined unit of well-armed people who had nothing against them. Instead, the governor left it to local police officers whose number was much closer to that of the protesters and rioters and were given the unenviable task of settling things down. It didn’t work nearly as well as officials hoped. This makes the restraint that protesters and counter-protesters showed in Charlottesville even more impressive. No one worked to keep them from attacking each other. Yet, the protesters and counter-protesters used less than murderous rage in their fights, and they made no attacks on public buildings and local businesses. Loud, insulting, and frightening as the tiki torchlight parade on the evening before the rally had been, people had shown they might be more ­restrained than their overheated rhetoric suggested. It was clear that unrest and violence weren’t the first things the alt-right protesters turned to in the run-up to the Unite the Right rally. Unrest only occurred after people spent months exhausting other avenues of petition and grievance redress before they brought as many people as they could inspire to join them. They were acting more like civil rights groups had during the 1960s: petitioning and protesting before they turned to violence. Upsetting and dramatic as the Unite the Right rally proved to be, the people who came to Charlottesville to have a fight ended up breaking little of the town beyond its decorum and pride. Given the availability of so many firearms, people on both sides continued to show how much more restrained they really wanted to be compared to how unrestrained and deadly they could have been. This and much more of what went on in Charlottesville was entirely consistent with what we know about how unrest and collective violence work in contemporary American society. People simply aren’t prepared or eager to fight to the death as much as they were in the past. Violence isn’t the first thing people use in their argument. It is the last thing they turn to. The outsiders who picked the fight in Charlottesville were surprised by how seriously they had been beaten. They went home with their tails tucked between their legs and waited quietly for the authorities to come knocking on their door. They did not resist being held accountable for the trouble they caused. Their friends and colleagues did not protest the sentences they received. Other elements of what happened in Charlottesville confirm our speculation about how unrest and collective violence have changed in the United States and Western democracies generally. Many organizations were involved in Charlottesville’s unrest and violence. Local people showed up too,

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but the unrest and violence that happened in Charlottesville was principally instigated and executed by well-organized groups. Another piece of our shared legacy in public fighting was notably missing from unrest in Charlottesville. Membership in the community and the right to talk about what should be done with the statues was not limited to Charlottesville’s full-time residents. Still, not even the most diehard racists and antisemites among the protesters imagined that black people and Jews were going to be pushed out of town. Their great reactionary crusade was not designed to rid Charlottesville of people they didn’t like. It was about keeping a couple of statues in public parks, being allowed to scream ugly and threatening words in public about people they didn’t like, and claiming they deserved more respect in public than they were getting. There were things that happened in Charlottesville that were markedly different from what had occurred in Ferguson and didn’t fit at all what we have come to expect in contemporary unrest and violence. Both sides in Charlottesville, as I’ve mentioned several times, used unrest and violence for reactionary purposes. More concerning, the obvious but restrained presence of alt-right groups like the Oath Keepers in Ferguson had turned into ­aggressive acts of intimidation by similar groups in Charlottesville. In neither case, however, did these organized and well-armed groups use the guns they brought to either event. In Ferguson, unrest and violence were used to accomplish more progressive ends. People used unrest and violence to protest a long and unbroken record of illegitimate force used by local authorities. In Charlottesville, ­people fought to reaffirm the more inclusive and accommodating civic culture they had been working on for decades. Their opponents were outsiders who thought Charlottesville should be less inclusive and accommodating. More than anything else, perhaps, the odd pairing of reactionary unrest in defense of progressive values in Charlottesville gives us a particularly good peek into how momentary acts of social and political disconsent reinforce the legitimacy of important institutions and cultural practices. Among these important institutions and practices, ironically, were things that had long kept black people in a less than enviable economic position in their own community. The same was true of the more uniformly progressive unrest that took place in Ferguson. The unrest and violence that happened in these communities had not been prompted by a desire to address, much less undo, all the bad effects that economic and political inequality have piled onto the backs of black ­Americans for a long time. What happened in Ferguson and Charlottesville was all about the public regard black people and other historically marginalized people had earned and were supposed to be shown when they were out in public with their fellow citizens.

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Even these social and cultural changes have proven harder to initiate and “institutionalize” than one might have imagined, however. The Almost Really Big Cultural Accomplishment of Unrest in Ferguson and Charlottesville

Historically, local people have viewed a community’s larger institutions and businesses as a public trust, just as they do their local government. Powerful and prominent people were supposed to protect the interests of residents who had much less power and social standing. Community leaders who failed to protect or show sufficient regard for their less well-off and less socially prominent fellow townsmen violated the trust everyday people had invested in them. Under such circumstances, their fellow townsmen felt free to criticize and even punish them.12 The erosion of people’s faith in Ferguson’s leaders took decades. It happened far faster and was more obvious in Charlottesville. But the unrest and violence in both communities was all about reminding their most powerful and socially prominent people and institutions that they weren’t paying ­attention and had broken faith with their fellow townsmen. In the immediate aftermath of popular unrest, black people in Ferguson would use their newly discovered public credibility to become a bit more equal to whites in terms of their political power. There would be talk but not much more than talk about finding ways to make them a bit more equal to whites in terms of their economic standing and clout. In Ferguson, local officials were held accountable for the disrespectful way they had treated black citizens. Business leaders were reminded that they had stood by and done nothing to stop it. The wake-up call local people gave Charlottesville’s leaders reminded their leaders they wouldn’t be allowed to stand by and let outsiders come in and undo cultural changes they had worked for many years to put in place. The most distinguishing feature of Charlottesville’s unrest was the ­legal back and forth everyone had to witness in the argument over the “free speech” rights of the alt-right and all-white outsiders who wanted to muscle their way into town and reassert their social prominence and understanding of history. These organizations worked through every legal and legislative channel available to them to make their case and still turned violent when they didn’t get the courts or city council to give them what they wanted. Charlottesville’s leaders worked hard to convince themselves and the protesters that legislative actions and lawsuits were the best way to hammer out a public resolution to the questions the protesters were raising. Courts listened to the concerns of protesters and Charlottesville officials and did what they could to accommodate the two sides. Ultimately, they sided more with the protesters than with Charlottesville’s officials.

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The city wouldn’t be able to deny permits to organizations that wanted to make hateful speech. Granted, allowing people to say whatever they had a mind to say could have bad social consequences. But officials maintained it would be all but impossible to regulate people’s speech. So, Nazis, KKK sympathizers, and other extremists could come to Charlottesville and say pretty much whatever they wanted. Not even the presence of guns would negate the rights of the people holding them to speak out. Protesters could only be stopped if their hateful speech turned into hateful and destructive acts. Otherwise, people who objected to what protesters were saying were stuck with hollering back at the protesters and “asserting a heckler’s veto.” Of course, this veto would have to be exercised in nonviolent ways.13 The problem was that alt-right and white nationalist organizations were intent on pushing up to and past the limits laid out in legislative and court decrees. In the months before the Unite the Right rally, these groups showed a willingness to shove themselves and their views into everyone’s face, whether the local officials liked it or not and no matter how scary and intimidating the groups were. People and organizations that wanted to protect the community from racists and antisemites were at a singular disadvantage, legally speaking. Speaking extra-legally, people in Charlottesville and their outside supporters had a rich and effective history of strategies they could draw upon to accomplish what local officials didn’t think they could do. They could defend themselves. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it could work. And, importantly, their leaders wouldn’t condemn them for acting in self-defense afterward. Authors who chronicled all the legal maneuvering that went on in the months before the rally recognized that by confining themselves to legal options, Charlottesville’s leaders had backed themselves into a corner and shown they were unable or unwilling to protect their people from unwanted outsiders.14 The lawyers among these authors recognized better than most, perhaps, how useless the legal decisions would be in stopping the ­protesters and counter-protesters from following through on all the threats and nasty words they had spent months throwing at each other outside of court. All the handwringing and posturing, promise breaking, and back-andforth poking that leaders of the organizations wanting to keep the statues did in the run-up to the Unite the Right rally was irrelevant to Charlottesville’s citizens. In their eyes, Charlottesville’s leaders could not or would not stop “bad guys” from coming into the middle of their community and making a very loud and frightening show of support for an outdated and patently racist way of life. It would be left to members of the public and organizations supporting them to fix what town leaders were unwilling or unable to make right.

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That same handwringing and posturing, promise breaking, and backand-forth poking, however, were crucial elements in the ritually prescribed dance that Charlottesville’s leaders and the outside protesters did together. It was all part of the escalatory process that ended on the streets of Charlottesville. Risa Goluboff, Dean of the Law School at the University of Virginia, has written about this process in an especially clear-eyed and effective way. She points out how white nationalist organizations sometimes asked for permits and sued local authorities so their members could march. And sometimes they just showed up unannounced as “flash mobs” might, just so they could surprise and better intimidate people. For all practical intents and purposes, alt-right organizations exploited and gamed the legal system. They played along with getting permission to protest but had already made up their minds that they wouldn’t be hamstrung by legal limits and would only accept one outcome in the fight they were waging with the whole of Charlottesville. The statues would remain where they were, or there would be trouble. Readers might see that an eerily similar chain of events and logic played out in the process of conflict escalation preceding the Capital insurrection in 2021. Goluboff’s sober conclusion about how the process of conflict came to escalate the way it did in Charlottesville should be kept in mind when I discuss the Capitol insurrection. She observed, that “(w)hat the law allows and what a community expects from its members are often different things.” The problem was that Charlottesville’s leaders conflated the two.15 They thought protesters would play by the rules and everybody else was good with that too. They were wrong. The law was supposed to protect everyone’s interests, and everyone was supposed to play by the rules clearly laid out in council mandates and court rulings. Town leaders hoped the protesters and counter-protesters would ­accept the law as their guide for how to act, without prejudging the outcome. They didn’t. Local authorities hoped they had come up with a legal workaround that would enable both sides to avoid having a violent confrontation. That didn’t happen either. And the reason the workaround didn’t work was the very one Goluboff suggested. The law and popular sentiment in this case and on ­January 6, 2021, did not overlap. The reason why they didn’t overlap in Charlottesville had nothing really to do with the Confederate statues. What to do with the statues was the pretext for a larger fight white nationalist and alt-right organizations wanted to pick with Charlottesville’s leaders about the community’s civic culture.16 The community had become too inclusive and accommodating to people and points of view that members of the alt-right groups found unacceptable.

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This was a fight the members of alt-right organizations and their supporters were willing to push up to and beyond the point of legal reasoning because from their perspective they had nothing left to lose. Their view of Charlottesville’s glorious and comforting past could not be reconciled with what the future looked like to them. Their campaign to keep the statues and to reaffirm a way of life in Charlottesville that had no realistic chance of being rekindled was as picture perfect an example of reactionary unrest as one was likely to see in this century. Until, that is, we saw an even bigger one in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Panelists on a panel at the University of Viriginia in 2022 made the same point.17 One participant observed that authorities “were not legally equipped to deal with an armed protest.” It was true both before and after people showed up armed in 2017. It was “mind-boggling” that the same thing happened on January 6, likening the Capitol insurrection to the “Groundhog Day of white supremacist activity.” We will see in the chapter on the Capitol insurrection that it wasn’t at all mind boggling. Panelists believed the courts and officials would be better prepared today to impose limits on free speech, and “where to draw the line between protest and violence.” I think they were overly optimistic. Events on January 6, 2021, would show that these limits would be easier to adjudicate after unrest than they would be to impose and enforce before unrest happened. As in Charlottesville, public leaders would try to restore important pieces of our civic rituals by putting rule breakers on trial and convicted criminals in jail. They would try to reform their way of a future uprising and another coup d’état by coming up with better rules and new limits to how upset people could beseech their representatives with their protests. None of this is to say that the principled arguments made in the courts by Charlottesville’s leaders and lawyers for white nationalist organizations were inconsequential or poorly reasoned. The alt-right people maintained that public settings were marketplaces where ideas should be openly exchanged. They thought this was especially true for unpopular ideas like theirs. Charlottesville’s leaders, arguing on behalf of their constituents, had a different and older idea about what passes for acceptable public speech. Namely, there are ideas that ought not be peddled in public. Indeed, some ideas are downright dangerous, and people should not be compelled to listen to them. There are cultural and moral limits beyond which speech and speechmakers should not go and need not be tolerated.18 The people of Charlottesville believed they had a right to protect themselves from organizations that clearly wanted to challenge their values and the town’s civic culture and appeared willing to use violence to do it. Local people and their outside supporters would resist the racists and their fellow travelers as best they could. And they were willing to use violence to do it.

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The principle at risk was worth fighting about. Whether one can do or say in public whatever one wants is an important question. As I have argued here and elsewhere, it is one of the three questions people must address when a new or unpopular notion is brought out in public, or a group tries to muscle its way into our public deliberations. Research on unrest in US communities and Western societies suggests that people are more likely to use unrest and violence when community leaders do not or cannot provide an effective answer to such challenges. It is not uncommon for members of “the public” or “the people” to take strong exception to the unclear and waffling answers their leaders give on such occasions. “The People” will hold raucous public meetings and demonstrations, protest and petition, boycott, and sometimes riot to make their objections as painfully clear as they can make them. It was just as clear to the outsiders trying to make their point in Charlottesville that they would have to take equally dramatic steps to make their case for the same reason. Legislators and courts would not give them an answer they would be prepared for or willing to live with. Which is why there was unrest and violence in Ferguson and Charlottesville. People in those communities used unrest and violence to bridge the gap between what the law allowed or prohibited and what popular sentiment demanded be done to make something bad go away or at least make it hide in a corner where good people wouldn’t have to look at it. Charlottesville’s leaders could not or would not answer strongly enough the challenge made to their town’s civic customs by the likes of the KKK, Nazis, and alt-right white nationalists. Local people and their allies took it upon themselves to push against groups whose members espoused ideas they could not abide. It is clear from published work on events surrounding the Unite the Right rally that local people acted as the town’s better conscience and defender of the higher moral ground they claimed belonged to them. Town leaders only made the situation worse by failing to protect their residents from the ­unwanted intrusion of objectionable outsiders and offensive ideas. In Charlottesville, all sides to the controversy had ample time and space to make and refine their petitions and pitches before a restive public. Members of that same public couldn’t figure out why the “bad guys” couldn’t be kept out of Charlottesville. A historically and culturally sound pushback to peoples’ unease is that the kind of public dialogue they wanted to avoid was bound to happen in a society whose political system is open to many different groups and points of view. Contemporary American society is awash with people and organizations with markedly different points of view. Their “Us Too” movements appeal to small but noisy and modestly well-organized constituents. Their ethnocentric posturing is as predictable as it is unavoidable. It wouldn’t happen in a more

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closed social and political system. In effect, the more inclusive and accommodating civic virtues the people of Charlottesville had come to practice were an open invitation to groups that felt displaced to come to town and try to reclaim part of the world they thought had been lost or stripped from them. The fact that “good people on both sides” had many chances to try out their value positions and strategies in public before they came to blows shows they were working from the same cultural gameplan on how to stage and choreograph a tough public conflict. It didn’t mean they could come to an agreement and wouldn’t fight. But it made it easier for both sides to act in more restrained ways when their fight finally happened. It also explains why people several years after the Unite the Right rally returned to the courts for a final resolution to the statues’ fate. Importantly, the radical difference of opinion and mutual contempt the two sides had for each other at the time of the rally did not preclude them from sharing similar views of who the good guys and bad guys were. Nor did it stop them from accepting that the good guys and bad guys were going to be treated differently after the rally was over. This point bears directly on my earlier observation about who used violence being more important than the severity of the violence they used when it came to holding people accountable for what they said and did in public. Unrest and violence done by the “good guys” was all but ignored and forgiven.19 Unrest and violence committed by “bad guys” was neither ignored nor forgiven. Corey Long, the antiracist “good guy” and self-declared Charlottesville patriot, spent less than a month in jail for shooting his makeshift flamethrower at people. Richard Preston, the “bad guy” outsider and KKK leader who said he really didn’t want to hurt anyone, was incarcerated for four years for shooting a single bullet into the ground. It is hard to make sense of such disparate sentences until you look at Long and Preston’s behavior through the eyes of Charlottesville’s people. For them, what Richard Preston and other protesters committed were crimes. Some leaders of the Unite the Right rally were subsequently tried and found guilty of fomenting violence and intimidating local people with racist hate speech. They were fined millions of dollars, most of which will probably never be collected by the plaintiffs but will help to bankrupt the defendants.20 What Corey Long and all the anti-racist fighters who beat up protesters committed were “social crimes,” which historically, as I point out below, were treated as a far more forgivable offense than “real crimes.” In the case of Charlottesville, most of the anti-racists were not hauled before a court and admonished, much less punished, for the violence they committed. Indeed, they were commended for the actions they took and the beatings they meted out to people who came to Charlottesville to scare everybody with their racist and antisemitic ideas. What the Nazis and their fellow white nationalists committed were “real crimes.”

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At the risk of alienating more conservative readers, the “social crime” idea belongs to Karl Marx. He didn’t invent situations in which local people were more forgiving of their own violence than they were when outsiders made the same kind of trouble. He only gave a name to how people treated community insiders better than they did outsiders when they acted in similar or even identical ways. For Marx, “social crimes” were ‘acts proscribed by law’ such as looting, arson, and beating people that were ‘thought neither immoral nor warranting punishment by considerable sectors of the community.’ The idea was that when people took trees or killed game from a well-to-do person’s property it was technically illegal. But it had also and for a long time been a “customary entitlement” granted to community members who were not well off or powerful. Implicit in their offense was an element of social protest.21 The “real” crime was committed by the landowner who took away the peasant’s “customary entitlement.” In our case, this meant that good people could do bad things and get away with it because they acted on behalf of the community, supporting local customs and the values that most people held. People who violated local community standards and values deserved to be punished. Whether this was the landowner who disallowed poaching or the businessman who charged too much for his grain, the result was the same. They broke faith with their fellow townsmen and deserved to be mistreated, not killed but roughed up. Anti-racists were not called out for abusing and shaming KKK members and other alt-right sympathizers who appeared in downtown before the rally, as they were after white nationalist groups protested in Charlottesville in May of 2017.22 The white nationalist groups were treated even worse when they showed up in August. People belonging to organizations on both sides of the fight about the statues already knew how they were viewed by ­Charlottesville’s residents and that one side was going to be treated better than the other when the pushing and shoving became less legal and more public. Again, in this case, anti-racist violence would be deemed a “social crime.” What the avowed racists and their allies did would be viewed as a “real crime.” One would be punished. The other wouldn’t. Karl Marx was totally onboard with people who committed “social crimes.” They had been denied longstanding entitlements. They were defending their traditional understanding of how their community was supposed to work. It was property owners and businesspeople who had broken the covenant with their fellow townsmen. They could be taken to task for breaking faith with their fellow townsmen. Everyone knew that is why more prosperous, powerful, and prominent members of the community were being mistreated. Marx took his view of history and sympathies to the United States when he was commissioned to write about what was going on in the run-up to our

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Civil War. Had Marx been even a tiny bit more reflective or shown a smidgen of talent for irony in his thinking, however, he would have attached a big asterisk to what he wrote about the American Civil War and repugnant slave owners. He would have seen that attacks by slave holders and their white neighbors against anti-slavery agitators and restless slaves fit his definition of a “social crime.” White people were protecting their community from ideas and practices that would have undermined the customs and values they held dear. Slaves, who were cultural outsiders and had no right to poach from their masters or, as property themselves, to escape their bondage, were the ones who committed “real crimes.” Also passing for “social crimes” in the late-19th century and throughout much of the 20th century would be violence directed by long-time residents against foreign immigrants and recently freed black persons who were newcomers to American towns and cities. Those outsiders needed to be kept in their rightful and lawful place, which was apart or as far away as possible from long-time and much whiter residents. This kind of reactionary violence, we will remember, was driven by local people’s wish to draw a very thick and dark line around their answer to the question of who could be treated as a legitimate member of the community and, therefore, someone who had to be treated with respect in public. Fullfledged members of a community might commit “social crimes” against the outsiders trying to push their way into the lives of people who had been there a lot longer and were better regarded. The “offenses” committed by immigrants and freed black people who didn’t fit in or know how to act properly were “real crimes.” The upside-down logic used to punish immigrants and freed black people for “real crimes” that longer-term and better accepted residents could get away with wasn’t lost on the immigrants and freed black people. It took some time and a lot of hard work by immigrants and former slaves to make the transition into more acceptable human beings who would be judged no differently for their misbehavior than any other citizen. Many black people would argue they still haven’t made a successful transition to being full-fledged citizens. One sign that they are coming closer is that when black people or other minorities are part of unrest that turns violent these days, they aren’t attacked or murdered as readily as they once were. Some of our forebearers certainly would have participated. But we are more civilized today. Our fights are more restrained than they were in the past. To be sure, Americans are still committed to making a show of their disdain for unlikable people who aren’t shy about sharing distasteful ideas they usually keep to themselves. We just don’t think it’s necessary or a good idea anymore to maim or kill these people.

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Though it fit perfectly with the crimes and “social crimes” each committed, the marked difference in Richard Preston and Corey Long’s jail sentences did not match up well with the less-than-murderous intent they displayed in their actions. Richard Preston’s gun and Corey Long’s miniature flamethrower were little more than props they used to show how big, tough, and threatening they could be. The restraint they showed in how they used their weapons and the reason why other persons did not use the deadlier weapons they carried on August 12, belied the coarse and bellicose words they threw at each other. This was the most important part of the story about the rally that wasn’t published in news accounts or offered as testimony in court. Had I been asked to provide expert testimony at their trials, I would have argued that Preston and Long and all their fellow protesters and counter-protesters were acting more like Irish Elk than out-of-control and rage-filled rioters.23 Irish elk? Yes, Irish elk. The long-extinct Irish Elk apparently were extraordinarily large animals. The males had enormous antlers, much bigger than any you could see today. Contrary to much 19th-century theorizing on why their antlers were so large, the elk may have flashed them to attract a girlfriend, but they didn’t use them as weapons. The big antlers, according to the late-naturalist Stephen Jay Gould, were designed to discourage other elk from picking a fight they might lose. As Gould put it almost a half-century ago, the antlers served “to prevent actual battle (with consequent injuries and loss of life) by establishing hierarchies of dominance that males can easily recognize and obey.” That’s a fancy way of saying the elk showed their antlers to scare off potential rivals and avoid harming each other. Larger elk intimidated smaller elk so the bigger animal wouldn’t have to beat the smaller one to death or maybe be injured himself. Scientists like Gould came to believe that the display made the less well-endowed elk give up without a fight. We could fit the same explanation to other moments people puff themselves up and make an intimidating show of their strength. What happens in boys’ locker rooms and Presidential campaigns come immediately to mind. The secret to why the stand-ins for the Irish Elk who showed up in Charlottesville didn’t use the guns most everyone knew or supposed were being carried, I’m thinking, isn’t to be found in the many small fights they got into on August 12.24 It is to be found in the much larger and deadlier fight they managed to avoid having at the Unite the Right rally. The same principle is at work when police show up at a demonstration carrying weapons they really don’t want to use or don’t dare use, knowing it would make an even bigger mess than the one they were already facing. They know going in what Richard Preston only figured out when he

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confronted Corey Long and shared with the rest of us at his sentencing. He really hadn’t wanted to hurt anybody. That is just one of several important lessons we can draw from what didn’t happen in Charlottesville. Why What Didn’t Happen in Charlottesville Mattered More Than What Happened

I have insisted that one of the most important things people miss in popular unrest and mass violence is what doesn’t happen. In the case of Charlottesville, what did and didn’t happen adds several layers of meaning to our understanding of social unrest that were not immediately apparent in Ferguson. For instance, we can make the case that Ferguson’s unrest had elements of a “social crime.” The prerogatives associated with being a full-fledged citizen were denied to many of the town’s black residents. They had no one to whom they could appeal and petition for relief. It is hard to imagine the mayor and town manager didn’t know what was going on inside their own police department or that Ferguson’s solitary black councilman at the time had heard nothing about it from any black citizens. These officials were, at the very least, complicit in the mistreatment of the town’s more vulnerable black residents. The violence committed in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed – the businesses that were ruined, the assaults on police officers, and disruption to the town’s “normal order” – was purposeful and not misdirected. It also wasn’t punished. This was a good clue that people in the community believed violence under the circumstances was understandable and, thus, forgivable. Rioters had committed “social crimes” not real crimes. Through their misdeeds and inaction, Ferguson’s public officials and private business leaders had violated the public’s trust. They had shown an inability and unwillingness to act as good stewards of Ferguson. Officials could not call out protesters and rioters for violating laws and norms of right conduct that they had so willfully ignored and abused. They deserved the beating they got, and in an earlier time in history perhaps might have been treated to an even worse one. By comparison, the indecisiveness and handwringing officials did in Charlottesville was evidence of a failure of will. It reflected more nonfeasance on the part of the town’s leaders, including those running the University of Virginia, than it did misfeasance or malfeasance on their part. Attempts to legally finesse a way out of a public showdown between members of white nationalist and anti-racist organizations failed to convince either side that the town’s leaders could find an amicable solution to their dispute. Charlottesville’s protesters and counter-protesters appeared to have a much clearer view of lines they would cross or did not want breached.

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Among the more notable historical lines protesters didn’t cross in Charlottesville was breaking into and damaging local businesses. Local officials, including police officers, also were not assaulted. Indeed, apart from the damage protesters and counter-protesters did to each other, the only things they broke were people’s confidence in Charlottesville’s leaders and the town’s civic routines. The violence in Charlottesville may not have been what pushed public ­officials to remove the Confederate statues. But it certainly made it easier for officials to do what most local people were willing or eager to see happen. The most visible reminders of the community’s racist past have been moved from public view. They have not yet been erased from the public’s memory, however. People were still arguing in 2023 about whether the statues should be melted down or put on display someplace away from Charlottesville. Public life in Charlottesville hit a life affirming speedbump, not a wall. For all the trouble it caused, the display of social and political disconsent that was the Unite the Right rally helped people accomplish three vitally ­important pieces of cultural work. First, as I already observed, the rally affirmed the more inclusive customs Charlottesville residents had come to practice in their public speech and ­actions. The big cultural stress test people went through with the Unite the Right rally presented itself as a ritual of renewal. The rally did not turn into a ritual of restoration which would have made it easier for older racist customs to make a reappearance. All the restoring that was done in the trials and new laws that were made reinforced the town’s more racially and religiously ­accommodating civic virtues and customs. What happened in Charlottesville also showed that both sides involved in a heated and violent disagreement could use organizations for more reactionary purposes. Had the protesters carried the day, older ways of speaking and acting in public on racial matters in Charlottesville would have been restored or at least affirmed. But the counter-protesters won, and with their victory they renewed people’s commitment to a newer, more inclusive set of civic virtues. Either way, local people had defended the local community’s prerogative to choose the kind of community and moral order they preferred. That’s what made their unrest and violence reactionary. What gave their reactionary victory a distinctively progressive twist was that unrest didn’t affirm old racist ideas and customs. It affirmed more recent and accommodating civic virtues and practices. Older ideas and practices about how to engage and treat minority people were not reaffirmed. Second, the trial of protest leaders showed that Charlottesville’s leaders had figured out how to make the protesters accountable for their hateful speech and intimidating public violence, if only after the fact. No one challenged the presumptive right of the protesting organizations to make a claim about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of removing the statues.

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The legal challenge local authorities made, and the counter-protesters accomplished, was to constrain and admonish white supremacists for their speech and actions in a way they had not been previously experienced or perhaps even expected. At least as important, and to my thinking even more important, however, was the tacit acknowledgment by all the protesting groups that they had made a big mistake. Their acknowledgment did not diminish the rightness of their cause in their eyes, perhaps. But it certainly was reflected in how they continued pushing it immediately after the Unite the Right rally. They tried but did not successfully countersue Charlottesville’s leaders for their inept management of the rally. They did not bother to sue the organizations whose members had beaten up their people. Had they thought they hadn’t crossed a line everyone else in town was committed to upholding, they would have been smart to sue the counter-protesting groups and might well have won. But they knew very well who the good guys and bad guys were in the eyes of the community, and they weren’t the good guys. Other people who do not want the statues melted down eventually took their case back to the courts instead of onto the streets of Charlottesville. Six years after the rally, four years after the state gave local municipalities the right to move their Confederate statues, and two years after the injunction stopping Charlottesville from doing so was finally lifted, town leaders gave one of the statues to the local African American Heritage Center. The Center’s leaders plan to melt it down and recast the metal into new pieces of art that can be displayed publicly. A Maryland foundation filed a motion to stop that from happening. As late as the summer of 2023, the case was still pending.25 The decision to send the argument about the statues back to the courts may or may not work out as the different organizations hope. But it is telling that the resolution has been taken off the streets and returned to an institution whose legally prescribed rituals recommit both sides to a non-violent process for resolving their disagreement. It is another sign that the organizations wanting to maintain the statues in a public setting are publicly acknowledging they went too far back in 2017. As acts of contrition go, this may not seem like much of an apology. But a public act of contrition for one’s misdeeds doesn’t have to be commemorated with a lot of fanfare. A quiet acknowledgment graciously accepted lets the restorative or renewing powers of public rituals do their important cultural work. Third, the unrest in Charlottesville and Ferguson let people show the kind of community they had in mind to make but had not made clear even to themselves. It also had a marked effect on the willingness of local people to step into public life. People in both Ferguson and Charlottesville have become more engaged in public life and civic affairs than they were before unrest and violence

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happened. To be sure, what happened in both communities was a vivid reminder to them and the rest of us that Americans still have a lot of unfinished racial business to work through. Reflected in Ferguson and Charlottesville’s unrest and violence were echoes of the consciousness of hierarchy built into the American way of life that Tocqueville first described in the early19th century. Back then, Tocqueville saw no immediate or easy way to shake off and replace the racialized part of that hierarchy with something less obnoxious or retarding. Here, in the first decades of the 21st century, Americans were still wrestling with the ghosts and remnants of our racist past two hundred years after Tocqueville’s visit. That fact alone may be mind-numbing. But in Ferguson and Charlottesville, it said more about people’s commitment to working things out together than it did about how long it is taking to grind out a more agreeable arrangement between the people who thought their position was unassailable and the people who found continuing public disrespect and degradation unacceptable. The grim legacy of these public fights played out differently in Ferguson and Charlottesville. Ultimately, however, the unrest in both places tried to answer the same questions. What kind of people are we and what is to become of our community? The fights weren’t about how many jobs different people have, how good their housing is, whether they have access to the same healthcare and educational opportunities, or how soon, if ever, the differences in their life chances might be narrowed. Such matters were raised or revisited in Ferguson and Charlottesville only after they had experienced unrest.26 The fights themselves were over the content and quality of people’s civic lives and how different groups should be talked about and treated in public. The unrest in Ferguson, as I mentioned earlier, was clearly progressive in nature. It spoke to a more hopeful and inclusive vision of public life in the town could be, and by extension, the kind of people Americans might become. People were looking to reform how public life currently was. The unrest in Charlottesville was more reactionary and protective of local customs and values. But as I pointed out, people were not trying to restore older and patently racist customs. Ironically, they used reactionary unrest to renew their commitment to more progressive ways of talking about and treating blacks and other people who had once been considered outsiders. What happened in Charlottesville spoke to a tradition of communities defending their civic culture against outsiders wanting to impose their ideas and practices on a resistant local population. In Europe several hundred years ago, the intrusive parties often were representatives of a national government whose leaders wanted to drag outlying communities into their orbit. A parallel situation in the United States was seen in the run-up and aftermath of the Civil

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War when our federal government pushed proposals to free slaves and later to protect freedmen from repressive Southern legislatures after the war was over. In both Ferguson and Charlottesville, however, the kind of civic culture being striven for or defended was more progressive in character than reactionary. The irony, as I just noted, was that in Charlottesville local people and their supporters used their version of reactionary unrest to challenge and defend a more progressive and inclusive vision Charlottesville as a non-racist and semitic-friendly community. Again, in Charlottesville, as it had been in Ferguson, unrest brought to light problems in the way their town had been governed and policed. How to improve housing and economic development opportunities for black people also came up as matters needing the community’s attention. Similar, too, were the halfhearted or woefully underfunded attempts by local officials and institutional leaders in both communities to deal with these kinds of longstanding economic inequities.27 Cited positively by people in both places was the progress their fellow residents made to become socially engaged and politically active than they had been before unrest happened. Attendance and participation in council meetings was substantially greater in Charlottesville afterwards, and people were more willing to speak up about problems they saw.28 People in Ferguson had observed much the same and reported it to me. Unrest and violence reenergized the civic lives of people in Ferguson and Charlottesville. How many people will remain engaged in the public life of the two towns and for how long are questions local people will have to answer for themselves. How much, if any, difference their engagement will make in reducing differences in the life chances of their white and black residents is even less clear. Moments of unrest and collective violence make it possible, perhaps even necessary, to revisit such questions. Riots, as we will see in the next-to-last chapter, are occasions that compel people to publicly confess their sins and make something akin to an act of contrition for having hurt other people and by extension damaged their community’s soul. The absence of a sustained discussion about the “structural” inequities that keep whites better off and black people in a less-than-enviable economic situation suggests that however willing people may be to pick at the edges of that scab, they are not willing to rip it off and do much that would permanently close the wound. Economic inequality, I and others maintain, is more “durable” than either political or social inequality. Economic inequality is also more accepted by people than they let on. People in Ferguson or Charlottesville are still talking about taking less-than-dramatic steps to reduce its effects but haven’t come very far in doing anything much about economic inequality. People have shown much more interest in learning how to disagree in public without becoming violently disagreeable with each other. To that end,

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we saw in Ferguson a willingness and ability to chip away at less durable forms of political and social-cultural inequality. In Charlottesville, white people reaffirmed their commitment to treating historically marginalized people respectfully, if not yet as their economic equals. People used unrest and violence to upend their community for a moment. They did so in ways that were more restrained than they might have been. In acting less violently than they might have, people demonstrated a commitment to acting better and fighting nicer in public than they had in the past. This is how Americans make the odd marriage of disorder to institutional stability work. Lessons in the Art and Science of Fighting Nicer

There is an art and science to learning how to wage more agreeable and civicminded fights in public. Reports and books about the unrest in C ­ harlottesville made painfully clear how people plotted and tripped their way into acting more civilized despite themselves and doubled down on their commitment to democratic ideals more than their hateful public words hinted was possible.29 First, the groups that opposed each other on the streets – white supremacist and the anti-white supremacist counter protesters – appeared to have their ­respective acts together much more than the town’s government and institutional leaders did. But splits and disagreements at least among white ­supremacist organizations became apparent soon after the rally and remained unclosed several years afterward.30 Their early unity was more apparent than real and organized around fighting somebody else rather than making nice with each other. Their collaboration was more transactional than permanent. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, their collaboration was not deeply principled. Charlottesville’s government and leaders fared better. They are still working together. But there have been a lot of turnovers in people hired or elected to administer the city. Public hearings are dominated by activists in no mood to compromise over much of anything.31 The same kind of turnovers in administrators and elected officials happened in Ferguson’s government. Black people have become more politically active but not yet shown they can administer their town any better than white people did. It’s not a good sign when a black town manager admonishes a now predominantly black city council to “stay in their lane” and stop looking for favors.32 Second, both sides in Charlottesville had their darker wishes fulfilled but were surprised when the fighting turned more violent than they were prepared to handle. They restrained themselves more than they let on. They were genuinely put out when the town’s public and private leaders didn’t step in and keep their showdown peaceful. They hadn’t expected to be stuck in a series of street fights, most of which the white supremacists lost.

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Bad as the fighting between them was, the well-armed groups on both sides certainly could have made matters much worse quickly, if they had wanted to do that. The fact that unrest in Charlottesville wasn’t a great deal worse had more to do with the restraint shown by the protesters and counterprotesters than it did with competence on the part of the town’s leaders or timely intervention of the police department. Only one of the guns that “the good people on both sides” brought to their fight was fired. People backed down and couldn’t leave fast enough after one person was killed, and the police finally said they should go home. Again, the town’s biggest institutions and most responsible leaders had much less to do with how this all went down than the protesters and counter-protesters did. Left to their own devices, certain of their own rectitude and contempt for the other side, and unrestrained by local authorities, more people could have been injured and killed. Local businesses could have been broken into, their interiors ransacked, and goods stolen and destroyed. The same could have happened to government buildings, churches, synagogues, and schools. Regular order in the community might have been more severely jeopardized. Public life in Charlottesville could have been left turned upside down for a great deal longer than it was. None of these much worse things happened in Charlottesville because the protesters and counter-protesters were more constrained by norms related to how they should fight in public than they probably realized or would have admitted to being. This is even more true of the protesters who used publicly available means to protest and petition officials and the courts as a cover for their less democratically spirited intensions. They could only go so far before their anti-democratic values run headlong into people and organizations with more solidly grounded and better-practiced democratic pretensions. The white nationalists also were better practiced or at least reconciled to living with different kinds of people than they could publicly acknowledge. All this along with their less-than-convincing commitment to mass violence, property destruction, and hurting people they were supposed to hate showed a degree of tentativeness that, again, belied the rhetorical brick-a-brat and bombshells they had been throwing at each other for months. There was no mystery as to how the events surrounding the Unite the Right rally unfolded. The surprise expressed by all the parties when the confrontations on August 12, 2017, played out as they did, however, was as heartfelt as it was headshaking. The unrest wasn’t headshaking for the people in Charlottesville on that day, of course. They found themselves in the middle of a chaotic scene. But it should be for us by now, given even the little we know about the more restrained way people in Western societies have come to argue and fight in public. There was a process and demonstrable logic to the way the disagreement between people who wanted to be rid of the Confederate statues and people

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who wanted to keep them unfolded in the months leading up to their big confrontation. By August 12, the protesting and counter-protesting organizations, state and local officials, and leaders at the University of Virginia were well familiar with each other’s positions, stratagems, and value propositions. They had all the information they needed to know about each other, what everyone could do, and how they might discourage people from acting out. But what happened on August 11 and 12, was still a surprise. It almost always is for people swept up in events, they imagine are driven more by their obvious upsettedness and anger than by contentious routines that have been practiced for a long time and adapted to fit in this time. It is the same well-known and choreographed practices that help people move past their disagreement far faster and less contentiously than they might have anticipated. This, too, was a surprise, and a more pleasant surprise than the one they gave each other on August 11 and 12, 2017. People returned to institutionalized methods of conflict resolution they had openly criticized and mocked only a short time earlier. Lessons for Unrest in Black Lives Matter Protests and the Capitol Insurrection

In the next chapter, we will see that a similar marriage of unrest in defense of progressive civic rituals was played out in Black Lives Matter protests. United States history is replete with examples of how reactionary unrest of a decidedly uncivil character restored and reinforced less congenial and highly exclusive civic customs for minority people generally and black Americans in particular. In Black Lives Matter protests in smaller towns, we witnessed the wholesale use of progressive unrest to renew people’s commitment to a more accommodating racial code and inclusive set of public customs. In bigger cities, peaceful protest and violence spoke to the need to reform local law enforcement customs. Before the Capitol insurrection, the unrest in Charlottesville and all the communities that had Black Lives Matter protests stood as the best validation of Hugh Davis Graham’s observation about the connection between unrest and institutional stability in United States history. Stability was ­accomplished differently in Ferguson and Charlottesville. The unrest in Ferguson was aimed at reforming old and demeaning ways of speaking about black people and treating them in public. Residents and activists took to the streets with the idea of wiping them clean of offensive racial practices. They wanted to make life in Ferguson better for black people. Those who had opposed such changes – local police and other ­public ­officials prominent among them – were targets of the protests and violence. What government officials and agencies did in response to the unrest ­reduced the level of public abuse black people would have to endure. But these

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changes fell well short of what was needed to make black people more effective stewards of their own community. That would take more time and a lot of work by the very people who would benefit most from any reform made with them in mind. Before the unrest, commercial leaders had paid little attention to the “bad side” of Ferguson. They paid much more attention to building and supporting businesses on the “good side” of Ferguson. This included using tax credits to redevelop businesses on the “good side” of Ferguson that public officials showed no inclination to use in rebuilding businesses that were lost to rioting on the “bad side” of town. Business leaders and financial lending institutions from across the metropolitan area were energized by the unrest. Much more of this effort, however, was still focused on rebuilding parts of the “good side” of Ferguson that had been damaged. Business leaders and residents on the “bad side” of Ferguson which experienced much more damage are still waiting for help to rebuild their commercial blocks in a way that is economically sustainable. The three non-profit organizations that opened new facilities on this side of Ferguson, including a Boys and Girls Club and an Urban League sponsored center for entrepreneurship are not going to bring many workers and shoppers to this part of Ferguson. The situation in Charlottesville was different. Before the unrest in Charlottesville, there was little talk of changes and repairs that could be made to the town so that black people could live better lives. More attention today is being paid to this idea. Plans are moving forward to redevelop the part of town that had been the historic center of life for its black residents. Important as this work may yet turn out to be, the lives of Charlottesville’s black residents were not the principal focus of the controversy that led to unrest and rioting. What to do with the statues of Confederate Civil War heroes and the naming rights for the parks on which they had been placed almost a century ago were the flashpoints of people’s anger and anguish. The public fight in Charlottesville, as I noted earlier, spoke to the appeal and power of continuity in people’s public lives. It was not intended to make big changes or adjustments in the way people were already talking and treating each other in public. It was about the story local people wanted to keep talking about, the historic narrative they wanted to be reflected in the town’s civic culture. A crucial part of the story of unrest in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and all the communities that had Black Lives Matter protests is that much if not most of the initiative for these local acts came from local people. It was not elite-driven or even supported by important local institutions. These were homegrown initiatives led by “regular” people. Outside organizations may have used their muscle and people to support these local efforts when they were fighting local police. But these groups did not hang around afterward to see that whatever had been broken was fixed. That was left to local people.

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The unrest in Charlottesville offers clues to how Americans with very different views on how to organize a community’s civic routines had to work hard to keep each other in mind as they tried to keep the community intact. The two sides in Charlottesville’s public fight used unrest to defend local peoples’ prerogatives. The fight could have restored old civic customs or renewed and affirmed new ways of treating historically marginalized groups in public. These competing views and approaches to making a community could not be reconciled easily or well. One side had to win. The other side had to lose. The local people on the winning side had no difficulty condemning outsiders for the trouble they brought to Charlottesville. Much less thought was given to criticizing or punishing local people who opposed the presence and ideas of troublemakers from outside the community. The ritualized disagreement between the two sides in Ferguson was much easier to settle. Absolutely no one on the side trying to rein in local people and other protesters claimed that the old way of conducting public business in Ferguson had been justified or fair. Everyone had more than a notion that local customs had to change. Try as they might, officials found it difficult to condemn local people for their violent acts. The use of different kinds of social and political disconsent – ritualized unrest and violence designed to reform, renew, or restore customary ways people behave in public – made what happened in Ferguson and ­Charlottesville difficult to compare. The conclusion that Americans are still unclear about the kind of people they aspire to become is entirely consistent with their ongoing use and celebration of both progressive and reactionary unrest. At the same time, from a historical perspective, the relatively restrained way different sides fought in public was a vitally important clue to how they’d eventually work things out. It showed that however wildly different Americans’ views about the right and wrong way to talk about and treat each other in public might be, we would fight over such matters in less deadly and destructive ways than we had in the past. Whatever the answer turned out to be, the world as Americans had come to know it wouldn’t come to an end. As conclusions go, this one might not be satisfying or definitive. But it was quite big enough to keep our public dialogue going without having to beat up the other guys as often and severely as we did in the past. Public life in Charlottesville is not as nasty as it was around the time of the rally; but people are still pretty upset about the way local leaders are running the government. Town officials aren’t making a public show of ignoring or tripping over each other like they were in 2017 or pretending they know what they are doing when they really didn’t. But they have also found it difficult to put together comprehensive plans to improve the life chances of black residents much less to execute them.

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Charlottesville’s biggest employer and institutional leader, the University of Virginia, appears no more engaged in the public life of the town than it did when white supremacists were causing a ruckus. Its policy of neutrality in the debate about the statues reinforced the perception that it had no real stake in its outcome or power to influence it. Discretion, in this case, wasn’t valorized as it was for Fred Pestello, the President of Saint Louis University, when he let protesters camp out right in the middle of campus. Pestello engaged protesters. He didn’t ignore them in the hope they would just disappear. From a strictly historical perspective, the University of Virginia’s unwillingness to take a strong stand on what to do with the statues undercut whatever legitimacy it should have had as a guardian and leader in its own community. It was an open invitation for less powerful and prestigious groups to step into the role it should have been playing in an important public debate. That debate and the fight it provoked was over questions I have said people must answer if they are to keep their community whole and effective. Who could be considered a full-fledged member of Charlottesville? How accountable would people be for what they said and did in public? University of Virginia officials took a pass on answering these important questions. The fact that they wrapped their non-answer around the word “principled” didn’t make it any more appealing. Residents do not appear to miss the statues, which are probably gone for good. The parks where the statues stood have been given new and inoffensive names. All the non-residents who had strong opinions about the statues and parks went home. Some are in jail. But it was less powerful people – the University’s own students – who stick around a while and then move on to other places after graduating who made the newest and most credible claims for membership in the community. This is not what social historians would have expected. Young people are often destructive wild cards in moments of social unrest. Adults are unable to control them. The young people appear unwilling to control themselves. There certainly were signs that young people were less restrained than adults were during the unrest in Ferguson. Black adults were not so outraged that they let young people run wild. They called out young people for the violence they were committing. They also put themselves between the younger and more aggressive protesters and police who were lined up in the streets of Ferguson. Younger counter-protesters in Charlottesville, most of them students, ­defied the stereotype of young out-of-control rioters. As university students, they had an institutional affiliation that mattered to them and a real stake in the community. Instead of challenging the university’s policy of non-­engagement with alt-right agitators, the students rose to defend their school and the community in which it is located. And they did so in the face of armed outsiders who were trying to intimidate everyone affiliated with Charlottesville.

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Students have a history of doing battle with local people or their institution’s caretakers over issues that seem arcane to outsiders and obnoxious to local people. Dueling and drinking in public, fraternity and sorority excesses, agitation over larger and smaller political questions, and any number of other expressions of “misrule” often offended and embarrassed longer-term and full-time residents. It is customary for young people to test limits in the relatively protected confines of their college or university. In many ways, misrule and unrest has been “institutionalized” in college and university settings. Officials are ­accustomed to large and raucous crowds. They also are expected or at least not much of a surprise to local people who have seen this kind of behavior in the past, especially at big athletic events, move-in and move-out days, and graduation ceremonies. By and large, the adults have figured out ways to deflect, stall, ignore, and accommodate themselves to new styles, ideas, and kinds of behavior presented by the students. What younger people did in Charlottesville was turn that disruptive history and custom of student “misrule” on its head. They put their experiences with exuberant sports celebrations, panty raids, and drunken fraternity bashes in the service of a different and, one might say, a more patriotic goal. They defended their school when the institution’s adult leaders failed to step up to meet the challenge presented by Nazis, KKK sympathizers, and other white nationalist outsiders. Students who participated in Charlottesville’s unrest and violence were disruptive in ways that were welcomed by Charlottesville’s residents. The students, in league with anti-racist groups not from Charlottesville, helped to bring the community together against the whole array of alt-right organizations that were threatening the school and town. In doing so, they ­commended themselves to the town’s other residents. University officials certainly could not encourage students to confront outside troublemakers. Indeed, they warned students not to confront the protesters. They set up alternative programming with a more educational than confrontational character to distract students from whatever the outside agitators were planning to do. The students went into battle on their own. The unrest they were instrumental in making or abetting was reactionary in character. It supported the standards, values, and customs of not just the university but the whole of Charlottesville. They didn’t pick the fight, but they were willing to take a leading role in it. In doing so, they were defending their community’s understanding of right and wrong, of what was considered good public behavior and what was viewed as bad public behavior. The unrest and violence in Charlottesville expanded people’s understanding of who could be a member of the community. The question of public accountability is both easier and harder to answer.

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The most obvious and serious accountability wake-up calls went out to protest leaders and followers in Charlottesville. Those who were arrested and tried or had civil suits successfully filed against them have paid a heavy price for how they behaved in events surrounding the Unite the Right rally. Some have been jailed. Others may never climb out from beneath the legal costs and judgements levied on them. In any event, outside troublemakers have not returned to either Ferguson or Charlottesville in sufficient numbers to frighten anybody living there. Ferguson police officers who mistreated the town’s black citizens left their jobs. Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, had to leave town. The municipal court judge who oversaw the effort to extract as much money as could be taken from many black residents was fired. The mayor in charge of Ferguson during the last years of the program to heap large fines onto his own constituents was eventually replaced by a black woman. His name is rarely mentioned anymore. He had little credibility left in the eyes of his fellow residents. Federal officials had to be brought in to oversee the implementation of reforms demanded by the town’s outraged and sobered citizens. Greater accountability is also seen in the turnover of elected officials and administrators in both Ferguson’s and Charlottesville’s governments. The town’s new Civilian-Police Review Board has been made aware of how poorly their police department was performing even before Michael Brown was killed. People are hopeful that the newest police chief will be able to do something about the department’s performance. Public officials in both communities may be under far greater scrutiny today than they were before unrest happened. Business and institutional leaders in Ferguson and Charlottesville are not. At least they show few if any signs that they knew they had not been paying enough attention to what was going on in their respective communities. In Ferguson, most of the money being spent to help rebuild businesses that were damaged and to fill properties made vacant when rioters destroyed them has come from outside of the town. The harder part of the answer to how accountability in Ferguson and Charlottesville has increased comes from the respective communities’ citizens. People in both Ferguson and Charlottesville have their public act ­together more than when unrest happened. They are more engaged today than they were before the unrest occurred. But engagement has come at a cost. People’s disagreements in council meetings are more open and heated. It is hard to bring them to an agreeable conclusion. At the same time, no one appears eager to cross any problematic lines in public like they were a few years ago. That goes for black people every bit as much as it does for white people. One particularly outspoken black activist in Charlottesville who went on to become a city councilman found himself publicly outed for openly

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racist comments he had made about white people years earlier. People are a lot more mindful today about what they say in public about their racial differences. And, again, outside troublemakers have not returned to either community. I do not know if people in Ferguson and Charlottesville think these are good tradeoffs. But it is the outline of the deal residents made with each other after their community experienced serious unrest and violence. Other Takeaways from Ferguson and Charlottesville

There were several other takeaways from Ferguson’s experience that had not gotten little or no attention in previous studies of popular unrest and violence. One – learning how to fight nicer in public – I have given a great deal of attention to in this chapter. A second takeaway – publicly-inspired clean-ups – was not relevant in Charlottesville. Protesters and counter-protesters broke little in the way of property during their off-and-on brawling throughout the day of the rally and the night before at the tiki torch march across the campus. The third Ferguson takeaway – the importance of crossing sensitive public lines – certainly wasn’t unique to Ferguson or Charlottesville, too, for that matter. A fourth takeaway was that tolerating the white nationalist protesters and treating them fairly and with discretion did no good and indeed made the situation worse. The white nationalists used available channels for petitioning local government officials to legitimate their plans to behave in a disruptive and violent way on the evening before the rally and on the day of the rally. Donald Trump followed a similar game plan in the run-up to the electoral college vote. Social scientists have long made a big deal about the importance of “precipitating events” in prompting people to riot. The impact of Michael Brown’s killing was not to be denied. Leaving his body in the street, uncovered, and photographed by passersby was devastating. The incitement to violence created by the unscheduled surprise tiki torch demonstration the evening before the rally in Charlottesville surely alerted everyone in town that something bigger and worse was in the works for the rally. What was noteworthy about police killings in the City of St. Louis and Saint Louis County was that most of them didn’t precipitate violent unrest. The importance of acts that violate a group’s sense of security and integrity cannot be denied. But it sometimes takes more than one act to provoke people into violently rebuking whoever it was who had a mind to insult them publicly. And there are times when an outrageous act doesn’t lead to violence or more violence, as was the case when a white nationalist ran his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. What may happen instead is that a seemingly random and truly inexplicable act may sober people to the reality that they

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need to take a moment from whatever they were doing so they can evaluate their situation in a less frantic way. That’s certainly what protesters and counter-protesters did in Charlottesville after Heather Heyer and others were run down by an automobile driven by a white nationalist. It is also what happened in the North Carolina mill where overworked and stressed-out employees used non-existent bug bites to take a much-needed break from their jobs. Their bosses took the moment to figure out what might really be going on that they were missing. Crossing a big public line and the popular unrest it inspires may be viewed as precipitating events of a different sort. They give their communities an unwanted but much needed timeout so people can evaluate what they might do to resolve their differences or address a common problem whose solution has thus far eluded them. White people in the St. Louis area had managed to avoid big public fights with black people for decades by running away and never quite being caught up with. Even after black people began catching up in some of the suburbs to which whites had found temporary refuge, the only place where animosities spilled over was in Ferguson. The line that was crossed there was the killing of Michael Brown. In Charlottesville, the line was crossed by white nationalist organizations whose members held a surprise and quite frightening march on the evening before the Unite the Right rally. The lines in both places were crossed in a public setting. Private insults and assaults might be overlooked. They may not even be recorded when they happen out of public view. But public insults and assaults are much more difficult to ignore or explain away, even if people might have preferred to look the other way. A corollary to the line crossing that prompts people to act out is that whole groups or institutions need to be blamed for whatever offense was committed. An individual’s misstep or purposeful insult committed out of public view is easier to overlook or excuse. An uncalled-for public insult or assault committed by someone who is treated as a representative of a whole group or institution is much tougher to overlook or excuse. All the trouble brought to Ferguson and Charlottesville was caused by organizations and institutions. The loss of credibility local institutions and public leaders suffer is even greater when they are unable or unwilling to address people’s upsettedness and anger that a big line has been crossed. People take their grievance public. They petition and protest. But nothing big, convincing, or of much good comes of it. Local government officials were complicit in the line crossing in both Ferguson and Charlottesville. People in both communities could not avoid becoming involved, because their government demonstrated willful indifference to the fact that a big line had been crossed or were clearly unable to deal with it satisfactorily. This only made the situation worse.

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The insider status of Ferguson’s police officers and outsider status of the White Nationalist groups didn’t seem to make either situation more combustible. What did was the unwillingness of the people in charge of these institutions and organizations to back down or make a full-throated apology for crossing the line as soon as it became clear the public disapproved of their behavior. Another element involved in inexcusable line-crossings that end up as ugly and violent public fights is that the opposing sides do not have their respective acts together nearly as much as they thought or needed them to be. It was particularly clear in the case of Charlottesville where organizations and groups had several months to try out arguments and strategies. All that practice notwithstanding, people still managed to miscalculate what their opponents would do and misjudge how well their own people would carry out the plans their leaders had made. In both Ferguson and Charlottesville, it was less powerful and crediblelooking people and organizations that gave the most compelling answers to the questions about membership in the community and public accountability. It was students and everyday citizens in Charlottesville and Ferguson who used unrest and violence to show how upside down the world could be made if more credible and powerful people and institutions didn’t come up with better and more agreeable answers. In an odd and unexpected way, the use of social media during the protests and rioting reinforced the already symbolic contribution that students and everyday citizens made to affirming or reforming the civic life in Ferguson and Charlottesville. I noted in the previous chapter that Ferguson was, to the best of my knowledge, America’s first “social media riot.” People turned to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to monitor events as they unfolded and to discuss the meaning of those events. The use of social media energized people who were sympathetic to protesters and even to the rioters. Law enforcement agencies also monitored these platforms for information about protests and violence and to gather intelligence about activists whose posts were garnering more attention.33 The content of social media postings helped to spread the word of what was transpiring in Ferguson to a national and international audience. It also helped to mobilize support across the country for efforts to limit police violence in minority communities. There is no evidence that social media reports helped to calm things down in Ferguson or do anything to bring the opposing sides together. The amount of information being shared across different social media platforms was overwhelming. Protesters and rioters used it to keep tabs on each other and where the action was. Law enforcement agencies used it to keep tabs on the protesters and rioters.

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People used social media in Charlottesville in the same way. It agitated people and did nothing to help bring opposing groups together. It did enable authorities and concerned groups to track and publicly criticize the way social media had been used to sew discord into Charlottesville’s civic routines.34 All the noise on social media was far from wasted, however. The informal and often chaotic-looking messaging on social media, like the unrest and violence that made it possible and even necessary for people to use it, turned “normal” public speech on its head. It showed how upside down the world would look and people would be driven to speak to each other when more conventional ways to describe what they were experiencing and feeling were denied to them. As such, social media provided a much bigger and different public service to people in the community than any of its biggest boosters and detractors have so far identified. Their propaganda and mobilizing accomplishments aside, social media did not make the violence appreciably worse and did not stop people in Ferguson and Charlottesville from behaving in ways that were consistent with the cultural playbook and historical traditions they brought to their fight. People would end up fighting in more restrained ways than their agitated and wholly unscripted electronic messaging would have led one to predict. The customs dictating how people would fight in public made their violence more restrained and the mess they left smaller, despite all the electronic noise that was being made on social media. In both communities, custom trumped social media noise and chaotic public speech. In Ferguson, to be sure, there was lots of property damage, much more than there was in Charlottesville. There were attacks on the police department on the “good side” of town. Some commercial buildings on both the “good side” and “bad side” of Ferguson were looted and burned down, but more on the “bad side” than the “good side” of town. One notable building that was spared on the “bad side” of Ferguson had a black-owned barbershop on the first floor whose owners and loyal customers told would-be arsonists they should keep walking. It takes little effort to imagine how much less damage might have been done had the National Guard troops waiting to be called upon had been invited to take a more active role in the unrest. While they were waiting, the police pushed rioters from the “good side” of Ferguson to the “bad side” of town and let them burn whatever they wanted. Not all black-owned businesses on the “good side” of town fared well. But no one’s home was attacked, and the only person killed was Michael Brown. The kinds of private property more easily condemned as targets belonged to businesspeople who should have stepped up and do a better job of protecting local people’s interests. The personal dwellings of people who were not wellto-do or socially prominent were left untouched.

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In Charlottesville, I noted that businesses in town were left unmolested and no public buildings, including those belonging to the university, were defaced. There were plenty of threatening public displays and no small amount of fighting between people defending the statues and people wanting them torn down. But people on both sides criticized public authorities for their inability to keep the two sides separated even as the fighting was occurring. The protesters from outside of Charlottesville were the “bad guys” who picked a fight. They violated the larger community’s understanding of right and wrong. Their misdeeds and illegal actions did more than “metaphorical” violence to the community’s sense of what counted as good and bad public behavior. The hurt they caused and the mess they made of the community could not be ignored. They had to be publicly shamed and punished. Students who typically are thought of as outsiders and not credible members of the community proved themselves worthy for full-fledged membership in the community. White people from outside of Charlottesville who in an earlier time would have been considered shoe-ins for membership were publicly and defiantly rebuked for their pretension. Furthermore, their r­ebuke, like the students’ acceptance, was certified by people from all of Charlottesville’s races, religions, backgrounds, and social classes. The “progressive” unrest in Ferguson and “reactionary” unrest in Charlottesville made the same cultural point that people who used to be considered outsiders – students and less-well-off black residents – could become insiders by virtue of how they spoke and acted in public. The converse also was true. Insiders could become outsiders if they didn’t speak and act in ways that local people approved. Social unrest cleared up any confusion there may have been about who were commendable people and good candidates for membership in the community. It also clarified what should make the cut as commendable public speech and conduct. People’s future public speech and actions might reaffirm or raise questions about their status, of course. But for the foreseeable future, there were voices that community leaders would be obliged to take more seriously than they had in the past. Unrest and violence made this possible, too. In the case of Charlottesville, recent events have only affirmed that politically conservative organizations haven’t given up their voices or the “culture war” they started in 2017. They recently showed their displeasure with ­local school officials by publicizing a video showing public school children attending a gay pride event. KKK sympathizers followed that up by leaving flyers on people’s doors that were critical of this activity.35 What they have not done yet is take their displeasure to the next level by staging inperson confrontations with officials at public gatherings like a school board meeting.

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That might still happen, of course. Given the town’s recent brush with agitated outsiders, however, groups still upset over the town’s liberal leanings haven’t come close to making another public spectacle. They do not seem eager to cross the same line a second time, when the first time worked out so badly for them. No organization or institution in Ferguson has shown any inclination to cross another public line as bold as the one they crossed in 2014. What happened in Ferguson and Charlottesville made a complementary point about the dividing line between what people say and what they do in public. It worked better in principle than it did in practice. There is a limit to what people are willing to accept as legitimate speech and acceptable behavior. It is sometimes necessary to erase for a while the principled line legislators and lawyers like to draw between the two. Idi Amin threw down a warning years ago, in between the time he was eating his fellow countrymen and being overthrown, that white nationalists in Charlottesville and other ill-liberal autocrats in America should have heeded better. “There is freedom of speech,” Amin said, “but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” What happened in Charlottesville and on January 6, 2021, fell well short of overthrowing the governments of that town and our nation. And the reason why is that Americans have had a lot of practice learning to fight in less than cannibalistic ways over their differences. People used unrest in Charlottesville to challenge ideas and practices their leaders found difficult to reconcile with their principled stand on outsider’s “free speech rights.”36 Students and members of anti-racist organizations demonstrated they had no trouble reconciling the two. As non-citizens and outsiders, respectively, they employed a ritual of disconsent to give town leaders time to catch up to where the rest of the community was already standing and waiting for them. The contribution made by a ritual of disconsent in this case might have ended up restoring people’s old understanding of who could be a full-fledged member of the community and how they were supposed to act in public. It could have reformed people’s ideas about who could be a member of the community and how accountable they would be for what they said and did in public. Or it might, and did in this case, renew people’s commitment to decisions they had made about black people and non-Christians as members but needed to remind outsiders about. Their unrest and violence had value. Whether you or I agree with the outcome of their fights is quite beside the point. People used unrest and violence to affirm their right and obligation to figure out together in public the kind of people and community they wanted to be. And quietly taking down and hiding other Confederate statues away in out of the way impound lots now seems to be something people across the South have come to agree upon.37

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Notes 1 https://www.npr.org/2021/07/10/1014926659/charlottesville-removes-roberte-lee-statue-that-sparked-a-deadly-rally 2 Tilly, Charles, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1979), pp. 83–118 3 Heaphy, Timothy, Final Report: Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia (Charlottesville: Hunton & Williams, LLP, 2017), p. 136; Nelson, Louis and Claudrena Harold, eds., Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018); Signer, Michael, Cry Havoc: Charlottesville and American Democracy Under Siege (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020); Smith, Ann, Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite The Right (Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2021), pp. 233–236; Smolla, Rodney, Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), pp. 258 and 264; Spencer, Hawes, Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), p. 191; Goluboff, Risa, “‘Charlottesville’ as Legal History,” Journal of American Constitutional History. Vol. 1 (2) (2023). Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2023–43. 4 https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/08/21/klan-leader-richard-prestonsentenced-four-years-prison-firing-gun-%E2%80%98unite-right%E2%80%99 5 For example, see: “Three Members of California-Based White Supremacist Group Sentenced on Riots Charges Related to August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Rally in Charlottesville.” Justice.gov, July 19, 2019; A.C. Thompson. “Once Defiant, All Four White Supremacists Charged in Charlottesville Violence Plead Guilty.” Propublica, May 6, 2020; Tyler Hammel. “Final defendant in Harris beating sentenced to more than two years in prison.” The Daily Progress, August 27, 2019; https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Neo-Nazi-group-barred-from-armed-ralliesin-Charlottesville-479322403.html 6 https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/white-nationalist-charges-universityof-virginia-rally/index.html 7 https://www.propublica.org/article/four-men-arrested-over-unrest-during-2017unite-the-right-rally; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-nationalists-rallycharlottesville-live-updates/ 8 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, pp. 235–236. 9 People belonging to no fewer than 17 white nationalist organizations participated in the protest. No Fewer than 12 anti-racist organizations were represented among the people who showed up as counter-protesters. Some people on both sides carried firearms. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally. 10 Ibid. 11 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/us/richard-spencer-charlottesville.html. 12 For a much more detailed and comprehensive treatment of how local people would use unrest to remind their leaders what could happen when that trust was broken, see Matt Clement, A People’s History of Riots, Protest, and the Law (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–100. 13 Charlottesville 2017, pp. 73–88. 14 For example, see many of the essays in Nelson and Harold, Charlottesville 2017; Smolla, Confessions; and especially Goluboff’s essays in Charlottesville 2017 and “‘Charlottesville’ as Legal History.” 15 Goluboff, “‘Charlottesville’ as Legal History,” pp. 127–128. 16 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, pp. p. 338; Singer, Cry Havoc, pp. 269, 295, 313–315. 17 https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/202208/5-years-later-lessons-rally-violenceecho-say-panelists-uva-event

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18 Rodney Smolla does a good job laying out the history of these conflicting approaches to “free speech” as a point of Constitutional law and how they were appropriated by the two sides in Charlottesville. See his book, Confessions. 19 A Georgetown University institute found some local people to sign onto the case they wanted to file against armed militia groups that had come to Charlottesville. Two of the militia named come to Charlottesville protect anti-racist protesters. https://truthout.org/articles/why-is-charlottesville-suing-two-anti-racist-groupsover-last-years-violent-unite-the-right-rally/ 20 https://www.npr.org/2021/11/23/1058024314/charlottesville-unite-the-righttrial-verdict; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlottesville-unite-the-right-rallytrial-what-to-know/ 21 See Clement, A People’s History, pp. 103–104, 107, 126. 22 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, pp. 9 and 157. 23 Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), pp. 79–90. 24 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, pp. 185, 274–275, 277; Smolla, Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer, pp. 275, 284; https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/­nation_ world/charlottesville-leftists-armed-trump-antifa-20170816.html 25 https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/confederate-groups-may-once-again-stall-charlottesvilles-plans-for-the-statue-of-gen-robert-e-lee/ 26 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/white-nationalist-rally-charlottesvillemayor.html; https://www.npr.org/2018/08/07/636237752/white-nationalist-rallyexposed-what-lies-beneath-charlottesville-s-exterior; https://nextcity.org/urbanistnews/charlottesville-fights-back-against-its-racist-zoning-demons 27 https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/black-charlottesville-residents-open-up-aboutwhat-changed-and-what-didnt-after-unite-the-right/; https://www.cvilletomorrow. org/it-took-five-years-but-the-board-of-civilians-that-oversees-the-charlottesvillepolice-department-has-its-first-case/; https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/it-took-fiveyears-but-the-board-of-civilians-that-oversees-the-charlottesville-police-department-has-its-first-case/ https://dailyprogress.com/news/august12/communitymakes-us-stronger-charlottesville-reflects-on-two-years-since-violence/ article_395b1e9c-8afe-5c33-a4a0-c1d67907f68f.html; https://www.npr.org/2022/ 08/12/1116942725/the-charlottesville-rally-5-years-later-its-what-youre-stilltrying-to-forget 28 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/us/charlottesville-nc-unite-the-right-rally. html; https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/confederate-groups-may-once-again-stallcharlottesvilles-plans-for-the-statue-of-gen-robert-e-lee/ 29 See endnote 2 for a list of books, papers, and reports about Charlottesville’s unrest and violence. 30 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/12/us/politics/charlottesville-va-protest-unitethe-right.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/us/charlottesville-unite-theright-white-supremacists.html; https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/two-yearsago-they-marched-charlottesville-where-are-they-now 31 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/white-nationalist-rally-charlottesvillemayor.html 32 https://www.stltoday.com/life-entertainment/local/wellness/ferguson-s-city-manager-speaks-out-on-why-he-chose-to-stay-after-sudden-resignation/article_dabded76-f64b-5cbf-b7ba-be76178491a4.html 33 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/twitter-black-lives-matter-ferguson-protests.html   https://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7539649/ferguson-protests-twitter   https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0124/Ferguson-How-Twitterhelped-empower-ordinary-residents

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  https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/04/06/from-twitter-to-instagram-a-different-ferguson/   https://time.com/3604478/ferguson-michael-brown-darren-wilson-social-­ media/   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326509198_The_Role_of_Twitter_ in_the_First_Week_of_Ferguson_Unrests_in_August_2014   https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1748048518822610?journal Code=gazb   https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/11/facebooktwitter-and-instagram-sent-feeds-that-helped-police-track-minorities-in-fergusonand-baltimore-aclu-says/ 34 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/russia-twitter-trolls-charlottesville; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/russia-twitter-trollscharlottesville; https://www.vox.com/2017/8/14/16145086/facebook-twittercharlottesville-terms-of-service-guidelines 35 https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/education/right-wing-media-circulatingvideo-of-charlottesville-students-at-pride-event/article_8e5f3530-0bc5-11eeb1f6-97900750be96.html#tracking-source=home-top-story 36 Signer, Cry Havoc, pp. 126–129, 132–135, 144. 37 https://dailyprogress.com/news/state-regional/virginia-confederate-monument-arlington-national-cemetery-confederacy-southern-poverty-law-center/ article_642002df-6d78-5be1-9396-52a78c34ef10.html#tracking-source= home-top-story

7 BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTS (AND VIOLENCE)

2020 was a notably unrest-full year. Most of the unrest and violence was associated with Black Lives Matter protests, which were inspired by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. No small amount of unrest in 2020, however, was by people concerned about COVID-19 restrictions and government vaccine programs. Groups sympathetic to these issues found ample reason to mobilize their supporters. The disconsent occasioned by Black Lives Matter protests was more progressive and inspired people to use rituals of renewal and reform to address the unresolved racial business that Americans were still working their way through. The disconsent apparent in protests against COVID-19 restrictions was more reactionary but did not make institutional leaders restore freedoms that put other people at risk. The upcoming national elections for President and Congress in 2020 added considerable partisan fuel to the public debate and street-level activism carried out by people and organizations that had an active interest in these matters and more. The unrest that accompanied the elections also happened all over the country, providing dramatic evidence of how well organized and politicized contemporary unrest in America was becoming. The Capitol insurrection in 2021 did not cool the fervor of people ­belonging to organizations pushing left-wing and right-wing causes. Protests in 2022 for and against the rights of LGBTQ people, gun control, abortion and voting rights, and immigration were held in different communities in different parts of the United States.1 These provided additional evidence of how contemporary America was becoming a society where social movements

DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-8

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would continue to pop up over stove-top-hot questions national politicians couldn’t keep their hands from touching. In this chapter, however, I am more concerned with the popular unrest and movement that arose in 2020 with the killing of George Floyd. Good counts of events related to social and political unrest in 2020 were difficult to make but not hard to find. The best we have, and they are extensive, paint a clear picture of how many protests and other kinds of unrest happened in the United States in 2020. Impressive as these counts were, they offered little in the way of detailed stories of what transpired in these events or how to make some larger sense of them. The counts themselves can be found in several reports issued by researchers from Princeton University and The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Researchers found that between “late May and the end of the August…7,750 demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter in more than 2,000 different locations across the United States, as well as more than 1,000 protests related to COVID-19.” They added that about “a third of the COVID-19 protests were linked to schools reopening… all of them peaceful protests. There were also at least 70 documented protests over COVID-19 involving healthcare workers, and at least 37 demonstrations focused on the eviction crisis.” An October update of their original report put the number of Black Lives Matter protests to something more than 9,000 separate events across the United States. Over 93 percent of the protests, most of them probably in small towns, were non-violent affairs. For the reasons I discuss below, we shouldn’t be particularly surprised that violence was much more prevalent in cities that had protests than in the small towns that made up the overwhelming number of protest sites.2 For all the peacefulness apparent in most Black Lives Matter protests, the researchers found “a troubling trend of violence from both government forces and non-state actors,” which consisted of armed militias and organizations like the KKK and other white nationalist groups. Federal law enforcement agencies in the Trump administration were much less sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter protests and more sympathetic to counter-protesters who belonged to white nationalist organizations. The muscular presence of federal agents and white militia did not happen in all cities that had rioting.3 When they did enter a city where unrest was serious, however, government agents were “more likely to intervene with force, like using teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray or beating demonstrators with batons.” By the end of the summer, researchers “documented 392 incidents…in which government authorities used force on Black Lives Matter demonstrators.” Not surprisingly, “violent intervention from government forces did not make protests more peaceful.” They made it worse. In Portland, Oregon, whose protests were marked by considerable violence, their study found

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“that intervention from federal authorities in the protest ‘only aggravated unrest,’ with the number of ‘violent demonstrations’ rising from 53 percent to nearly 62 percent of all events ‘after federal agents arrived on the scene.’ Armed individuals affiliated with non-government groups also became involved in at least 50 protests that turned violent. Most engaged in brawls with protesters. But dozens of the people affiliated with these groups launched car-ramming attacks against demonstrators. These attacks happened across the entire country, too. But these groups were not targeted by federal law enforcement agencies. Groups affiliated with Black Lives Matter were. All told, nine people associated with Black Lives Matter unrest were killed. Two people who were counter-protesters also were killed in these disturbances. Averaged over 9,000 protest events, the amount of deadly violence was modest, of course. But there is little doubt that the deaths piled up mostly in protests and unrest that happened in cities. The number and variety of groups affiliated with the Black Lives ­Matter protests and unrest was impressive. Actions taken by anti-vaccine and COVID-19 lockdown activists were just as well organized. The social movement-like quality of their nationwide activities was unmistakable. Even if one missed it, activists on both sides of these fights and federal officials pointed out just how widespread and politically inspired these protests were. What happened in 2020 and January of 2021 provided ample support for the claims of social historians that organizations would become more deeply involved in modern forms of unrest. What these writers didn’t expect, as I noted in earlier chapters, was how much contemporary unrest would remain more conservative or, more precisely, reactionary in character. There were two additional features of contemporary unrest that figure prominently in this chapter and the next where I write about the Capitol insurrection. First, the peaceful nature of most of the small-town protests was a sign of how restrained people were prepared to be in front of their neighbors or people whose presence at a homegrown event was readily accepted. They also were familiar with how to stage and pull off a good-sized protest. Their small-town ways left plenty of room for people to make what for them would have been an unaccustomedly loud point about a matter that concerned them. City people shared many of the same understandings and public customs. But they were much more likely to make bigger public trouble, more noise, and a bigger mess with their much larger numbers. Even in the face of aggressive actions by federal agents and non-government actors, however, comparatively few people on either side were killed in violent unrest during the summer of 2020. City people destroyed property, lots of it. But they were not as inclined to turn their anger against other people as they once were, even though U.S. cities had experienced marked increases in legal and illegal migrants from a

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host of foreign countries in the last three decades. Despite their differences, newer city residents had already learned to disagree and fight in public like other Americans. They had bought into American civic virtues, not so much as people in smaller towns, perhaps, but enough to keep themselves from ­killing each other when they couldn’t get out of each other’s way. Second, while the effect of both leftwing and rightwing movements would be felt in the 2020 national elections, the more progressive unrest associated with Black Lives Matter protests peaked in the early summer of 2020. It would have no bearing on the unrest that followed the 2020 elections. The situation was much different for organizations whose protests were directed at COVID-19 lockdowns and anti-vaccine initiatives. They did not stop their activities as Black Lives Matter protests wound down. Indeed, they would become even more active in the run-up to the election and in the unrest that followed it. People inclined to use unrest and violence in more reactionary ways would step up more than they had since the middle of the 20th century. Rightwing groups like the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and Oath Keepers played a big part in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. So much so that more than 1,000 of their members and other people who participated in the insurrection were arrested on January 6 and afterward. By the summer of 2023, more than 600 of these people would have pled guilty to charges leveled against them or were later tried, found guilty, and imprisoned for what they did that day. How big or permanent a dent these arrests, trials, and incarcerations have made on the strength and activities of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other likeminded groups remains to be seen. Within months of the insurrection, however, there were reports of white nationalist groups being in disarray. Their leaders were reported to be “low on cash, struggling with defections and arguing with members over the future.”4 That may account for the fact that as of the middle of 2023, not quite a year away from the next federal election, people belonging to these groups have made much less noise and even less violence than they did in 2020 and 2021. The role of reactionary unrest in the Capitol insurrection is explored in the next chapter. Here we explore the more progressive side of popular unrest and violence in American towns and cities with our analysis of Black Lives Matter protests. Black Lives Matter Protests

I will begin with someplace small and manageable, then move on to Black Lives Matter unrest and violence in big cities. As small places go, what happened in Delhi, New York fits the bill rather well. Delhi would seem an unlikely place to have a protest, much less one of

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the Black Lives Matter protests that swept over the United States in 2020. Three hours and 150 miles north of New York City, Delhi is in a lovely r­ ural setting. It is unnewsworthy, except perhaps for the presence of a smaller campus of the state university system whose students had already left town for the summer. Not counting the students, over 90 percent of the 5,100 people who live in and around Delhi are white. This was consistent with the makeup of people who were in the protest or watched it along Main Street.5 Reporter Andrew O’Hehir described the scene this way. More than 700 people, most of them white and most under age 40, lined Main Street for several blocks in both directions – maintaining appropriate social distancing, and wearing masks – outside the Tractor Supply store and the Speedway mini-mart and the Delaware National Bank and Dubben Brothers Hardware. They did call-and-response chants and held up the now-familiar array of signs protesting police violence or white ­silence and honoring the equally familiar litany of black people’s names: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown – as you know, we could go on. The Delhi police chief posted a cheerful Facebook message in support of the protest, while making clear that whatever bad things involving cops may have happened elsewhere had nothing to do with him. After two hours of largely upbeat protest on a beautiful Saturday in Delhi, nearly everyone up and down Main Street “took a knee” in commemoration of George Floyd and other victims of police violence. Whether in tribute to my antiquated journalistic ethics or my middle-aged knees, I didn’t do it. I retreated under a storefront awning and stood next to a young, bearded bicycle cop, who chewed gum and avoided eye contact with the protesters who politely urged him to join them. It felt like a momentary brotherhood of uncomfortable white men, trying to figure stuff out. Then everybody got up and there was a lot of hugging, in small, socially distanced groups. The crowd slowly dispersed into the afternoon. The two women in Tractor Supply smocks, who had been standing outside the store smoking cigarettes and watching us, put their masks on and went back to work. From media reports in major newspapers and more local publications, the Black Lives Matter protest in Delhi does not appear to have been appreciably different from what went on in protests in other small American towns. “­Uncomfortable White Men Figuring Stuff Out” could have been the tag line for a Black Lives Matter marketing campaign in the summer of 2020.

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Emblazoned on a banner draped across the Main Streets of small towns across the United States, these words would have captured what people were doing when they met in public to register their concern about something that bothered them as much as George Floyd’s murder obviously did. What else they could do may not have been clear right then and maybe not for a long time, which is only one of the ways these protests were different from the ones in big cities. But that didn’t matter as much as the fact that people in both small towns and big cities knew coming together in public was something they could do when they needed to figure stuff out together in the face of an unexpected and worrying turn of events. They knew this because inviting a crowd of people to a public square so they might share their views on matters of mutual concern is something leaders have done since the ancient Greeks. Two millennia later, it was regular people in tiny Delhi, New York, and other small towns across the United States who showed they could make a good-sized crowd on their own. They didn’t need their leaders to call them together. They could march their crowd down Main Street so that everyone in the town could see and hear what their fellow townsmen thought about white police officers killing unarmed black civilians. It was more than self-awareness that enabled people in Delhi to meet in public and say out loud what they thought about the murder of George Floyd. By 2020, the custom of bringing like-minded people together so they could make a dramatic and sometime violent show of what they thought about an important matter had become a cultural entitlement for Americans. It was something citizens at both ends of the political spectrum and across the middle of it had the presumptive right and obligation to do. It was a privilege and duty that millions of younger, middle-aged, and older Americans of different colors in over 2,000 other towns and cities thought they should exercise during the summer and fall of 2020. People in all these places made nearly identical statements about the killing. Over the same summer and fall and in many of the same places, a much smaller number of white people came out to show they had a very different view of George Floyd’s death and what should be done about it. They exercised the same privilege and felt a very similar obligation to practice it just like the people who protested Floyd’s killing. More often in cities than in small towns, people on the two sides sometimes fought each other. A few of them were even killed while practicing their cultural entitlement. Three years earlier, the citizens of Charlottesville hadn’t been so keen on people’s right to say and do whatever they wished in public. They, more than their leaders, wanted to stop people from pushing ideas local people found offensive and acting in ways the same local people found downright threatening. But their leaders said it was okay or couldn’t say no to the outsiders who were out to test the limits of what “the right to free speech” meant

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in Charlottesville. So, Nazis, KKK supporters, and other white nationalists were allowed into the center of Charlottesville, free to insult and assault the people who lived there. The outsiders were quickly shown they were not welcomed. It was only ­after the riot that Charlottesville officials and local courts would come around to the position local people had already staked out. Local people, more than their leaders, couldn’t see the fine between “free speech” and “threatening acts” that the white nationalists made a big deal about so they would be allowed in Charlottesville. Having seen what happened when that line was crossed and obliterated, Charlottesville’s leaders came to agree that threatening speech could be construed as a threatening act, and the speakers eager to cross it could be subjected to legal sanctions, which included banishment from the town and incarceration. Three years later, the whole American people would find themselves reckoning with the same problem in the run-up to our national election and in the events that followed it. The relevance of what happened in Charlottesville was either ignored or not treated seriously enough by elected officials in Washington, D.C. There, too, it was only after a riot occurred that federal officials would appoint a commission to think about the very same questions. While they were doing this, the courts began grinding their way through the trials of hundreds of people who had come to Washington thinking it was their cultural birthright to stop the certification of an election their leader told them had been illegally stolen. The relevance of our long and complicated history with civil unrest had been clarified but not settled in Charlottesville. The crowds that met there and the unrest the two sides brought to the community could have pushed the civic customs of the town in one of two directions. People could have used this moment of disconsent to restore an older set of civic virtues and customs, which were unwelcoming to people who weren’t white or Christians. Or people could have used it to renew their commitment to a set of civic virtues and customs that were welcoming to all kinds of people, including those who weren’t white or Christian. People in Charlottesville chose the second path. No matter which way it had gone, the unrest brought to Charlottesville would have a marked impact on the kind of civic culture local people would embrace. It also would make a big statement about the kind of people they wanted to be in the future. A similar dynamic played out in all the Black Lives Matter protests and violence that happened across the United States in the summer of 2020. ­Local people assumed the responsibility and privilege to call their fellow citizens together and make a very deliberate and dramatic statement about the right of black people to be treated like everyone else.

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That statement was presented in a relatively restrained way in small towns where Black Lives Matter protests were held. The statement was much less restrained and sometimes turned violent in larger cities where Black Lives Matter protests took place. Crowds were a pivotal factor in the figuring-out process initiated in both smaller towns and big cities across the United States in 2020. Again, the similarity between small-town and big-city protests showed that people in both kinds of communities were aware of the customary ways people use to make bold public declarations and push their leaders to act. The use of violence in some of the bigger cities that had BLM protests testifies to additional experience city people bring to their public challenges that people in smaller towns don’t have. For that reason, the “Uncomfortable White Men Figuring Stuff Out” banner stretched across Main Street in cities would have needed a big a­ sterisk (*) stamped on the end of it. Part of the reason, as I just recounted, was that city people have a lot more experience using crowds to make big public statements. The other reason why is that city people also have more experience with the problem that made people in Delhi take their concerns to the street. City dwellers already knew more about police officers killing unarmed black people than the people of Delhi hope they would never have to learn. The Black Lives Matter protests in big cities were more about pushing their leaders to do something about it. That added piece of pushiness is what sometimes drives city people to up the level of drama and aggressiveness in their public demonstrations. It certainly played a part in the big-city protests that turned violent. The largely non-violent protests in places like Delhi were a special case in the practice of popular disconsent in the United States. The violence that didn’t happen there was every bit as appropriate and necessary to the value of small-town protests as the violence that sometimes happened in big cities was to theirs. As I already observed, Americans in small towns like Delhi clearly knew how to make a crowd just like the ones people in big cities make and to use their crowd to register their opinion on a matter they believed needed to be brought before the whole community. Their message was so compelling that even their police chief got into the act by making a public declaration of support for his fellow townsmen’s protest. This would happen as well in other small-town protests across the country. How much further Delhi’s police chief was prepared to go or what he could do to address his fellow townsmen’s concerns was not apparent now. But his openness to considering how his department might address their concerns was clear. Everybody in attendance would have to figure that out, too, just as the reporter who witnessed the protest in Delhi had smartly observed.

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City dwellers have a longer and more robust history of taking to the streets and striking aggressive postures to provoke a public reckoning on matters their leaders seemed less than serious about addressing. In cities more than in small towns, people had a clearer view not only of what was broken but also that it had been broken for a while and needed immediate attention. I’m going to take a small historical digression here to remind the reader of a point I made earlier in the book about urban life and popular unrest. City leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries had two principal concerns: doing whatever they could to make their city prosperous and keeping their residents in line. The first one kept them running every day. The second one kept them up nights worrying. The two concerns – keeping their economies moving forward and not having that progress stalled or pushed backward by a bunch of unruly residents – were related. Leaders feared that if they didn’t have people working from the same cultural script and pulling in the same direction, then all the hard work they were doing to grow their city’s economy would come to no good end. This is the reason why they worked so feverishly during the 19th and 20th centuries to invent new institutions and customs that would keep their growing and ever more diverse populations in line or at least staying out of each other’s way. Public and private leaders were preoccupied with creating a new social and moral order in cities, one that would put people on the same cultural page and instill in their fellow city residents a sense that they were all working on the same grand project. Many attempts to address cities’ pressing problems in the 19th and 20th centuries began as campaigns and crusades initiated by leaders who believed that the urban masses needed some serious direction and ongoing moral and social instruction.6 Moral crusaders in 19th and early-20th-century cities – the cultural warriors of that age – were under no illusion that newcomers and other people who would struggle to fit in would all become model citizens. But city leaders worked hard to ensure that people who were disinclined to get with the program wouldn’t get in the way of everyone else who was at least making a good faith effort at fitting in and not rocking the boat. Like the ancient Greeks, all the moral reforming and reclamation that people of a better sort did was done for the good of the city. It wasn’t done for the sake of all the newcomers, outsiders, and people with little hope of doing something much bigger with their life. The redemption of every individual in the city wasn’t feasible, and city leaders knew it. Inspiring good people or people who wanted to be better with new and impressive collective enterprises and publicly inspired initiatives would accomplish enough. At least that is what they hoped. The fact that they weren’t confident about pulling it off was apparent in their withdrawal from elected office and retreat to boards directing the work of institutions they founded and continued to

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subsidize until local governments stepped up to provide the same services. It also was evidenced by their movement out of cities and into suburban enclaves they expected would provide them with a buffer against people that gave them the heebie-jeebies. Absent the creation of new ways to bring people together and imagine themselves as part of a single moral community, city leaders feared they knew what the end of their city would look like. It would look chaotic. And it would likely be violent. City leaders believed this because they had firsthand experience with what sometimes happened when members of the “lower orders” became restless. Their grumbling could grow into larger, noisier, and openly violent attacks against each other and them. Historically, that is what distressed citizens have often done when their leaders didn’t act quickly enough or convincingly enough to assure people of their good will and effective stewardship. The disgruntled and dispossessed would take to the streets and make a bold and dramatic show of disconsent about what their leaders weren’t doing to address their serious concerns. That’s what happened in both Ferguson and Charlottesville. Everyday people might have used unrest and violence on these occasions to temporarily withdraw their consent to be led as they had been up to then. Leaders viewed these temporary displays of misrule as something more ominous and long lasting. They imagined everything they had built going up in smoke. Their fears may have been overblown but were not misplaced. They knew who the troublemakers would likely be and that these troublemakers would be acting on their own and in their own best interest. People in small towns rarely went so far as attacking people or burning something down, unless the people were outsiders or black and the property they damaged belonged to such people. Townspeople might take exception to the practices of some local businesspeople or a decision their elected officials had made. But it would have been a rare occurrence for them to kill a fellow townsman or burn down their neighbor’s home or business. Upset city dwellers were expected to be less discriminating and didn’t disappoint their leaders who, up to and well past their successful revolution against English rule, had often led and could be counted on to support the ­occasional riot. Less privileged and well-regarded citizens learned early on from their leaders that sometimes making a big mess was altogether necessary and the right thing to do. Committing “social crimes” of this sort often happened when people had a compelling need to make their feelings known to leaders who should have been paying more attention. Whether in small towns or big cities, large and often raucous public gatherings have long been an unmistakable invitation to a cultural reckoning about what was bothering people and a clear sign that whatever local leaders were doing wasn’t working as well as they thought. The airing need not

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have been of the community’s dirty laundry, though that often is the purpose served by such public displays. Dramatic public outings were used just as readily to celebrate or acknowledge something good about a community that is not commemorated often enough in the estimation of the people who are rallying, marching, or demonstrating. The same big public display could make very different cultural statements about the community and the rightful place of different groups in it. Of course, demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd were anything but a celebration. In cities, it was much more a protest of an act they had seen agents of a local government take before: the unwarranted public execution of a black person by a white person who had the power but not the right to do what he did as far as they were concerned. Unrest in cities was supposed to inspire leaders to reform local police departments but also show what awaited them if they didn’t. In small towns, the protests were a demonstration of a different kind of community sentiment. There were comparatively few threats to their own police. But the public display of people’s shock over the killing of a stranger showed they were willing to hold their leaders accountable should anything like that ever happen in their town. The protests commemorated a non-event in their town, which is undoubtedly part of the reason they didn’t see the need to act more aggressively. But the protests were instrumental in opening a public dialogue about the kind of community local people wanted and, perhaps more importantly, the kind they didn’t want. When community sentiment is clear, as it was in Delhi, a public demonstration looks more like a big exclamation point than a ­question mark about what to do. People in Delhi made a loud and life-affirming “Not in My Back Yard” statement for everyone to see. An important gesture, to be sure, but nothing that would necessarily lead town leaders to take a formal action to address the killing, which happened in Minneapolis more than a thousand miles away. Black Lives Matter protests in small towns were an expression of cultural renewal. People affirmed their commitment to a cultural change and newer civic virtues they had made but hadn’t thought to make a big deal about until George Floyd was murdered. Small-town white people wanted black ­people, and presumably other non-white persons as well, to be treated as they ­themselves would expect to be treated. Nothing may have needed to be reformed in Delhi. People just needed to make clear that they were watching what their leaders and fellow citizens were doing when it came to dealing with black people. It was different in cities and not because such killings are more likely to happen in urban areas that have large minority populations. It also was different because cities, unlike small towns, make all manner of crowds all the time, and sometimes city crowds can turn “unruly” without a whole lot of effort.

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Though violence is more likely to be part of what city people in crowds do than small-town people do, comparatively few city crowds turn angry enough to openly declare their displeasure. That’s one of the reasons why the crowds that came out in small towns for a Black Lives Matter protest were so exceptional. People who rarely gather to complain about anything came out across the country to complain about the very same thing.7 These protests may have not left much of a mark in terms of changing how these towns were organized and run; but they a very big statement about their town’s civic values and public customs. There was no precedent in U.S. history for the number of protests that occurred after George Floyd was murdered. They happened in every state, many of them in counties with predominantly if not overwhelmingly white populations. They also happened in U.S. territories and in foreign countries with their own history of poor relations between minority people and police officers. Just as impressive were the self-reports people made of their participation in the protests. In the United States alone, the number who said they were involved fell somewhere between 15 million and 26 million. These numbers greatly exceeded the three million to five million people who participated in the Women’s march of 2017.8 Even more surprising, the number of Black Lives Matter protesters might well have exceeded the total number of participants in demonstrations during the Civil Rights movement of the late-1950s and 1960s. Cities like New York had continuous protests over the summer of 2020. And more of these demonstrations than the ones in smaller towns had violence where people looted and burned businesses, destroyed police cars, and fought with police and counter protesters. Thousands of people were arrested. Several cities saw police precinct houses attacked and closed. Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, whose experiences are further alluded to later in the chapter, were prominent among them. This violence was reminiscent of what happened in hundreds of “protest riots” in cities across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, the violence accompanying Black Lives Matter protests was different in several ways. First, except in one or two cities, like Portland, Oregon, the protests and riots associated with Black Lives Matter lasted only a couple of months. They did not drag on for several years as they did in the 1960s. The ones that happened in cities were intense affairs. The value of insured property damaged or destroyed by looting, arson, and vandalism – a sum estimated to have been between one and two billion dollars – was staggering, the greatest recorded going back to the late 1960s.9 Second, people affiliated with anti-government militias, Antifa, and white nationalist organizations showed up and fought alongside and against the

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protesters.10 That simply didn’t happen in the 1960s. Police and National Guardsmen did all the fighting for white people. Adding further significance to the Black Lives Matter protests was that virtually all of them were homegrown affairs. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter provided “materials, guidance and a framework for new activists.” But the protests were inspired by what people saw in the media and posted online, not necessarily by what people in the next town were doing. Thanks to the use of social media, attempts to map the “contagion” effect of local protests and violent disturbances to nearby towns and cities, not to mention foreign countries, would be rendered all but useless. The white nationalist groups, armed anti-government militia, and Antifa activists did not instigate these protests, but no doubt learned of them through the same social media outlets used by local protesters. How much these organizations contributed to the overall level of violence in cities is not known. Given the militia and white nationalist groups’ penchant for showing up to events carrying firearms, however, they would not have helped discourage people from courting more violence. That made the absence of gunplay in most of the riots noteworthy. Indeed, there was only one instance when someone affiliated with these groups, a gun-wielding teenager who drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin from Illinois to join counter protesters, shot and killed a pair of protesters. Black Lives Matter as a social movement was ten years-old in 2023, and it may have had a broader geographic base and more financial support than white nationalist organizations and militia groups. Its central organizing committee had received a great deal of money from businesses, foundations, and individuals who wanted to support its initiatives. But Black Lives Matter had always been a highly decentralized operation. For all these reasons, it was a near-perfect example of what a progressive social movement was supposed to look like today. All the organizations whose members subscribed to all or parts of whatever it meant to be a white nationalist today were pictureperfect examples of what a reactionary social movement should look like in the same United States. Social movements pushed by confederations of rightwing and leftwing organizations have become prominent players in American politics and ­ ­culture wars. The progressive unrest and violence evident in big-city protests in 2020 was Black Lives Matter member organizations’ version of a coming out party. The reactionary unrest in Black Lives Matter protests and ­Charlottesville were preliminary events. The main event happened in the Capitol insurrection. It was the white nationalist’s coming out party. The nearly simultaneous arrival of Black Lives Matter and white nationalist unrest in Washington, D.C. within six months of each other may have been an interesting coincidence, but it was not a mistake. Each tested the resilience of American institutions and civic virtues in a different way. And in

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each case, American institutions would pass the very different tests and difficult cultural challenges both movements posed. The bottom line, at least for the foreseeable future, is that we’re all still here. So, too, however, are a host of organizations whose members and supporters are committed rightwing and leftwing activists. Sam Sharp and Ed Fedder were right. We are condemned to having a dialogue with each other. The white people who lived in smaller communities that had Black Lives Matter protests obviously were inspired to participate on the progressive side of the dialogue. As reporters for The New York Times put it at the time: More than 40 percent of counties in the United States – at least 1,360 – (had) a protest. Unlike previous Black Lives Matter protests, nearly 95 percent of counties that had a protest recently are majority white, and nearly three-quarters of the counties are more than 75 percent white. Quoting Doug McAdam who has long studied social movements, the reporters added, (w)ithout gainsaying the reality and significance of generalized white support for the movement in the early 1960s, the number of whites who were active in a sustained way in the struggle were comparatively few, and certainly nothing like the percentages we have seen taking part in recent weeks.11 The cultural reckoning in small towns that came on the heels of George Floyd’s murder was an explicit acknowledgment of black people’s right to membership in all manner of communities, including places like Delhi where few of them lived. That sentiment probably was not shared by every white person living in these places and might only have been openly celebrated by the portion of the community who showed up to demonstrate. But the fact that it was publicly affirmed and celebrated all over the county and provoked little resistance was a demonstration of a previously unrecognized and certainly unheralded cultural change that had already taken hold in American civic life. Donald Horowitz was right. The unrest commemorated a big cultural change that had happened. Unrest didn’t make a big cultural change happen. The public reckoning pushed by rioters at the Capitol insurrection only six months later was a demonstration on behalf of a much older set of customs and civic virtues. This one heralded the importance of cultural continuity. It was a dramatic and violent celebration of that fact by people who thought they owned the exclusive rights to practice it.

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A great many white people had come to a much different conclusion. They believed that black should be able to practice the same rights and privileges that white people had long taken for granted. Prominent among those rights was the presumption that black people should not be insulted and accosted in public. On the other side, the one that would show its dramatic face at the Capitol insurrection were organizations and people who thought keeping black people, other non-white and non-Christian minorities, LGBTQ people, and women in less congenial public spaces was their way of going back to the future. Fights over the membership rights of black people, other non-white persons, women, and non-Christians had been a feature of urban life in the 19th century and remain contested in some cities even today. More recently, LGBQT people were added to the list of people whose rights for membership were up for consideration and feverish public dialogue. The formal acknowledgment of black people’s citizenship and civil rights at a national level hadn’t come until the mid-1960s. Resistance to making similar acknowledgments of women’s, non-white and non-Christian’s, and LGBTQ people’s rights has persisted and even grown in the 21st century. Important as the acknowledgment of black people’s civil rights was, it didn’t come soon enough and was not so fully embraced in American cities at the time to stop them from experiencing hundreds of riots. What we have seen so far of social and moral reform crusaders in the 21st century suggests that the fights being waged on behalf of women, non-white and non-Christian people, and LGBTQ people are at least as well organized as the ones we associate with the Civil Rights Movement. But they also are more restrained than the ones that accompanied the elevation of black Americans to something closer to full-fledged members of the places where they live. What we have seen so far in the social and moral reform crusades of the 21st century taken up on behalf of white Christians generally and white Christian males specifically suggests a similar dynamic is in play. The fights being waged on their behalf are just as well organized as the ones taken up by supporters of women, non-white and non-Christian people, and LGBTQ people. But contemporary white nationalist organizations and campaigns show little reluctance to bring guns to their revivals and pose threateningly with them. Consistent with other changes in the nature and temper of contemporary unrest, however, thus far they’ve not shown much enthusiasm for using them other than for their shock value and intimidation potential, which are substantial. Reactionary unrest has always been more deliberately violent or more likely to turn violent than unrest associated with more socially progressive causes. Furthermore, a transition in the use of reactionary unrest in America to more progressive kinds of unrest has not been as obvious and neat as some

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historians and theorists predicted, just as the events recounted here demonstrate. As I said earlier in the book, American unrest today reflects a complex and difficult-to-untangle mix of progressive and reactionary impulses. Racial unrest in the 1960s was much more progressive than it had been in the past. Minority groups held city leaders accountable for how they were responding to minority concerns about access to jobs, decent housing, and better social services. Better police services were also high on the list. By the 1960s, the question of black people’s membership and status as citizens in American cities and the United States had already been settled. It never came up during the “protest riots” of the 1960s. How far people in American cities had come in recognizing the rights of black people was apparent in how some governments responded to Black Lives Matter protests: quickly, surprisingly so. Public officials in many communities were taken aback by the killing and sobered by the countrywide protests just as millions of other Americans were. In Minneapolis, the City Council pledged to dismantle its police department, only to walk that idea back several months later. In New York, lawmakers repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. Cities and towns across the country passed new laws banning chokeholds. Mississippi lawmakers voted to retire their state flag, which prominently includes a Confederate battle emblem. A great many more statues of Confederate Civil War heroes, and other people whose heroism was tainted by their mistreatment of non-white persons, also came down after George Floyd was murdered.12 And this time, there was little or no resistance made by white nationalist groups. The Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the killing of Geroge Floyd were exceptional in all these ways. In other important ways, however, the protests were anything but exceptional. The reasons why tell us a great deal about the social and cultural significance of popular unrest and what, if anything, as a practical matter it accomplishes. First, as I suggested in earlier chapters, unconventional acts such as protests, no matter how peaceful or violent, carry the cultural stamp and blueprint of public celebrations, commemorations, and grievance-sharing customs long practiced in Western societies such as the United States.13 Their staying power and familiarity do not make them any less surprising, unconventional, disruptive, or threatening when they happen, of course. It just means events very much like the Black Lives Matter protests have a storied history in Western societies. They are one way people have customarily used to make themselves heard when they had something important to say about their community or their place in it. Second, people willingly break commonly accepted standards for decorous behavior long enough to make clear they are upset, but not so long that they permanently damage the community. They don’t have to last longer to make the point they wanted everyone to hear and see. No matter what grievances

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may have inspired their public display, however, every demonstration provides clues to who is (or is not) a community member in good standing and who is accountable for keeping the whole community in good working order. Third, and just as important, no matter how dramatic demonstrations are, including the more violent ones, larger questions about why the community is organized the way it is and who benefits (rightly or wrongly) from the ­arrangement are not raised loudly, if they are made at all. This is no less true for aggrieved parties than it is for persons who might become less privileged, powerful, and well-off if the community were organized much differently. The questions raised around protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and even riots are not trivial and can be quite sensitive. To play down their immediate threat and the potential damage they can do, expressions of popular unrest often mock the people they claim are hurting them and are presented as parodies of real-world practices. They invite laughter and head shaking as much as they do serious reflection. But peoples’ concerns and grievances also deal with problems whose solution would be well within the reach of all the parties implicated in a public kerfuffle. As I just noted, left unmentioned as a problem until after unrest has happened are the underlying economic and power arrangements that set the stage for the problems and misunderstandings that put people on a public collision course. Raised even less often for questioning are the foundational values upon which these arrangements are built. These values could be invoked but are not often called into question or openly challenged by anyone. They are the elephant in the room people do not want to talk about but cannot stop themselves from poking or at least dancing around. The protests following George Floyd’s murder satisfied all these criteria, and, as such, were successful pieces of street theater. They brought together as good a mix of exceptional and unexceptional cultural features as one would hope to find in a good stage play. The performers were dramatic enough to capture our attention but not so over-the-top, except perhaps in Portland, Oregon, that we focused on them and forgot to talk about the larger moral of the story they were trying to tell. However angry people may be, burning down their public stage and the theater around it is not an option. The building next door, perhaps. The one around the corner from the theater, a safer and more likely target. But people are not well trained in burning down their own houses and are understandably reluctant to take such a reckless turn in their public fights, including the ones that turn violent. A Closer Look at Some Black Lives Matter Protests

People involved in protests or simply observing them provide good hints about the message trying to be conveyed. But it is not just what they say

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and do that matters. Just as important and sometimes trickier to discern is what they do not say or do in public. Their unwillingness to use deadly force, for instance, is, if you will, a dead giveaway in this regard. So, too, is the mismatch between the overheated rhetoric people use compared to the less aggressive way they act when confronting their real or imagined opponents in public. Our task is to not to figure out peoples’ motives for becoming involved in different kinds of unrest but the moral of the story they are trying to tell with their provocative behavior. The fact is people are not particularly self-aware and may have only a vague idea, if they have any notion at all, of what they hope to accomplish. Peoples’ lack of clarity is itself a clue to the cultural significance of popular unrest, why people use it as often as they do, and why the rest of us find it hard to figure out not just what they’re up to but what could possibly be making them act that way. The cultural secret to unrest lies where it has always been, in plain sight. People are not supposed to know how unrest will turn out. If they did there would be no point in raising an alarm. Popular unrest works only because it is a surprise and shocks people who have become too comfortable and certain about the way their community works and their place in it. Figuring out and perhaps controlling the ingredients that make unrest a surprise in the hope people might avoid the confusion it sows and the mess it sometimes leaves for them to clean up may not be a fool’s errand.14 I think it is, and more determined or gifted scientists may yet prove me wrong. But their preoccupation with predicting unrest and tamping it down avoids two important lessons embedded in popular unrest and violence. First, the singular accomplishment of unrest is to push us to recognize the uncertainty and contradictions we have built into our world. Hitting the cultural equivalent of a pause button gives people some time to figure out whether and how they might make their world a bit more certain and less wracked with contradictions. Second, the people engaged in social unrest today – the ones on the right every bit as much as the ones on the left – have shown the rest of us they know how to restrain themselves. It may not look this way, but Americans have been making a slow but unmistakable turn back to a brand of civil unrest more common in the 18th century. We attack property more than people, prefer symbolic assaults on figures of authority, don’t use the most violent weapons available to us, give up in the middle of a fight, and then go home, half expecting not to be held accountable for how we behaved but not resisting much or at all when we are. The newest nod to fighting in more restrained ways is apparent in how we have come to elevate matters of personal preference and identity into “culture wars” and inflate the status of the people who carry them into “culture warriors.” The practical effect of these fights, even when there is a clear

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winner and loser, is trivial. Some number of Americans may feel better about themselves and think they are changing the world. But no great matters of public consequence are raised or settled. Any policies imagined with the redemption of individuals as their principal objective and programs that might be implemented to put such principles into practice become parodies, begging to be mocked and almost impossible to take seriously. It is as if people have taken one of their highly stylized rituals of inversion, where they create the appearance of turning the world upside down and turned it into something permanent and institutionalized. Converting an impermanent theatrical display into something that cannot possibly work and only few people take seriously has become a popular way of conducting safer, less violent, and deadly public fights. The motivations of participants and observers – interesting, ill-defined, and irrelevant as they may be under the best of circumstances – tell us little of what we want or need to understand about unrest, which is inherently unsettling and off putting for many of us. What people have going on their heads under such circumstances obscures more than it clarifies about the larger cultural and historical lessons built into the momentary mess they make on the streets. Here I will try to identify what was (and was not) being communicated in the Black Lives Matter protests and what important community matters ­become clarified when people go public with their concerns in a big and sometimes even violent way. The information presented here came from news accounts about Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Stories were scoured for word and behavioral clues attributed to the people who were there. Most of the protests in these news stories were in bigger cities such as ­Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, New York, and Portland, Oregon. But a crucial feature of the Black Lives Matter protests was all the smaller and much whiter towns that had one demonstration or a series of protest events. What happened in those places was like but also different from what was done and said about protests in bigger cities. In the hope we might identify some of those similarities and differences, I had students choose pairs of smaller communities in states whose towns had protests but had not been mentioned in national news stories. (A list of places we surveyed appears at the end of this chapter.) Students collected media accounts of the protests in those towns and then interviewed local officials and anyone they could find who had been mentioned in the newspaper stories about their protest.15 The principal question asked of the people students managed to track down was about what happened in the town after the protests ended. My guess was that life would have returned pretty much to what it was before the protests, but I could not be certain which is why we asked.

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Students certainly uncovered more about what had happened from the perspective of the reporters and citizens who were there. But people had much less to say about changes they saw. Students got a lot of “not much” or “not really” answers when they asked whether changes had occurred in their town because of the protests. People in some towns reportedly were planning to change how they policed their communities. In other towns, local people hoped to keep conversations about racism and race relations going at least in the near-term and established groups or committees to carry on such discussions. As a practical matter, that might be all the protests accomplished. But that is not all the protests told us, albeit indirectly or unintentionally, about the community or why they were important. Much more telling, from my perspective, are the answers people provided to the three questions I posed earlier about community membership, rule breaking, and accountability. What follows is a summary of what we learned and was reported in the media. Protests in Smaller Towns

Black Lives Matter protests in places as geographically dispersed as Nome, Alaska, Millersport, Ohio, Chambersburg and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Moscow, Idaho had several features in common.16 They were small, with one or two hundred people at most, but a big deal and stand-out affairs for towns with a few thousand residents. The protests often were led by white and minority teenagers and twentysomething year-olds. Older adults known to them, including parents and grandparents, and others they did not know well or at all came out to support them. There were occasional comments about the protests being “family affairs.” One young mother in Paducah, Kentucky, for example, said she was proud to see her fellow townsmen rally beneath the statue of Chief Paduka, a historical marker in their community. She wanted her mixed-race children to see how her community could come together and tell them, “They are powerful, unique, brave and be unapologetic about who they are and what they stand for.”17 A mother in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania brought her teenage son and his friends to a rally in a public square near a prominent town park. She declared, “I’m so proud.” Another attendee at the event, a white 19-year-old man, said, “This is my girlfriend, who is a black woman. My brother is three years old, and he is a little black boy. I don’t want to have to worry about my girlfriend going to work or my brother growing up and having to be afraid of the police. I’m here to try to make a difference in the world and not have this repeat itself.”18

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Lined up against the protesters in some communities were smaller numbers of white persons who jeered at the protesters or just stood in place and tried to look menacing. It did not appear to bother the protesters who seemed satisfied calling out police misbehavior and decrying racism. For their part, black protesters and observers were surprised at how many white people showed up to protest and give voice to complaints they have had for a long time. They were even less certain how they could use it. Apart from calls for greater police accountability, it was hard to know what ­issues local black residents might raise in the future or which initiatives white ­people would support or take a pass on. Everybody watching, not just uncomfortable white men, would be trying to figure out what to think of the protest and do next. The protests were much more revealing of peoples’ sentiment on broader social or cultural questions such as how welcomed black persons would be in the community, whether whites and blacks would be held to the same standards for how to behave in public, and how accountable different groups were for keeping the town in good working order.19 The sense we made of their words and actions goes something like this. Most people wanted their town to be open to black people. Police officers were expected to behave professionally and most certainly not single out black people for abuse. And people who mistreated black citizens and townsmen should be held accountable for their misdeeds. Local people who disliked the protests and the ostensible reason for staging them made their sentiments clear mostly by what they didn’t do during the protests. White people did not act out as much as they did d ­ ecades ago when black people first showed up in predominantly white neighborhoods and townships. But there was no widespread fighting this time. Most counter-protesters exercised self-restraint in front of their neighbors. Protesters, whose numbers included even more whites than the counter-­protesters, drew a new metaphorical line in the sand that counter-protesters understood, might have groused about, but only occasionally made a little p ­ ushback against. The story conveyed in the words and deeds of the people at the protests contained an important moral about the kind of community they had made and how it measured up to the one they wanted to make in the future. And, again, that story had a socially progressive edge and moral attached to it. The Question of Community Membership

However much or little white people may have welcomed black people in the past, protesters made a strong a bid for blacks to be considered credible members of the community where they were demonstrating. George Floyd was a stand-in for all black persons in this regard. But the bid was just as important for the younger black and white persons who led so many of these

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protests. Counter-protesters made smaller, less demonstrative, but still noteworthy challenges to these claims. In their eyes, who could be considered full-fledged members of the community was still open for debate. But community sentiment, as evidenced by the demonstrators, clearly leaned more toward recognizing the protesters and the people on whose behalf they were demonstrating. The presence of so many young people and parents who brought their children, especially the ones who looked nothing like George Floyd, was noteworthy. Their absence from the ranks of counter protesters was not commented upon in news reports but was just as noteworthy. Had people thought about it, the absence of white mothers and children would have stood in marked comparison to what had happened in many towns and cities a generation or two earlier when white mothers brought their children out to protest the desegregation of their local school. Several news stories did draw attention to the fact that younger white people were no longer willing to let racist practices go unchallenged, a fact that apparently surprised and one imagines quietly pleased some black onlookers. Misplaying by the Rules

To make their bid more credible, protesters frequently paired their obvious “coming out” with equally obvious attempts to play by rules their fellow townsmen had already vetted and certified for how people are supposed to act when they want to make a dramatic public declaration. Demonstrating fidelity to community rules, even as people purposely turned them upside down for a moment or two, is an important way people use to identify each other as credible members of the community. The single most important way protesters made this clear was by working with local police departments to keep their protest peaceful. In many towns, both protest leaders and town officials commented on how well their planning and collaboration had gone. Counter-protesters, whose status as members of the community was not in dispute, made no public a­ ttempt to work with local officials to keep their obvious displeasure with the protests in check. They did this on their own by not acting out in most instances. But when they did act up the police were there to keep the two sides separated. Playing by the rules and sometimes ignoring, bending, or breaking them matters to everyone, even if people do not recognize it or are unwilling to acknowledge the importance of unrest as a culturally approved way to petition their leaders or grieve some action they have already taken. When people are concerned, upset, or shocked by events they do not understand or thought everyone already should have understood, how they respond is limited only by their imagination and experience.

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There are good reasons why experience takes precedence over peoples’ imaginations under such circumstances, and they all have to do with history and the power of customary displays of people’s disconsent. As a m ­ atter of history, people are likely to ignore, bend, or break some previously agreed upon understanding about how to deal with their problems when they face something new or unprecedented. Unclear or unsettled situations challenge those understandings and customary ways of handling community concerns. On those occasions where the misunderstanding is substantial, people struggle to find something they can do that will work. To that end they often find themselves splitting the difference between using past solutions, which probably will not work as well as people hope, and their imaginations, which are less constrained but whose proposals for action are not well tested. Nothing people have invented splits that difference better than popular unrest, which is all about ignoring, bending, or breaking rules until such time as people figure out something else and presumably better and longer lasting to do. Peaceful disruptions to everyday routines are closer to one end of the ignoring, bending, and rule-breaking continuum. Violent disruptions are closer to the other end of that continuum. But in unsettled situations rules are always the first things people put off to the side or, under extreme circumstances, throw out the window. The reason this is not as off-the-wall as it sounds has to do with where our ideas about unrest come from and how practiced we are in using it: history. Unrest works because its form and timing are guided by customs that are well-traveled, tried out, and flexible. In popular unrest we have a customary way to ignore, bend, and break rules so we can deal with unexpected events and troublesome conditions. And, to repeat, nothing works better to alert the wider community there is a problem in search of a solution than a good display of public outrage or concern. Making People Accountable

The other way protesters in smaller towns made their claim for membership in the community more credible was by asserting or reaffirming that everyone needs to be held accountable for what they do and say in public. Given the multi-racial and multi-generational makeup of the protesters, the demand for accountability would have applied not just to powerful, well-to-do, and more well-regarded persons in the community but also to persons who were not. The calling out of Derek Chauvin as a stand-in for all errant police officers and public officials who abuse their authority was the single most powerful message about accountability conveyed in the Black Lives Matter protests. No one missed it. Not the public officials who would soon be rushing to pass new rules about police conduct. And not the counter-protesters whose

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inaction spoke louder than the individual jeers and catcalls a few made from the sidewalk as much larger numbers of children and adults, many of whom they may have known and most of whom looked like them, walked down the middle of the street. Another way public accountability was an important value and part of the story protesters wanted to tell was by bringing more local issues and problems to the attention of their neighbors. Included on this list for different towns were proposed changes to their schools’ curriculum, voting rights, black persons’ mental health, gentrification, black-on-black violence, the ­removal of Confederate statues and other symbols, drug abuse, black men’s respect for black women, the treatment of immigrants, white fragility, and the importance of having an ongoing community dialogue on matters involving race. These were items local people wanted to post on the community’s public bulletin board for future consideration and further action. It should be noted that white adults who did not share these opinions did not remain quiet for long. Only a couple of years after all the Black Lives Matter protests were held, many conservative-leaning white adults would take their resentments to local school debates over diversity training and concerns about curricula that included too many references to the history of racism in the United States. There also were successful attempts to limit ­accessibility and even the presence of books on topics related to race in public libraries. They enjoyed a great deal of success in mobilizing significant political counter initiatives to policies and programs that had been introduced in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. Heated as these local school and library debates and arguments were, and ginned up as they were by Republican office holders and Presidential candidates, none of them turned violent. Well-organized political campaigns with a more reactionary look and feel, like their progressive counterparts, were taking root all over the place. But their sometimes mean look and always heated rhetoric belied their attachment to conventional political activities and more restrained kinds of public fights. Protests in Bigger Cities

In small towns, younger white and black people had a noticeable and perhaps unexpectedly large presence in Black Lives Matter protests. Both the protesters and counter-protesters behaved better than people may have expected for people involved in a protest. Confrontations with counter-protesters rarely were more than shouting matches. In cities, protesting crowds were larger, noisier, and more likely to be challenged by police officers than civilian counter-protesters. The last time white adults were this involved in sensitive racial disputes it was as protesters against school desegregation orders and disputes over black people moving

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into white neighborhoods.20 Whites grudgingly ceded cities and neighborhoods where they had once been dominant but could no longer exclude blacks or scare them away. Large numbers of white people “escaped” to suburban safehouses for a while and have been all but missing in confrontations with fellow black citizens since then. Fights over desegregating schools and neighborhoods gradually cooled down. This left city police departments (and sometimes a state’s National Guardsmen) to keep a sometimes-restive minority population (mostly black but also from other racial minorities) in line. There was nothing new about any of this. The principal mission of the police has always been to maintain public order, especially against the real or imagined threat presented by newcomers and cultural outsiders. It was never to solve crimes, except perhaps for the real and imagined ones committed by newcomers and outsiders. Since the 1960s, the police have proven overzealous and ineffective in carrying out their principal mission in cities. The people being most targeted in cities had become too numerous and assertive to control with force. This is the reason there were more fights with police, looting, and arson associated with Black Lives Matter protests in cities.21 The unrest and violence that happened in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was killed by police officers, and several other cities whose experiences I summarize below, was like what happened in in Ferguson six years earlier. By 2020, the killing of black individuals by police officers had been a longstanding and recognized problem across the country. However, there had been no recent nationwide campaign against such behavior prior to Floyd’s murder. His killing, like that of Martin Luther King’s assassination a half-century earlier, precipitated unrest in cities and towns that had not erupted in violence until then. Some cities, like New York and Portland, had a history of protests and other forms of popular unrest and rioting. Others, like Kenosha, Wisconsin, didn’t. Still others, like St. Louis, had experienced more than a little racial upheaval and agitation but been remarkably free of mass violence since the 1950s. They all had unrest and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Their different histories of unrest and violence notwithstanding, these places had similar expressions of unrest and violence after Floyd’s death: peaceful protests during the day, looting and vandalism of businesses at night, damage to public buildings and monuments, and setting fires in streets or otherwise occupying streets and highways. Few people were killed; but in a couple of cities their number included police officers. A lot of private property was damaged or destroyed. All these actions – what social scientists identify as a “repertoire” in the practice of contentious politics – were on display in these cities and others across the United States. There also were other things, however, that were relatively new to the practice of popular unrest and violence in American cities.

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I note them here but will delve more deeply into each in the last section of the chapter. First, well-organized groups of protesters and counter-protesters fought in public. According to one report out of Washington State, by mid-June of 2020, “there had been 136 instances of paramilitary, far right and armed militia groups or individuals attending anti-police…protests nationwide.”22 Second, there were clean-ups of businesses and government almost immediately after the violence was over and sometimes even as unrest was continuing. Third, there were well-publicized trials for white people and agents of the state after the violence was over. Fourth, word of all events associated with unrest and its aftermath was spread by social media. No one with a cell phone missed what happened or escaped highly charged commentaries about these events. The first three didn’t happen in every city but were noteworthy in the cities where they did. Social media were a crucial part of the story of what happened in every city, just as they had been in the small-town protests. All four were introduced to the American public in Ferguson and/or Charlottesville. All four would play an even more prominent part in the Capitol insurrection and its clean-up. However similar or different the protests in small towns and bigger cities were, big-city and small-town protests both address the same questions about the kind of community and civic culture people are in the process of making. The answers I come up with for both perhaps aren’t as different as most observers might think they should be. But I recognize that the differences are probably still big enough to let people conclude what they already believed was true. Namely, the civic virtues reflected in city life and the customs city people follow do not match up well with those embraced by people who live in small towns. The exception I take to this conclusion is based on how city people more recently have reinvented unrest and used violence in ways reminiscent of how people fought in 17th- and 18th-century cities. Popular unrest today may be just as destructive and, in some cases, maybe more destructive than it was in the past. But it is decidedly less deadly. The reason why has everything to do with the way street brawls between rival groups of white and minority people or newer immigrant populations have largely disappeared in cities. The presence of immigrant and non-white people so close to whites used to be heavily contested but isn’t so much anymore. I am sure these still happen, because even today there are cities whose neighborhood boundaries are contested. But the only bona fide ‘race riots’ I could find happened in New York city in 1976 and 1991. The first one lasted only 10 minutes and involved no more than 100 white and black teenagers who fought each other in New York City’s Washington Square Park.

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Their fight left dozens hurt and one person dead.23 The second, the Crown Heights riot, lasted for three days. It began when two children of Guyanese immigrants were unintentionally struck by a car driven by an Orthodox Jew.24 The greatly diminished presence of fights between people of different races, religions, or national backgrounds speaks to the fact that unrest about who can or cannot be considered a legitimate member of a community happens much less frequently today. People are much less inclined to worry about or challenge the presence of newcomers and outsiders in their city. The kind of unrest we have in cities today is used to clarify how accountable public leaders and different groups should be for what they say and do to each other when they are out in public. I pointed out earlier in the book that violence over the “membership question” was nastier and more deadly than violence that happens when city people fight over the “accountability question.” If our unrest today is more civil and our violence more restrained it is because “membership riots” have largely been replaced by “accountability riots.” The former tends to be more reactionary in character, the latter more progressive. Nevertheless, the continuing relevance of both reactionary and progressive ideas in Black Lives Matter unrest and violence is obvious. Protesters were all about making public leaders more accountable. Counter-protesters were making a not-very-subtle point about the very right of black people and other minorities to be taken seriously. I am dwelling on this point for two reasons. It is historically and politically relevant. American unrest has always had a conservative and at times reactionary bent to it. The other reason for reminding ourselves of this is that it helps put the historical irrelevance and but undeniable political relevance of “Us Too” activism today in its proper place. Aimed at too small and homogeneous pieces of us, “Us Too” activism and newer social movements may leave fewer scars but will have no great cultural legacy to ponder and admire apart from this. They show how much more restrained or civil our public fights have become over questions some people are passionately committed to addressing and answering. Important as these questions are to the people asking them, the answers “Us Too” movements come up with make no lasting mark on our public lives and civic customs. The personality transplants demanded of people by “Us Too” movement activists would invert the natural order of an individual person’s consciousness and make them a better person. A laudable goal for individuals of any color, perhaps. But for black persons, their individual accomplishments would fall woefully short of the making a self-confident and accomplished Black American ethnic group.25 Individuals cannot invert the natural order of a community’s conscience, which is what drew Tocqueville’s sharp eye to how the newly christened

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American people fought over the contradictions built into their way of life. Only groups can. Displays of “rank privilege” by a community’s more esteemed and welloff members were commonplace but challenged only occasionally. The challenges picked up whenever people from a new race, religion or nationality showed up. Fights over the ranking privileges of more established and well thought of people only became a threat to a community’s stability when ­people of the “lower orders” began displaying too much democratic cheekiness. Which happened whenever they spoke and acted in public with the same kind of disregard for the privileges of rank they were being denied. Intermittent displays of their disdain in moments of social unrest and more organized social movements were taken seriously because they showed that the social contradictions built into a community were not unassailable. The dramatically posed possibility that they might be replaced with an entirely different way of running the place and ranking the people in it was scary for the people in charge. There’s absolutely nothing scary about “Us Too” movements, except the rhetoric used by people who oppose them and the limitations they manage to impose on people who want to be given more attention and a bigger piece of public regard. But there is something undeniably annoying about activists who push them, particularly when they manage to elevate other people’s benign indifference and personal obnoxiousness into a serious political concern. “Us Too” movements do not change, much less improve, the customary ways people conduct their business in public or settle disagreements among themselves. They freeze them in place. And when these movements aren’t distracting our attention from problems we have in common, they’re actively discrediting civic virtues and practices that enable different people to become more accommodating in their public dealings with each other. The populist face of “Us Too” movements looks progressive but serves a more reactionary social and political end. Noisy “Us Too” activists make it easy and even commendable to retreat to the comfort and protection afforded by what Tocqueville called our “small private circles.” They discourage rather than encourage people to engage each other in the public arena. Their markedly ethnocentric take on the world, if codified in law and pushed as an expression of people’s right to go their own way, would undermine the resilience of a community’s key institutions and civic rituals. Popular unrest and violence, by comparison, have done a much better job reminding us that we can become more alike and different at the same time without the world coming to an end. They have done this by keeping the focus on how our communities work and how the customs we practice might be amended to give us more time to reckon with a fuller picture of our public hypocrisies and how to work through them together. “Us Too” movements

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afford us the luxury of becoming ever more focused on ourselves and avoiding the much harder work involved in changing our communities. The Question of Community Membership in Big-City Protests

No matter what individuals living in small towns thought about black people, the question of black people’s membership in the community was unsettled as a practical matter in the small towns that had Black Lives Matter protests. That is because the number of black residents was too small to threaten white persons’ social and political dominance. The good feelings participants made for themselves and made with each other would make no lasting change in the way their community was organized and who benefitted from running it. There were serious pieces of “Us Too” stuff in play in small-town Black Lives Matter protests. There was very little if any “Us Too” stuff going on in the Black Lives Matter protests that happened in cities. City people had first wrestled with the problem of accepting black’s membership in the late-19th century and continued working on it right through the first half of the 20th century. By 2020, black peoples’ presence in cities was not open to question, much less being challenged. But exactly where and when during the day they could assume all the rights and duties that come from being fully vetted members of their own community was still up for grabs. In bigger cities, such questions were raised in Black Lives Matter protests in ways they had not been raised since the 1960s. How far the limits of ­unconventional behavior could be pushed. Where protesters could assert such control (if only for a little while). And why they should be held any more accountable for their unruly behavior than the police were questions that both black and white people brought before the public again after George Floyd was murdered. Misplaying by the Rules in Big-City Protests

Big-city protesters and police officers ignored, bent, and broke rules for ­acceptable public behavior that small-town protesters did not ignore, maybe bent a little, but never came close to breaking. The rules that city protesters ignored, bent, and broke are apparent in their repertoire of contentious ­actions which included property destruction and fighting with police officers and out-of-town militia members. The rules ignored, bent, and broken by police officers included striking and tear gassing protesters indiscriminately, shooting them with rubber projectiles, and pushing both troublemakers and non-troublemakers into the same confined areas so they all could be a­ rrested. It didn’t matter that most of the protesters would later be released. The point was to empty the streets of protesters no matter what they were doing.

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I noted at the beginning of this chapter that the behavior of police and other government forces made the situation on the ground worse. The ­longest and most provocative acts of civilian-inspired resistance to public authority and police intervention occurred in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. There, mostly white protesters declared certain parts of the city off limits to any authority except their own and kept it that way for months. Annoying, provocative, and at times violent as these takeovers were, they stood as a counterpoint to what happened in the other cities where the question of who “controlled” public spaces went only hours, at most a few days, or was revisited on a predictable weekday or weekend schedule. For however long city protests lasted or were repeated, though, the people who were involved made a much bigger point of playing by rules that were more flexible and open to being challenged. By no means did city protesters attempt to tear up all the rules by which people customarily played and used to work their way into and out of big public fights. They just had a bigger playbook and were more accustomed to making additions to it and adjustments to the cultural script they had inherited from earlier generations for moments very much like these. The playbooks and scripts used by people in small towns that had Black Lives Matter protests simply weren’t as large or as amended as often or readily as those belonging to city people. Public Accountability in Big-City Protests

Unlike small-town protests where matters having little or nothing to do with the police were added to the list of community concerns that they wanted their leaders to think about, big-city protesters were laser-focused on efforts to make police officers more accountable for their actions. Cutting police budgets was the adult version of taking away part of their allowance. It was payback for excessive policing going back many decades. The shaming of police officers in New York whose misbehavior was photographed by citizens and then published in the New York Times was one way to make them accountable.26 Well-publicized trials of a police officer like Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, who was charged with killing George Floyd, the white men in Georgia who killed Ahmaud Arbery for “jogging while black,” or the 17-year-old white boy who killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin were other dramatic ways of making white people accountable for their misdeeds.27 The flipside of shaming lawbreaking police was the celebration of protesters and counter-protesters in the press and the creation of makeshift memorials to people who were killed during protests or, in Derek Chauvin’s case, as the precipitating event that kicked off the protests. The most notable and perhaps permanent of these was built on the corner where George Floyd was murdered.28

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Absent a physical spot to memorialize, the unrest itself and the clashes with police that were such an integral part of big-city protests could be invoked long into the future as a memorializing event and a warning. Recalling clashes with police, federal agents, and white nationalist groups would become part of the collective memory of the communities where unrest happened, and a legacy for others to consider as they figure out what to do with their future.29 The memory of how the community (or part of it at least) had been mobilized on behalf of “a greater good” could be recounted and rallied around the next time the question of who was accountable to whom was asked, and community members demanded a different answer from the one they had been given up to then. Changes in Rituals to Work Our Way Into and Out of Big Public Fights

Moments we confront unmistakable evidence of our shortcomings and contradictions can be postponed, but they cannot be avoided forever. Fueled more by accidents and incidental screw-ups than a scheduled reckoning of our own misdeeds, people draw upon ritual-rich customs to help them make sense of their flubs and flaws and work their way through moments when mistakes can no longer be ignored. The principal rituals people turn to at such moments are the ones I have called rituals of disconsent. People cannot predict how often they will trip or back their way into an unavoidable cultural reckoning, or the circumstances that will trigger one. There are scientists who think it is possible and believe such knowledge would help them figure out better ways, less destructive and violent ways, for people to work their way out of a mess they made. I am not among them. In this book, I have laid out a much different and downright contrarian view of popular unrest and violence. It is built around the idea that we are not supposed to know when everything goes crazy and bad at the same time. The reckoning we have at such moments wouldn’t be worth the trouble we made for ourselves or become events worth remembering and passing along to future generations if we saw them coming. We are not as far out on a limb at such moments as we imagine, however. Over a long time, where a long time is measured in centuries, we also have created culturally approved and well-practiced rituals to work our way out of trouble. The practice of disconsent is leavened by other rituals we call upon to restore previous cultural understandings and customs, change and reform them, or renew our commitment to changes we already made. In more democratic societies, a greater number and variety of people have a hand in maintaining and amending all these ritualistic ways of making ourselves trouble and working our way out of it. Not all the ways people use to show their disconsent and to restore, renew, or reform their way out

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of big trouble afterward work as well as might wish. They can be amended, dropped, or revisited as circumstances allow or demand. Rituals of disconsent are built around troublemaking strategies every bit as well practiced, if not so well regarded or close to being revered, as the rituals we call upon to clean up the messes we make. The repertoire of strategies – the menu of contentious acts – people used in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests trace their roots back centuries to how people in Western European towns and cities made trouble for each other. What is clear from the unrest and violence in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and Black Lives Matter towns and cities is that people added to or amended the repertoire of actions used to make and get out of big public fights. Novel as they strategies are, they are not so different that they don’t make sense or can’t fit comfortably in the public script people use to address serious problems they have with each other. The four on-the-spot changes people introduced to conflict-making and conflict-reducing strategies observed in these places were listed a couple of pages ago. I return to them now to explore how they fit in the history of contentious social and political gatherings in the United States. A second reason for detailing them here is to foreshadow how they were used in the last and most notorious piece of popular unrest considered in this book: the Capitol insurrection and failed Presidential coup d’état on January 6, 2021. The backdrops for this part of my discussion of Black Lives Matter ­protests and the response to them are Saint Louis and Portland, Oregon. Portland was an obvious choice. The unrest there lasted for months, invited all manner of pushback from federal law enforcers and white nationalist groups, and became a rhetorical punching bag for then-President Donald Trump. What happened in St. Louis and some of the suburbs surrounding it will help round out the picture of how activism in the area had changed since the 2014 unrest in Ferguson. Brawls Between Organized Groups of Protesters and Counter-Protesters

White and black people were understandably upset and angry over the killing of George Floyd. Unlike what happened in the St. Louis area several years earlier when people demonstrated against other police killings, people’s upsettedness was demonstrated in communities across the metropolitan area and on both the Illinois and Missouri sides of the Mississippi River. The response to the killing of George Floyd by people in and around St. Louis was consistent with what happened across the country: non-violent protests in suburbs and small towns; non-violent protests and some violence and property destruction in the city. Such fighting that happened was limited

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to citizens and the police. No white nationalist groups showed up in the city or any of the suburban municipalities that had protests. Clearly, members of groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys chose the cities where they would make an appearance and intimidate local citizens and activists. Members of the Oath Keepers had come uninvited to Ferguson, made a show of walking around with their automatic weapons and military gear, and left when police officials told them they weren’t wanted there. They either weren’t invited back or chose not to make a return appearance in the St. Louis area in 2020. It is worth noting there weren’t enough of these people to make an intimidating appearance in every place they may have wanted to show up in 2020. There were more than enough white and black people to mount protests and pick fights with law enforcement personnel and militia members in all the towns and in every city that had Black Lives Matter protests. As counterprotesters go, militia people were grossly outnumbered all over the country. Portland, Oregon was one of the cities these people made their presence felt. It was a good choice. The civic protesting customs of people in the P ­ acific Northwest are embraced every bit as much by rightwing groups as they are by leftwing groups. As civic cultures go, Portland’s leans shamelessly, even happily, in more progressive directions. Two years before Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, a feature newspaper story about the city made a serious but affectionate point about Portlander’s “culture of resistance,” which the reporter noted, “is indicative of a rare level of civic engagement you don’t find everywhere.”30 Only recently, they had “protested everything from a Shell Oil icebreaker ship bound for the Arctic in 2015…to vaccines.” In a small but telling nod to Portlander’s attachment to the idea community accountability, people had “mounted one of several protests nationwide the day after the 2016 presidential election. Property damage incurred by a splinter group of anarchists made headlines. What was less publicized was the peaceful rally beforehand, and that one of the protest’s organizing groups raised $32,000 to repair the damage they hadn’t caused.” Activism and public demonstrations, messy as they can be, are an integral part of the city’s public life. So, when members of Patriot Prayer – a rightleaning paramilitary group affiliated with white supremacist, white nationalist, and neo-Nazi groups – visited Portland for the third time d ­ uring the summer of 2020, everyone had a good idea for what might happen. These groups had clashed with local activists and Antifa sympathizers before. ­Indeed, the two earlier events had “ended in bloody fistfights and riots, and one counter-protester was sent to the hospital with a skull fracture.”31 Fights between people from different races, backgrounds, religions, and, much less often, social classes were commonplace in 18th and 19th-century towns and cities. It might capture the interest of local politicians and even be

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used to push candidates they approved or issues they wanted to promote. But most unrest grew “organically” from what local people were worried about or trying to do or not have done to people just like them. Popular unrest today has the fingerprints of better-organized groups with rather explicit social and political agendas all over it. Both leftwing and rightwing groups use unrest to promote ideas they believe in and even more often to disparage and beat down the ideas of their opponents. The insistence of Patriot Prayer’s leader to return to Portland had “crystallized a debate about the limits of free speech in an era of stark political division.” His promise to keep returning to Portland until his followers “could express their right-wing views without interference” had led to efforts by “anti-fascists or ‘antifa’…(to organize) anonymously online to confront ­Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys in the streets.” This is precisely what happened in Charlottesville. It would happen again in 2021 in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection. There was another innovation brought to rituals designed to pick and back away from big public fights. It was inspired by the involvement of these same well-organized groups. The willingness and ability of these groups to carry out the threats they made invites comparison to violence instigated by local political parties in 19th-century election campaigns. That kind of unrest was part of “normal” politics in big cities back then. It popped up every election year and quieted down just as quickly when elections were over. The unrest and violence instigated by the likes of the Oath Keepers and Antifa was different, very different. There was nothing “normal” about their politics. They backed no slate of candidates. They weren’t interested in passing legislation or running local governments. They were single-issue interest groups whose only interest was in promoting racism or doing away with racism. The word “compromise” was not in their vocabulary. Their overheated rhetoric and unapologetically aggressive disposition were rightly perceived to be a threat by people who had a longer-term commitment to the city where these groups made brief but disruptive appearances. Leaders in places like Charlottesville and Portland had to reconsider the legal wall between provocative speech and actions these outsiders had purposely breached with their violence. Circumstances had made it impossible for town leaders to ignore how easily and willfully organizations had abused “free speech” and crossed the line into making violence. Threatening speech in these places was an undeniable predicate to violence. The metaphorical violence threatened by these groups wasn’t in the same league as looting, destroying public property, or killing people, perhaps. But the damage done with ugly and threatening speech had proven to be more than metaphorical. When hundreds of people stand up in a crowded movie theater, wave lit tiki torches, and scream “fire,” no one can afford the luxury any longer of doubting they really mean to burn the place

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down. Other people stuck in the theater with them thought the torch wavers had to be stopped, banished from the town, and kept from bothering them by being sent to prison. It is important to remind ourselves that the inspiration for reexamining the connection between provocative speech and unruly actions didn’t come from calm deliberation. It was violent unrest that made leaders reconsider the principled line they had drawn and long defended between obnoxious but legal speech and destructive public behavior. The violence that people in Charlottesville helped to make inspired public leaders to change their laws. In doing so, popular unrest had served a larger public good. Other elements of disconsent Portlanders practiced in 2020 made it clear they hadn’t lost touch with Tocqueville’s understanding of what a good ritual of inversion should look like or their sense of humor. When confronted by more powerful and heavily armed adversaries, they openly mocked and tried to disarm them with acts of resistance that parodied their opponents’ illprepared but theatrically heavy-handed tactics.32 There was the “Wall of Moms” who stood between protesters and police, much as ministers did in Ferguson. They were backed up by the “PDX Dad Pod” who brought leaf blowers to clear the area of teargas and encouraged fellow Portlanders to buy additional leaf blowers for the protest to support local businesses. Not to be outdone, a “guy named Lorenzo…came out one night grilling ribs for the protesters.” Though Lorenzo was tear gassed and eventually shut down by the police, “a local collective called the The Witches created a fund-raiser for him while different houseless people helped to turn Riot Ribs into something bigger,” with Lorenzo setting up job interviews for them and find places for them to shower. Cleaning Up After Unrest and Violence

What sense local people make of unrest and violence is part of what goes into cleaning up the mess that was made. In the case of Black Lives Matter unrest in the Saint Louis area, people extended the “invented tradition” of clearing broken glass and helping local businesses reopen after a night of unrest that had been invented in Ferguson only a few years earlier. This practice was copied in other cities that had violence come with their Black Lives Matter protests. Local people viewed their small business owners as neighbors rather than occupiers and treated them accordingly. Months of unrest and violence in Portland inspired a different kind of clean-up and reckoning among the people who had participated and observed what happened.33 People worried about the longer-term meaning and impact of the protests on their city. White leaders of the protests questioned whether their “main focus” had been supporting Black Lives Matter or simply opposing the presence of federal officers in their city. New York Times

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reporter Mike Baker wrote that black leaders in the city, worried “that what should be a moment for racial justice in Portland could be squandered by violence.” For their part, “business owners supportive of change have been left demoralized by the mayhem the protests have brought.” And meanwhile, the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who had been “despised by many of those in the streets, has now been fighting to have federal officers leave them alone.” People in more rural parts of the state, reporter Robert Fuller wrote, were frightened by the unrest in Portland and wondered if it might spread into their communities. One local gun shop “sold 4.5 million rounds of ammunition…(when) the pandemic drove up sales. Demand for guns and ammunition soared even further…when the protests in Portland turned violent in the weeks after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis.” There is a good reason why unrest, especially violent unrest, lasts only briefly. Frankly, it is difficult to sustain for long periods of time. More importantly, on the rare occasion it lasts a long time, which happened in Portland, it really can mess with a community’s ability to focus on the important statement people were trying to make. What people focus on instead is the violence everyone had a hand in making, which helps no one except groups whose principal interest is in frightening people and political candidates who want to turn people’s fear into votes. “Accountability Trials” for White People and Police Officers

Perhaps the most startling innovation made to American rituals of disconsent and reconciliation has been the way white people and police officers were held accountable for their illegal and discreditable actions in matters involving race. Most injustices cannot be undone. But criminal proceedings can provide a measure of restorative justice for aggrieved people and the larger community. It was the case in Saint Louis and its suburbs that unrest and violence happened when white police officers killed black boys and men and were not punished. In more recent protests where police officers behaved in less than commendable ways but didn’t kill anyone, they were charged with abusing their powers and punished for their misdeeds. Even more aggressive steps were taken against white people who went to Charlottesville with the intention of intimidating and beating up local citizens. The members of white nationalist and antisemitic groups were arrested on the spot or were tracked down and arrested later, tried, and imprisoned for what they did. Restorative justice was at work there too. In the most celebrated of these “accountability trials,” police officers in Minneapolis were tried, found guilty, and imprisoned for the part they played in murdering George Floyd. White people and police officers in other cities also were called out for their misdeeds during Black Lives Matter protests.

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Their public trials led to convictions and prison sentences for some of them too.34 This was an unprecedented change. Social Media as a Mostly Bad News Delivery System

The mobilization of people to participate in Black Live Matter protests across the country and the globe occurred quickly. It could not have been accomplished without the assistance of countless individuals sharing word of these events with a great many people, some they knew and many others they did not know. People used social media platforms such as Twitter to spread word about their own Black Lives Matter protests and violence and to make sense of what was happening in other places where unrest was occurring. They were the same platforms that activists had used to discuss what was happening in Ferguson. And what was shared on these platforms would make an oversized contribution to law enforcement agencies who used them to track down people who committed violence so they could be held accountable for their misdeeds. Researchers interested in one or the other of these topics tried to make sense of the vast amount of information gathered from people’s messaging, but it was not easy. Authors didn’t get much further than cataloging some ­basic themes in the messages that had been shared in real-time by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of participants and observers. Their research would best be characterized as exploratory, their conclusions speculative.35 As in much of the research and theorizing about rumors that people spread during an episode of collective behavior, the presumption was that some of the information shared over social media was accurate and some would better be described as “fake news.” Researchers spent a lot of time figuring out how protesters and counter protesters “framed” their respective narratives about the unrest and violence. The story lines were more positive or negative, depending on whose side you were on. There also was writing in which researchers wrote about police violence, movement tactics, and all the ways public authorities used social media to surveille and control what protesters were doing. I found no research or news reporting where the surveillance value of the analyzed messages was viewed favorably, especially for the unrest that happened in Portland.36 My guess is that criticism for using social media messaging this way will soften when the messages being analyzed belonged to rioters at the Capitol. But I have yet to see any research to back up my hunch on that matter. The research on social media relevant to the Capitol Insurrection, which is described in the next chapter, certainly bears that out. I found two findings by Alvin Tillery, whose work was cited above, particularly useful. He noted that BLM organizations generated more tweets

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that framed the movement as a struggle for individual rights than ones that utilized frames about gender, racial, and LGBTQ identities. He also noted that Black Lives Matter activists had urged their followers to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention less frequently than they encourage other political behaviors. Tillery’s first observation is in keeping with what sociologists have pointed out about the “new social movements” that arose at the end of the 1960s. They were beginning to make a turn away from collective concerns about gender and race. Social movements, instead, were becoming more interested in people’s individual rights and sensitivities. At the same time, he observed that people in Black Lives Matter protests were encouraging participants to become more involved in conventional political activities. Taken together, these observations are consistent with what I said earlier about the rise of “Us Too” movements and the turn toward more restrained forms of social unrest and contentious public fights. People in towns that had Black Lives Matter protests made quite explicit comments about white people needing “not (to) make (protests) about white guilt or co-opting a movement.” Social commentary and criticism, it was reasoned, should focus principally on “black and brown” voices.37 Social media were crucial in promoting such understandings. They also helped people more supportive of counter protesters to identify and work with each other. People have long wondered and fretted about these informal communication chains in moments of collective unrest and how accurate the information being shared was. The wantonly inaccurate information spread by foreign organizations trying to increase the discord between different Americans made this situation even more problematic. People made stuff up to make the situation worse. The sharing of false information about Black Lives Matter protests begs comparison to the kind of hysterically contagious sharing of information about non-existent bug bites sociologists found in a North Carolina fabric mill. The sociologists discovered how the “fake news” about bug bites did not spread throughout the whole factory but mostly across rooms where workers had friends who had been bitten. The accuracy of the information was irrelevant to how this piece of collective behavior unfolded. The accuracy of the information may have been irrelevant. But there was something more important to understand about this expression of worker disconsent than how false information had been spread among friendly coworkers. It was that they temporarily turned the world inside the factory upside down by using a culturally approved way to make a big public show of their upsettedness and get away with it. These people weren’t pretending. They really believed they’d been bitten by a nasty bug. What neither the people in the factory nor the sociologists ever figured out was that the whole bug thing only worked because both the

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workers and the owners drew on a customary way of backing away from a fight over employer and employee rights and turning it into time out. Some Concluding Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Protests (and Violence)

There were several instances when people described their Black Lives ­Matter protest as “doing community.” They were right. Protesters and counter-­ protesters made moral claims about what being a credible community member looked like, the values they should embrace, and how their behavior should reflect those values when they were out in public. Black Lives Matter protests were an occasion for teasing out which standards would be embraced in the future and for affirming why changing their standards might be a good and necessary thing to do. It is how people like those in Delhi and all the other places that had protests used them to help figure stuff out. Americans have had more than a few disquieting and unsettling racial moments to deal with in the past decade that required us “to figure stuff out.” The main point made here is that however well or poorly Americans have worked our way through such moments in the past we seem to have come to a clearer understanding about how we want that part of our world to look in the future. We are ready to write a different story, and that includes how we will police ourselves. The moral arc of our new story was apparent in the Black Lives Matter protesters and, by way of a comparison, in how different they were from the Capitol Hill insurrection on January 6, 2021. The crucial moral of the Black Lives Matter protests is that we have more in common culturally than we recognize and acknowledge. Black people more like George Floyd than Martin Luther King have earned the privilege and obligations that go along with being full-fledged members of the community where they live. They deserve the same public regard and treatment white people have long taken for granted. (Here is where the protests come in. They affirm a new community standard for the fair treatment of black persons by people granted public authority and power.) By comparison, the moral of the story embedded in the Capitol insurrection is that our politics today are all about keeping us divided and not being held accountable to anyone except your kind of people. The ire of the insurrectionists was directed at legislators who do not appreciate how marginal and culturally irrelevant white people supposedly have become in their own country. White people made their displeasure clear in their attempts to reinstate Donald Trump as President by disregarding votes made by persons who lived in urban areas with lots of black people. It also was made clear by their rejection of every decision made by courts that disagreed with what they wanted.

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The insurrectionists staged their four-hour rebellion after every attempt to redress their grievances had been publicly and legally rejected. The unrest they fomented was supposed to reaffirm an older community standard and storyline that had kept their fellow black citizens legally marginalized until the mid-1960s. That older community standard also was rejected. The popular unrest reflected in the Black Lives Matter protests and Capitol Hill insurrection raised important cultural questions about the people Americans are and the kind of community Americans want to make in the future. It also gave us a clear cultural answer: all kinds of Americans, including more white ones than at any time in the past, have publicly declared they no longer buy trumped-up claims of racial superiority and inferiority and will not tolerate the use of force to reimpose them. Smaller Communities Sampled for This Chapter

Florence and Anniston, Alabama Russelville and El Dorado, Arkansas Safford and Nogales, Arizona Aspen and Alamosa, Colorado Carrolton, Dacula, and Lawrenceville, Georgia Decorah and Ottumwa, Iowa Emporia and Liberal, Kansas Belfast and Lewiston, Maine Aberdeen and Pierre, South Dakota Covington and Winchester, Tennessee Issaquah and Shoreline, Washington Morgantown and Clarksburg, West Virginia Nogales and Safford, Arizona Florence and Anniston, Alabama Notes 1 Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, June 13, 2022. “Locals arrested, charged in planned Idaho riot.” Jacob Barker; The New York Times, July 3, 2022. “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” Pamela Paul; The New York Times, July 5, 2022. “Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next.” Katherine Stewart; The New York Times, June 27, 2022. “In Florida, California and Beyond: Both Sides Mobilize Over Abortion.” Kate Zernike; The New York Times, June 26, 2022. “Pride March in New York Infused With New Sense of Urgency.” Matthew Haag, Chelsia Marcius, and Lauren McCarthy. 2 https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-­americanew-data-for-summer-2020/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/05/ nearly-all-black-lives-matter-protests-are-peaceful-despite-trump-narrativereport-finds; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killedprotests-political-unrest-acled

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3 The New York Times, July 28, 2020. “From the Start, Federal Agents Demanded a Role in Suppressing Anti-Racism Protests.” Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sergio O ­ lmos, Mike Baker, and Adam Goldman. 4 Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2021. “Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Forceful on Jan. 6, Privately in Turmoil.” Rebecca Ballhaus, Khadeeja Safdar, and Shalini Ramachandran. 5 Andrew O’Hehir. “Protest in a small town: Black Lives Matter comes to rural America – and it matters.” Salon, June 15, 2020 [Online]. Available at https:// www.salon.com/2020/06/15/protest-in-a-small-town-black-lives-matter-comesto-rural-america–and-it-matters/ 6 Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 7 Wikipedia (2020) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Floyd_protests_ in_the_United_States. See also ‘2020–21 United States racial unrest’. https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%9321_United_States_racial_unrest. 8 The New York Times, July 3, 2020. “Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history.” L. Buchanan, Q. Bui, and J. Patel. 9 “Vandalism, looting after Floyd’s death sparks at least $1 billion in damages: report.” The Hill. September 17, 2020; https://www.axios.com/2020/09/16/riotscost-property-damage. The 1992 Los Angeles riot, where insured losses came in a close second, was far and away the largest sum lost in any single event in U.S. history. 10 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-28/antifa-boogaloo-extremists-at-usfloyd-protests/12388260 11 Buchanan, Bui, and Patel, op. cit. 12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_removed_­ during_the_George_Floyd_protests; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_ Confederate_monuments_and_memorials; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent Sam 13 D’Arcy, S., Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest Is Good for ­Democracy (London: ZED Books, 2013); Davis, Susan, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Delgado, Melvin, Celebrating Urban Community Life: Fairs, Festivals, Parades, and Community Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Tilly, Charles and Sydney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 14 Collins, Randal, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Nassauer, A., Situational Breakdowns: Understanding Protest Violence and Other Surprising Outcomes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 15 Here are a few of the local news accounts we found. W. Corona. June 3, 2020 “Carrollton police officers dance with protestors during rally.” Retrieved January 13, 2021, from https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/carrolton-police-officers-dance-with-protestors-during-rally/T6HPEDFD3FG5BE3FOHVFA7DAGM/; C. Cruz. “Peaceful protest in downtown Lawrenceville Monday night following death of George Floyd ends in prayer.” June 2, 2020. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/local/peaceful-protest-in-downtown-lawrenceville-monday-night-following-death-of-george-floyd-ends-in-prayer/ article_69715722-a42f-11ea-a903-5328ab9d0b1c.html; Hettrick, D. (June 7, 2020) Peaceful and uplifting march’ draws 4,000 people to Shoreline’s Black Lives Lost protest. Shoreline Area News. Retrieved from https://www.shorelineareanews.com/2020/06/ peaceful-and-uplifting-march-draws-4000.html; J. Massara. (July 15, 2020) “Want to Protest? Get A Permit: Lawrenceville Police.” Retrieved January 13, 2021, from https://patch.com/georgia/dacula/want-protest-get-permit-lawrenceville-police

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16 Pennsylvania Capitol-Star. June 3, 2020. ‘People want to stand up for what’s right’: in Wilkes-Barre, teens raise their voices in peaceful protest’. Patrick Abdalla; E. Moscow-Pullman Daily News. July 13, 2020. ‘It’s not over,’ protesters vow’. E. Dennis; Time, June 4, 2020. ‘Protests are being held in small cities and towns across the U.S. – and young people are leading the charge’. M. Gajanan. https://time.com/5847228/george-floyd-nationwide-protests/; The New York Times. August 28, 2020. ‘What Black Lives Matter has revealed about small-town America’. C. Robertson; J. Shuler, ‘Can the white people of small-town America get behind the movement for black lives?’ New Republic, July 2, 2020. 17 CNN, June 6, 2020. “Black Lives Matter protests aren’t just happening in big ­cities. They’re also in America’s small towns.” Alisha Ebrahimji. 18 Abdalla, op.cit.; Steve Mocarsky, “Protests for Black Lives Matter continue in Wilkes-Barre.” [email protected] 19 Monti, Daniel, The American City (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 20 Hinton, Elizabeth, America on Fire (New York: Liveright Publishers, 2021). 21 Vanessa Williamson, Kris-Stella Trump, and Katherine Einstein, “Black Lives Matter: Evidence that Police-Caused Deaths Predict Protest Activity.” Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 16 (2) (2018): 400–415. 22 High Country News, July 27, 2020. “Patriot militia groups mobilize during a deadly pandemic and massive protests.” Anna V Smith. At the time, militia members in Washington State used Facebook to find volunteers to help with a food drive” and also were “collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to repeal Washington’s comprehensive sex education law.” Other anti-LGBTQ+ groups were backing the same repeal effort. 23 The New York Times, December 22, 2022. “‘The Only People They Hit Were Black’: When a Race Riot Roiled New York.” Andrew Meier. 24 New York Daily News, August 23, 2001. “Beep Honor Peach Coalition: Crown Heights leaders reflect on 10-year milestone.” Such fights have a lot in common with “turf wars” between rival gangs of young people who live in contiguous neighborhoods or on contiguous blocks of the same neighborhood. Such fights used to be commonplace and probably still are in many cities. They are not counted among acts we would call “civil disturbances” for several reasons. Notable among them is that these fights often happen between members of the same racial or ethnic population who are members of rival gangs, each of which claims to control what goes on in their small territory including criminal activities taking place on “their” blocks. In his early work, Charles Tilly would have called such fights “primitive outbursts” because they had no social or political significance. He also saw such outbursts as relics that would eventually be overshadowed by reactionary and progressive outbursts that made some kind of social or political claims. In this book, I would consider them a subset of reactionary contentious gatherings which are intended to lock in place a neighborhood or city’s current social and political boundary lines. The connection between gangs and their area’s political organizations and leaders would support such a declaration. See: Robert Vargas, Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Interesting to consider are the parallels between such fights and the much more politically conscious battle lines between groups of protesters and counter-protesters who fought during Black Lives Matter protests. There was nothing “primitive” about these battles. They fought over their very different progressive and reactionary views of what the city’s social and cultural landscape should look like and who should shape it. 25 Christopher Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 42. 26 New York Times, July 15, 2020. “Only 4 NYPD Cops Have Been Disciplined So Far for Violence Against Protesters.” Scott Shackford.

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27 The New York Times, April 28, 2021. “3 Indicted on Federal Hate Crime Charges in Ahmaud Arbery Shooting.” Katie Bonner and Will Wright. 28 The New York Times, June 1, 2020. “How a Minnesota Bail Fund Raised $20 Million.” Jonah Engel Bromwich; The New York Times, June 2, 2020. “‘He Could Have Been My Brother’: Women’s Voices in the Protests.” Emma Goldberg; The New York Times, July 2, 2020. “Thousands Join N.Y.C. Bike Protests: ‘It’s Like Riding in the Cavalry’.” Troy Closson and Sean Piccoli; The New York Times, August 7, 2020. “They Were Arrested During the Protests. Here’s What Happened Next.” Ali Watkins; The New York Times, August 29, 2020. “‘Enough Is Enough’: New Racial Justice Leaders Rise in Kenosha.” John Eligon; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 25, 2020. “Kenosha shooter’s lawyers portray him as a ‘patriot’.” Bernard Condon. 29 James Werstch and Henry Roediger, “Collective memory: Conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches,” Memory. Vol. 16 (3) (2008): 318–326; Michael Ian Borer, “From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time, Place, and Urban Redevelopment,” Symbolic Interaction. Vol. 33 (1) (2010): 96–114. 30 Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, October 21, 2018. “A Guide to Portland Beyond the Birds and Beards.” Megan Burbank. 31 The New York Times, August 2, 2018. “Right-wing, ‘anti-fascist’ groups clash in Oregon.” Manuel Valdes and Gillian Flaccus. 32 New York Times, July 17. 2020. “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland.” Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs; The New York Times, July 17, 2020. “50 Nights of Unrest in Portland.” Charlie Warzel; The New York Times, July 18, 2020. “Federal Officers Deployed in Portland Didn’t Have Proper Training, D.H.S. Memo Said.” Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Young; The New York Times, July 25, 2020. “Federal Agents envelop Portland Protest, and City’s Mayor, in Tear Gas.” Mike Baker; https:// www.newsweek.com/portland-dads-leaf-blowers-join-wall-moms-blow-backtear-gas-police-1519673; The New York Times, September 8, 2020. “Inside the Battle for Downtown Portland,” Kate Conger and Derek Watkins; https://www. npr.org/2021/08/20/1029625793/black-lives-matter-protesters-targeted 33 Conger and Watkins, Ibid.; The New York Times, July 21, 2020. “Chaotic Scenes in Portland as Backlash to Federal Deployment Grows.” Mike Baker; The New York Times, September 5, 2020. “100 Days of Protest: A Chasm Grows Between Portland and the Rest of Oregon.’ Thomas Fuller. 34 The New York Times, December 10, 2021. “Self-Proclaimed Proud Boys Member Gets 10 Years for Violene at Portland Protests.” Michael Levinson. Well more than 100 persons were tried and convicted of “hate crimes” in the United States ­between 2019 and 2023. Not all of them were instances of anti-black or antisemitic violence; and these certainly weren’t the first hate crimes for which Americans had been punished for committing. https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crimescase-examples. By 2020, however, white people and police officers were no longer being given a pass when they mistreated black people and other minorities. 35 Alvin Tillery, “What Kind of Movement is Black Lives Matter? The View from Twitter,” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Vol. 4 (2019): 297–323; Eyako Heh and Joel Wainwright, “No privacy, no peace: Urban Surveillance and the movement for Black lives,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City. Vol. 3 (2) (2022): 121–141; Rashawn Ray, Melissa Brown, Neil Fraistat, and Edward Summers. “Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown on Twitter: #BlackLivesMatter, #TCOT, and the evolution of collective identities” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 40. (11) (2017): 1797–1813; Marcia Mundt and Karen Ross, “Scaling ­Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter.” Social Media + Society. Vol. 4 (4) (2018). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118807911;

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Darius Karl, “Black Lives Matter: An Autoethnographic Account of the Ferguson, Missouri, Civil Unrest of 2014.” Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict. (2016): 6–20; Jelani Ince, Fabio Rojas, and Clayton Davis, “The social media response to Black Lives Matter: how Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 40 (11) (2017): 1814–1830; Ryan J. Gallagher, Andrew Reagan, Christopher Danforth, and Peter Dodds, “Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.” PlosOne. Vol. 13 (4) (2018). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0195644; Nakita Carney, “All Lives Matter, but so Does Race: Black Lives Matter and the Evolving Role of Social Media.” Humanity and Society. (2016): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160597616643868; Catherine Langford and Montené Speight, “#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possibilities.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric. Vol. 5 (3/4) (2015): 78–89. 36 https://www.streetroots.org/news/2020/09/23/law-enforcement-scours-social-media-protesters-are-catching; https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read. cfm?id=301665; https://www.newsweek.com/portland-riot-protest-george-floyd1517678; https://www.portland.gov/ipr/news/2022/4/12/lessons-learned-citys-­ response-protests-exposed-vulnerabilities-portlands-police; https://www.voanews. com/a/report-feds-gathered-intel-on-portland-protesters/6810606.html 37 Shuler, op.cit.

8 JANUARY 6

The idea of transforming America into something closer to a white ­Christian caliphate than a constitutional democracy might have worked out better for members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other white nationalist ­organizations on January 6, 2021, except for two things. Their insurrection needed to last more than four hours and not be overshadowed by a coup d’état led by a man who didn’t mind comparing himself to God.1 A great many Americans with strong evangelical beliefs had bought into it. Or at least they showed no reluctance to ignore some of their Christian teachings so they could hitch a ride with other Americans whose sense of b ­ eing left behind, left out, and ignored had opened them to the illiberal appeals of Donald Trump. They were among the people who were called to the Capitol to provide the muscle for his attempted coup d’état. But they weren’t the principal instigators of violence on January 6, 2021. That honor belonged to hundreds of people claiming membership in some of the very organizations that had made increasingly louder reactionary noises in Ferguson, Charlottesville, many of the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and in anti-vaccine campaigns. Their attempt to foment an insurrection against the government of the United States failed, though certainly not for lack of trying. In the wake of their failure, much attention has been paid to how close they came to achieving what they set out to do, what had brought us to the point that something like this could have happened, and what might be done to ensure it never happens again. These surely are important matters deserving all the serious attention they have received. They are not my principal concern here, however. I am more DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-9

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interested in putting the events of January 6, and what preceded and ­followed them, in a larger historical and cultural context. Right now, I imagine there are people, perhaps a good many people, thinking about our next insurrection, eager to bring it on or stop it. Of course, nothing I write, or anyone writes, will keep them from their planning or plotting. What I hope to do here is provide some insights into why the ­Capitol ­insurrection and Presidential coup d’état accomplished no more than so many other dramatic and unnerving but less consequential moments of popular ­unrest and violence had before them. These twin outrages tested the resilience of important institutions but ended up reinforcing their legitimacy instead. Aside the from the audacity of their effort, there was absolutely nothing new in the story of rioters, would-be insurrectionists, coup d’état plotters, and other simulated rebellion-throwers accomplishing the exact opposite of what they had expected and wanted to happen. Rebellious rhetoric and lessthan-convincing rebellious behavior have been at the heart of popular unrest in America for 250 years. One word captures much of their appeal and real success. Surprise! My use of that word is no glib putdown of their ambitions. It is a reminder of what I said at the beginning of the book. Popular unrest is a surprise when it happens, rarely turns out the way people hoped it would, and, as I just said, afterward finds the rest of us scratching our heads trying to figure out what just happened and what to do next, so it won’t happen again. It would be easy to say that anyone remotely familiar with the history of social unrest in the United States could have seen the abrupt end of the Capitol insurrection and coup d’état coming. But since few of us are, and I’ve already confessed to being surprised by what happened on January 6, 2021, it came as a great relief when the events of the day didn’t turn out as horribly as they might have. But this is a retrospective study, not just of the events leading up to and following what happened on January 6, 2021, but of the way Americans have used unrest and violence to figure stuff out for more than 250 years. And what our history tells us is that is exactly how momentary disruptions to a community’s or country’s “normal order” are supposed to turn out. This is the public service ritualized rebellions perform. They alert leaders that something has gone very wrong, and they need to do something to fix it. The surprise is a big part of the social good that ritualized rebellions do for the rest of us who, again, are left off to one side scratching our heads trying to figure out why people made so much public trouble. Simulated rebellions make people step back and consider how they might address whatever problem people were so worked up about that they thought taking to the street and making a big public fuss was necessary. The reassuring

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upside to such momentary outbursts and especially to the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup d’état is that these events condemn us to continuing a dialogue about the kind of people Americans aim to become. The endlessly annoying and messy part is that we will likely have to work our way through many more moments of popular unrest and violence like the ones discussed in this book to get there. This is just how Americans sometimes talk to each other and argue among themselves when they can’t think of anything else to say or cannot imagine what else needed to be said. Be that as it may, the January 6 insurrectionists, much to their chagrin and obvious surprise, didn’t have the muscle or institutional support they needed to finish what they started. This is best illustrated by their failure to capture any of the legislators they wanted to put on public trial and their inability to stop the counting of electoral votes that confirmed Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter that they tried hard. It only means that as hard as they tried, and despite all the help they got from the sitting President of the United States to tip the scales in their favor, at the end of the day they couldn’t pull off what they set out to do. What didn’t happen at the Capitol insurrection and Presidential coup d’état matters more than what happened. The mess left behind by the people who breached the Capitol is the most salient clue to what was really going on. Rioters always leave messes behind. Successful insurrectionists would have memorialized their mess afterward. Absolutely no one, to the best of my knowledge, has tried to celebrate much less memorialize the Capitol insurrection and failed coup d’état. There has been a great deal of soul searching and wondering out loud, but no commemorating. Were Donald Trump re-elected President of the United States and had plenty of time to calculate such an event from a luxury prison suite in the Atlanta area, there might still be a commemoration. But just like the masses he called out to protest his indictments who didn’t show up, a commemoration played out before supporters at the Washington Mall but surrounded by many more non-supporters would provide ironic testimony to what contemporary rituals of restoration look like. Make excuses for the Capitol insurrection and failed coup d’état? Of course, yes. Try to pretend it never happened or wasn’t a big deal? Again, yes. Throw a big party every January 6 from that point on? I’m thinking not. Doing their best to run in the opposite direction ever since January 6, 2021, much as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley did on the day of the riot, would be Republican legislators and party officials who had tried to turn the tallying of electoral college votes to their political advantage. They had already made their complicity clear by not speaking up on behalf of rioters

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being tried for their crimes.2 Already well past believing the former President was as good as his word, many of the January 6 rioters he wouldn’t end up pardoning would not be surprised by another show of non-support by ­Republican legislators.3 In 2023, more than two years after the insurrection and coup d’état, some Republican legislators continued to deflect attention from their involvement in the events of January 6, 2021, insisting that they too were only following the orders of their Commander in Chief. Some of the hundreds of people who have already been tried and convicted for aiding and abetting the insurrection and coup d’état have had a change of heart. Before being walked out of the courtroom to begin serving their sentence, a few tearily acknowledged the election hadn’t been stolen and they were duped.4 It may be that the criminal indictments against Donald Trump and the four trials where the evidence behind them will be argued over will help reduce all this dissonance, but I think that unlikely. Something closer to a political palate cleansing or an even bigger gag-inducing moment is more likely to happen in the 2024 Presidential election. All elections are consequential. But the one coming up in 2024 will be a real test of whether Americans want to renew their commitment to making a more open and accommodating society or restore the country to a state in which some kinds of Americans are more welcomed and highly regarded, while others are openly disparaged and mistreated. That second world is the one Donald Trump didn’t have the chance to finish delivering in 2020. There will be early signs of which way the American people are wanting to go – toward renewal or restoration – by how well the two sides mobilize their supporters for the upcoming election. It happens that mobilizing a community is one of the three principal ways in which Americans have historically dealt with troubling displays of unaccustomed or unwanted behavior, like an insurrection or coup d’état.5 By 2023, several state legislatures had already taken steps to mobilize their Republican majorities to pass legislation that make voting harder to do and remove officials who disagree with them. This, in turn, was energizing Democratic activists to counter such initiatives.6 The other two ways Americans historically have dealt with the violations of accepted customs and norms by their fellow citizens is by shaming them or removing them from the community, for a while and sometimes for the rest of their life. Americans have made particularly effective use of public punishments and shaming to show their contempt for people who violated their standards for good behavior in this case. They may do even more shaming and punishing of the people who instigated the insurrection and coup d’état before the next election. Historically, in its most extreme expression, people use extra-legal means to hunt down and kill people for their misdeeds. Popular in communities whose government is not particularly effective or responsive, “vigilante

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justice” is a much rougher version of what crowds do when they make their opinion clear on a matter that bothers them. This was the kind of “vigilante justice” the people who tried to take over the Capitol had in mind but didn’t have the wherewithal to pull off. They were not as serious as they had made themselves out to be or imagined themselves to be. Nothing close to vigilante justice will happen at the trials of public officials who assisted Donald Trump’s attempted coup d’état. Unlike what happened in ancient Greece, the institutional rituals associated with trials in the United States today make no provision for this kind of extra-legal activity. But the tip off to which way Americans want the trials to go of leaders who misbehaved was already being revealed in the early trials of the people who stormed the Capitol. If they had been treated leniently, it would have meant Americans were inclined to restore older civic values and make outsiders and newcomers feel unwelcome. If they were punished more severely, it would mean Americans were looking to renew more congenial ties to each other and rejecting older and less accommodating ways of treating newcomers and outsiders. As of 2023, it appeared that American courts were not disposed to treating the Capitol rioters and coup d’état enablers leniently. There was no opposition to these decisions from most American citizens. There was no caterwauling or gnashing of teeth over the public shaming to which arrested and tried rioters were subjected. The American public assented to their public humiliation.7 Some of the convicted would-be insurrectionists did too. Some participants in the events of January 6, remained defiant, even in the face of evidence about what they had said or done in the Capitol assault and coup d’état or in promoting the idea that there had been a great deal of cheating in voting. The groups to which they belong are still out there. Individual members are still making threats.8 I am not surprised by any of this. What I find striking was the amount of self-criticism and public reflection some of the rioters shared with their fellow citizens, the part of public shaming where the guilty people stand up and acknowledge the mistakes they made. I don’t know how much good these confessions did for the people making them. But I have little doubt they will serve as a mightily important counterpoint to the self-serving comments more prominent leaders continued to make about themselves and what they did in the run-up to their trials. The difference might not matter much for those of us who lived through January 6, 2021. We watched it unfold in “real time.” However, the juxtaposition of what former public leaders said with the words some of their followers used to describe their own behavior during the insurrection would make compelling reading in a civics class. Trying to make sense of all the contradictory information that swirled around these events would be a great deal harder without the words of the people who made heartfelt confessions.

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The spectacle of the trials might fade once they are over, if only because no one involved would have found these moments edifying enough to want to celebrate them year after year. The memory of their own and others’ actions is something people would want to forget. But those public confessions are an entirely different matter. They are proof of the greater good that can come from a public trial over a lost cause in which some regular Americans showed greater dignity in defeat than the leaders who goaded them into sacrificing themselves. For their part, the officials who egged them on are a good example of why elites worked hard to remove themselves from public trials where their misdeeds were subjected to public scrutiny and rebukes. Their public trials over election fraud and public unrest could turn into the cultural equivalent of a “one off” moment, something that would pass in our civic lifetime. Or it could turn out to be another important sign that popular unrest is returning to its origin as a ritual of restoration in which crowds brought the community together after their leaders failed to perform their duties. Whatever happens, it is unlikely that disgraced government leaders will have to forfeit their lives to make amends. This didn’t happen to elites in Greece, and it won’t happen in the United States today. There is a much better chance, I think, that the trials will leave them as financially bankrupt, which would be a nice ironic touch the ancient Greeks would have admired. There is another part of the cultural reckoning over the Capitol insurrection and coup d’état that has yet to happen. It involves addressing the question about why these actions failed so quickly and spectacularly. I imagine the Greeks would have sorted all this out at the trial, and that may happen in the trials of our former leaders as well. More than two years after the insurrection and coup d’état, however, we are still too caught up in doling out accountability demerits to have thought much about it. The only way this matter has come up so far is in relation to reforms that have been made to the way law enforcement agencies plan to respond to such threats in the future.9 A third step in our cultural reckoning – the one where we renew our commitment to electoral customs and the federal government’s integrity – won’t come up again until the 2024 elections. And many citizens may not like the way this one turns out. There is a chance the upcoming election will not renew our commitment to being a more inclusive people but restore us to the less accommodating and tolerant kind of Americans we used to be, and Donald Trump wanted to restore. Either way, we will learn a great deal more in the 2024 election about the kind of Americans we are on the way to becoming. In the meantime, the ritualistic enactment of attempts to restore, renew, and reform the American people will provide clues to which way we are leaning. The yet-to-be-fully-tested and still-in-the-work fixes Americans will undertake to address whatever was behind a serious act of political disconsent

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is very much part of the cultural reckoning. It is how people back their way into making changes rather than rushing headlong into them. Evidence of how seriously Americans treat backing into political changes instead of throwing out their governments is clear from how infrequently we have had coup d’états. The only time in U.S. history that rioters left a change in government, as I recalled earlier in the book, was in the late-1890s in Wilmington, North Carolina.10 Heartening as this historical fact may be for fans of democracy, it wouldn’t make you happy if you were part of a group of several thousand people who broke into the Capitol expecting to turn the national government over to America’s first king. The good news for those Americans who weren’t especially keen on this happening was that the rioters satisfied themselves by acting out in more customarily riotous ways. They beat up police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol, took selfies of themselves, and stole items from the desks of lawmakers who, it bears repeating, they were never able to find much less put on trial. The trophies taken by the rioters may have been a poor substitute for what they’d wanted to carry off, but these souvenirs were the only things the would-be insurrectionists had to show for the time they spent in Congress. There also were videos of their daring-do. But the bragging rights that went with them lost their appeal once the videos were used to find and arrest the people in them and as evidence in their trials for the crimes they committed. Bringing an end to a constitutional democracy as old and established as America’s would surely have been an immense and dangerous undertaking, something that would need a large and committed force to pull off. A runaway clown car carrying a couple thousand people armed with sticks and clubs wasn’t up to the task. What is more, the people riding in the clown car knew it, which is why the ones who weren’t arrested on the spot or banned from airline flights they hoped to take, left town as quickly as they could, went home, and waited for federal agents to knock on their door.11 And when the knock came, there is no record of anyone in the community running to their neighbor’s house to block the door. The mistakes made by the insurrectionists and the leader who hoped to use them to punish his enemies and restore him to office were mistakes no self-respecting Athenian crowd would have made. The relevance of this historical point, whatever other value it may have, is that the January 6 insurrectionists and their leader had no appreciation for the customs they were tapping into and hoping to exploit. For that matter, neither did the legislators who would hold their own public hearings and impeachment trial for the insurrectionists and their leader after the election results were certified and the coup d’état failed. The Capitol insurrection and coup d’état were the denouement of the longest and best-chronicled run-up to a ritualized rebellion to ever happen in the United States. Donald Trump’s test of the federal government’s resilience

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took four years to bubble over, five if you count the 2016 election campaign. All the guardrails he tore up along the way, the norms he willfully flaunted and broke, civic virtues he gleefully ridiculed and mocked, and violence he courted were ripped from the autocratic playbook the Founding Fathers had in mind when they composed our Constitution. However unmindful or uncaring Donald Trump was of our customs and laws, both as a candidate and President, at the end of his simulated ­rebellion against the federal government he walked away. He spared himself and ­everyone else’s dignity by refusing to attend Biden’s inauguration. It was a fittingly symbolic way to slink out of the Capitol he had tried to add to his real estate portfolio. It is important to note again that no crowds tried to disrupt the Congressional hearings into the insurrection, President Trump’s second impeachment trial, or any of the four court hearings where the former President was acc­ used of committing before and after his failed coup d’état. I will have more to say about this below. It is enough right now to observe that the legislators’ detailed postmortem of the insurrection and coup d’état left us with a chronicle that lays out the imminent threat posed by these events and who was responsible for it but no explanation for why they failed.12 The Greeks may not have left detailed records of their public trials and the part that crowds played in them. But the record left for us by the January 6 commission should give future Americans all the information they could possibly need to figure out why they should find better things to do with their time than make another coup d’état. Americans are clearly awful at making coup d’états. We are much better practiced in making less permanently disruptive inversions of public order and putting them to good use, which is what the Capitol insurrection was and did. As a citizen, I was every bit as upset by the Capitol insurrection and coup d’état as most other Americans were. But as someone with knowledge about the customary ways people make disorder and sometimes act crazily, I was fascinated by the crowds outside the Capitol who believed they had been laid low by electoral bugs their leaders swore had bitten them, but no one could find. The principal difference between what happened in the North Carolina fabric mill infested by June Bugs no one ever found and what happened in Washington, D.C., in January of 2021, is this. The millworkers got a couple of much needed “sick days” off from work, and the insurrectionists would be punished for the “defiance day” they spent running through the Capitol in a loud but ultimately futile search for the bugs who were allegedly complicit in stealing the election from their leader. Hundreds of the bitten insurrectionists would spend years in jail, taking a mandatory time-out from the lives they had been living before they came to Washington, D.C.

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The rioters’ four-hour rampage through the Capitol might be dismissed as unhinged but for the fact that noisy exuberance and breaking things, including people sometimes, have been hallmarks of popular unrest for hundreds of years, and not just in the United States. Popular unrest and violence do what they are designed to do: capture the attention of the people being targeted. The January 6 insurrectionists certainly achieved that goal. More important for our purpose, however, the insurrectionists’ unprecedented act of disconsent proved more restrained and less productive than they had declared and clearly hoped it would be. The rioters couldn’t even bring themselves to do all the damage they had the means to do. They left their guns back in their motel rooms or along the parade route and never came close to punishing the people they believed were responsible for their misery much less killing them. If the insurrectionists had read all the history books I’ve read, they would have known going in that they’d probably have little to show for what they did on their way out. But since no one on either side of the coup d’état gives any appearance to have been familiar with the history of such events it stands to reason that it wouldn’t be the first thing they thought through as they tried to clean up the Capitol and make the insurrectionists and coup d’état backers accountable for what they did. But it wasn’t the only clue to why the plan to take over the national government failed so miserably. There were two other clues to consider. First, the campaign on which the insurrectionists staked the success of their takeover of the Capitol was based on reactionary ideas and aspirations that had already been deemed unattractive and hard to defend by most Americans long before the Capitol rioters showed up. Even more telling, ­perhaps, no one was willing to stand up and defend these ideas and aspirations after the would-be insurrectionists were run out of town. Second, what the insurrectionists had wanted to accomplish at the national level had been tried before and failed before. The people who wrote that failed playbook belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. People sympathetic to their reactionary campaign to put America on a better course did not fail because they lacked focus and commitment. Indeed, they had scored some startling electoral victories in several states outside of the South between 1915 and the late-1920s. They also had a sophisticated organizational network standing behind their campaign and showed they could use intimidation and violence to get what they wanted. No, the KKK failed because its members and allies took their campaign to restore white Christian America to places it could not succeed. That is, to cities and states where new black residents found unexpected support from big-city politicians and state legislators whose constituents included many people the Klan disliked almost as much as they did blacks.13

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The cultural ground where Klan supporters tried to plant their white hoods did not contain enough manure to make their reactionary movement take root and grow. That movement collapsed in the 1920s for the same reason white nationalist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys failed in 2021. Namely, the culture of many American towns and cities outside of the South had already become more accepting or at least much less antagonistic to newcomers and outsiders such as black people, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. A half-century later, black and white people committed to reforming American society would use organizations of their own making and strategies for mobilizing masses of people just like the ones the KKK used, only this time to push for more progressive reforms. They had learned a great deal from reactionary people and organizations about how to use unrest and violence to get what they wanted. The big wall the KKK ran into a hundred years ago was built of people who may not have been black or been around long enough to pass as something more than members of in-between “races” still trying to make a good place for themselves in cities. But they knew a threat when it was thrown in their face in public. By the 1920s, they also had enough experience with urban politics and American civic customs to know how to publicly humiliate and dismantle the KKK campaign…in public where everyone could watch. More than a half-century earlier, Protestant denominations had made overtures and civic peace with Catholics. In the 1930s, a similar rapprochement between Christians and Jews would be initiated in many American communities. These people hoped to soften the effects and appeal of antisemitism by claiming that Christians and Jews had similar beliefs and a shared cultural past that was more important than their religious differences. These claims weren’t accepted by all Christians and Jews, but they were convincing and compelling enough to take hold and begin to flower into many attempts by leaders of their respective faiths to work together on a host of social and political initiatives. These people rediscovered the hard lesson the earliest Americans who belonged to different Protestant denominations had learned in the 18th century.14 People could be alike and different at the same time and get along better than their sometimes-rough introduction had led them to believe. I benefitted from this lesson in interfaith cooperation as a child without even knowing it. My childhood friend Naomi Malkin, whose version of Christmas, I recall reporting to my parents, lasted eight days, helped me improve my checkers playing skills at a table on her porch, which was around the corner from where my Catholic family lived. We didn’t have a porch. The important thing was that neither Naomi nor I knew anything of the history our parents would have seen being made firsthand and put us on her front porch. We just enjoyed each other’s company and had fun playing

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checkers. By the 1950s, Maywood, New Jersey had lots of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews living there and provided many moments where they could learn to get along. But the foundation to effecting better relations among people from these different faith traditions was laid decades before Naomi and I were born. We grew up in a more agreeable and welcoming world. Black people weren’t part of that world yet, but they were already making serious moves that would soon bring them much closer to it. By 2020, the cultural accommodation whites and blacks had been making while Naomi and I were growing up was evident in all the small towns that had Black Lives Matter protests. White Americans in these places made parades to express their willingness to recognize black people as legitimate claimants for membership in their communities, even when those communities were in states where comparatively few black persons lived. The white nationalists who stormed the Capitol in early 2021 would not have been worrying about me and Naomi playing checkers on her porch back in the 1950s. But our playtime together was a child-like display of cultural changes that would all but doom the insurrectionists’ plans and those of their biggest political booster almost 70 years later. The cultural bottom line is this. White nationalists and other disaffected people had more than enough presence to make significant trouble on January 6, 2021. Their problem was that the rest of us had already moved past their pinched view of what it meant to be an American and how people from different races and backgrounds should treat each other in public. We had already reformed our way out of a world they wanted to restore.15 We hadn’t bought for a while what they wanted to sell, which is how Naomi and I would end up on her porch playing checkers and why we thought nothing of it. All the other reasons why the aborted white nationalist insurrection and failed Presidential coup d’état went down like they did were apparent in the unrest and violence that occurred in Ferguson in 2014, in Charlottesville in 2017, and in the towns and cities where Black Lives Matter protests happened in 2020. First, by 2014, black people and other non-white minorities had become the principal users of violent unrest in the United States. White people had ceded control over most collective violence to them by the 1960s. White people hadn’t forgotten how to make violent unrest, as the trouble they made in Charlottesville clearly showed. But that unrest also demonstrated how out of practice white Americans were in using violence in a sustained and convincingly intimidating fashion. They couldn’t get out of town fast enough when confronted by a much larger number of students and other white and black residents of Charlottesville and outsiders belonging to a host of anti-racist organizations. As we would have said back in Jersey, they had their asses handed to them.

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A few armed militiamen had shown up in Ferguson and made an impressive appearance with their body armor and high-powered firearms. But they didn’t say much or shoot anyone. They just hung out on corners of town’s nicer shopping area, when they weren’t standing on the roofs of businesses waiting for more rioters to break in who had already been pushed to the other side of town. They left town quietly too. Hundreds of people just like them representing over a dozen white nationalist and antisemitic organizations would come to Charlottesville three years later. They, too, were armed with guns they didn’t shoot, but also carried more primitive weapons, which they used a lot, just like the Capitol insurrectionists would. But, as I just noted, they faced an even larger number of students, residents, and a host of anti-racist organizations who showed no reluctance to fight them. White nationalists glared and traded verbal insults and challenges with Black Lives Matter protesters in small towns. But these racist groups but didn’t push much harder than that. White nationalists squared off and fought with Black Lives Matter protesters in many American cities, where several protesters and their own people were killed. White nationalists were working themselves into a fight most of us were surprised to see on January 6, but had been warned was coming and would be welcomed by the then President of the United States. Tens of thousands of them, many belonging to the same organizations that had gone to Charlottesville, would show up in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Only a small portion of these people, maybe between five and six percent of them, would end up marching on the Capitol and entering it in the hope of stopping the certification of Joe Biden’s election and capturing federal legislators. Among the legislators they ran out of the House chambers was Senator Josh Hawley, who had openly courted the insurrectionists but was videoed running from the very people they had helped incite to riot. It was an impressive performance, but probably not one he would have wanted recorded.16 Second, white people had become more hesitant to use violent unrest, black people much less so. The black “protest riots” of the 1960s, like the one I studied for my dissertation, happened in conjunction with a great deal of non-violent protesting by supporters of different civil rights groups. What happened in some of the cities where Black Lives Matter turned violent suggests that black people today aren’t waiting for civil rights organizations to show how little they can squeeze from business and political leaders before they turn violent. This is a big change. I will suggest why later in the chapter. Today, the killing of a single black man who apparently committed a petty crime set off rioting in cities across the country just as Martin Luther King’s assassination had more than a half-century earlier. Contemporary Americans showed they could be as offended by the killing of a common person as they

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had been by the killing of a much more heroic figure. That’s what happened in Ferguson, anyway. It also seems to have happened that way in other U.S. cities where Black Lives Matter protests turned violent almost immediately. In these cities, it is likely that aggressive policing by local police and federal agents played a part in the rapid escalation into violence. Fights picked by armed militia groups in these cities probably had the same effect. It’s also possible, however, that the custom of rioting in cities had changed for both white and black people. Such an outcome is reflected in my next point, which I have made before. Third, popular unrest had become more civil. Black people may turn to violence more readily these days, white people much less frequently. In both cases, assaults on human beings have diminished greatly. Attacks on property and symbols of public authority have remained staple features of popular unrest in America. But they may have taken on greater symbolic importance considering how much less violence these days is being directed against people. Fourth, by the 1960s, the right of black people and other non-white and non-Christian minorities to stand as credible members of their communities had already been accomplished in practice and codified in federal statutes and court decisions. These enumerated and now taken-for-granted rights might be chipped away. Denying water to black people who had to stand in extra-long lines at polling sites because voting sites in their neighborhoods had been closed or their mail-in ballots were considered more suspect than those mailed in from white neighborhoods were insulting and might discourage some people from voting. But the fact that black people could vote was no longer disputed in public. No one in Ferguson, Charlottesville, or any of the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests challenged the right of any of the protesters and counter-protesters to be there. People were just trying to figure out how they should treat each other in public and what they wanted to do now that they had fuller access to the public arena. The relevant lesson here, one I introduced earlier in the book, couldn’t be clearer or more important. Rioting over questions of community membership has fallen into disuse. Rioting over questions of public accountability has ­become the disorder of choice in America. Fifth, people from different races, ancestries, religions, genders, social classes, and political persuasions had learned to use the same strategies to make public grievances and petitions. They also had shown they knew how to use organizations to help them declare their grievances and push petitions in the faces of leaders who would rather not have been bothered. The convergence in the way black and white people use unrest today speaks to the fact that they have come to share similar sensibilities about when and how to make trouble in public.

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Destroying one’s own property and that of your immediate neighbors was never part of the customary way people acted out. Killing people and destroying other people’s property still happen but have become less crucial elements of popular unrest. Attacking public authorities and symbols of their dominion have become an even bigger part of popular unrest today. The problem with democratizing unrest, of empowering more people and people with fewer discernable ties and less practice in defending the community to act out, is that making people accountable for their actions has become more difficult to do. That is why people in Ferguson and Charlottesville made a point of identifying troublemakers they didn’t want and outsiders whose values and goals were at odds with their own. It’s also why they asked local authorities to remove these unwanted people from the fight they were having. Local people wanted to continue the public argument they had been having and the fight they wanted to pick, not someone else’s argument or fight. This is further evidence of how hard people work at restraining themselves and others these days even when they’re in the middle of a nasty public fight. Granted, it would be hard to describe what happens in the middle of a riot as “restrained.” But compared to the way earlier generations fought in public, the violence practiced today is a great deal more circumspect than it was in the past. To be sure, white nationalists and their sympathizers left an impressive mess behind when they were pushed out of the Capitol after only four hours. They had been highly motivated and were angry. They had been given every opportunity to take down some important pillars of our constitutional democracy, thanks to the intervention of the current President. But they did not use all the means available to them to injure and kill people. Most notably, they did not use the guns they had brought to Washington when they breached the entrances of the Capitol and roamed through it looking for legislators to capture and put on trial. All signs to the contrary notwithstanding, at the end of the day on January 6, 2021, the would-be insurrectionists at the Capitol were much better prepared to stage a riot and have a brawl than pull off a coup d’état.17 The President was too. The most consequential act of political unrest and violence carried out in the United States since the Civil War did not end with a bang but with a whimper. Everything that has happened since the Capitol insurrection has been part of an equally important legal reckoning about the abuse of executive power and a cultural reckoning over customs and norms that are foundational to the practice of public discourse in America. Notable among the latter is the use of popular unrest and violence in our national politics. The officials in charge of the legal reckoning had an impressive and wellused array of public rituals they could use to deal with the aftermath of the

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Capitol insurrection and coup d’état. The American people who stormed the Capitol had already demonstrated a finer grasp of the limits of popular unrest and violence in politics than either they or their leader recognized. Whether acted out in courtrooms and legislative chambers or on city streets, people use rituals to publicly mark important moments and m ­ ilestones in the history of their community. I have argued that rituals of disconsent make a big show of a community’s shortcomings and failures. Rituals of restoration, renewal, and reform commemorate a community’s attempted comebacks and successes. Two of them – rituals of restoration and reform – made well-publicized contributions to our public reckoning in the immediate aftermath of January 6. Americans would have to wait for the elections of 2024 to put their work in renewing their commitment to American political customs and civic virtues to the test. The number and variety of people coming out to vote in 2024 would constitute the first part of the test. How peaceful the run-up to the election and electoral college vote turns out will be the second part of our self-administered and graded civics test. The Escalation of Disconsent in the Capitol Insurrection

Americans have long used reactionary unrest and violence to make a point about how they imagined their communities should be organized and the kinds of values people should embrace. The array of organizations and social movements pushing reactionary ideas in contemporary America can trace their origins to the end of World War II.18 Their greatest accomplishment and failure to date were the Capitol insurrection and Donald Trump’s attempted coup d’état. The large number of rightwing groups that emerged across the country in the last decade became involved in a variety of issues that played to white people’s sense that they were undervalued and were on the verge of being displaced as this country’s preeminent population.19 These organizations would provide the most committed people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They also would be among the people given longer prison terms for what they did that day and all the activities that led to it. Their rise and recent reversal of fortune coincided with the election of Donald Trump as President and his failed bid to be re-elected to that office. It was during this period that supporters of right-wing extremism, antisemitism, and all the other “isms” associated with reactionary ideologies, unrest, and violence in contemporary America had their largest and most enthusiastic public audiences. Their turn to violence confirms what social scientists and historians have long observed about the way inter-group conflicts escalate into violence. Namely, that violence is not the first thing groups adopt when they go

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public with their private concerns. People exhaust other avenues of grievance ­redress first. Except when they don’t.20 Americans have an equally robust tradition of vigilante-like violence against newcomers, outsiders, and groups that violate their customs and cross hard-drawn lines they laid down to keep unattractive and threatening groups as far away from them as possible. This kind of reactionary violence was intended to make painfully clear who was and was not considered to be a credible member of the community. An unexpected and fascinating example of this tradition being turned on its head was provided by the unrest and violence in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., where aggrieved white people and the groups presenting themselves as defenders of white Christian values and sensibilities acted more like civil rights protesters in the 1960s. They took time ramping up their protests into something bigger and more threatening, while they watched a case being built in courtrooms and on the streets that authorities weren’t treating them or their concerns as seriously as they thought they should be. White nationalists didn’t leap directly into violence. They led with nonviolent actions. But they mixed in enough violence to foreshadow their plan to make even more trouble when less violent appeals failed. I noted earlier that white and minority people had watched and learned from each other’s attempts to make over the world. It was only one way, albeit one big and dramatic way, they showed they could become more alike and stay different at the same time. The historical and cultural significance of this kind of sharing cannot be overstated. It shows that no matter what their color, religious or ethnic identity, or social class mix, groups that escalate grievance making and petitioning to the point of violence have one thing in common. They view themselves as relatively powerless or losing whatever power and status they thought had once been theirs. Groups whose members who may have achieved more legitimacy than they recognize or view themselves as having achieved a measure of status and power and are more confident don’t need to follow such a stepwise progression from non-violent to violent challenges. They skip straight to violence. Which groups quickly turned to violence had nothing to do with the color of their supporters. It had everything to do with how powerful or unpowerful they imagined themselves to be or were on their way to becoming. The period between insult and payback is shorter for groups on the rise or already in enviable positions. It is longer and approached more tentatively by groups that are powerless or view themselves as being on the way down. The timing and use of unrest and violence by the different groups involved in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection provide ample evidence to support this hypothesis. The cultural rise of black people as co-authors and owners of American civic sensibilities and practices corresponds to the decline of white people as

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the exclusive authors and owners of those same sensibilities and practices. This is why black and white people traded places in the practice of social unrest and violence when they did. The passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s was the effect, not the cause, of this important cultural change. The violence that happened immediately after the killing of Michael Brown and George Floyd didn’t happen only in Ferguson and Minneapolis but also in cities far removed from these places. There had been no groups protesting or making demands on behalf of black people in either place. Police officers committed unpardonable offenses, and then there was violence. Unrest and violence in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. didn’t unfold that way. The tentativeness of white nationalist groups and their supporters in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. was telling. The warming up to violence in Charlottesville was preceded by months of intense protests, legal suits, community mobilization, and outside agitation that satisfied no one. This may have been especially true for the racist groups that wanted to make Charlottesville an example for other communities contemplating such an insult to white sensibilities. The years-long warmup period for the unrest and violence at the Capitol was more dramatic because so many towns and cities across the United States had a chance to watch it unfold or had to deal with their own white nationalist and Black Lives Matter activists, protests, and clashes.21 The fact that it took several years for different militia and white nationalist groups to show up at the same place before they used all the violence they dared to muster on January 6, 2021, was even more telling than what happened in Charlottesville. Tens of thousands of angry people, many of them heavily armed, could have done incalculable damage and killed a great many people. Comparing this to the sticks and clubs used by the much smaller number of people who ended up storming the Capitol tells us everything we need to know about how ill-prepared and unwilling they were to pull off what they bragged about doing. Upon reflection, it should also tell us everything we needed to know about the empty threat behind their leader’s bloviating and bullying. The singular failure of all the legal and extra-legal steps President Trump and his rightwing supporters took in the months leading up to and following the 2020 election, the inability to find proof of the bug they claimed had bitten them, made them crazy. But not so crazy that they couldn’t walk away when their bluff was called. Nobody else had to die. No one needed to have died in the first place. Trump’s stick-wielding Praetorian guardians could have made the same dramatic point without doing so much damage or having to go to jail. The loss of life was altogether unnecessary. The damage done to the Capitol was substantial but repairable. The people in charge of the ritualistic cleanup and reckoning after the violence was over were more than up to the task.

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Rituals of Restoration, Renewal, and Reform After January 6

It may have taken 2,000 years to get here, but American unrest flirted with its Athenian roots with the Capitol insurrection and Presidential coup d’état. Representatives drawn from the masses would not carry out their own brand of vigilante justice. But a few of them would be asked in courts of law to judge the guilt or innocence of their leaders and their fellow citizens who chose to stand with those leaders instead of them at a crucial moment in their country’s history. Fitting novel events and unwanted assaults on an otherwise orderly world into a longer storyline is the most important cultural service rendered by ­serious public reviews of how people reacted when the unimaginable actually happened.22 Americans had two sense-making moments in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup d’état: a second Presidential impeachment trial for Donald Trump and a Congressional ­review of the events that led up to and followed the coup d’état. Whatever their merits, neither of these politically inspired and executed reviews of the insurrection and coup d’état succeeded in punishing people who had startled and shocked us with their violence. These reviews did something a great deal more important, however. They linked the fate of the ringleader with that of the people who aided and abetted the insurrection and coup d’état in public trials that would drag on for a long time and be overseen by unelected judges and everyday citizens whose judgment would not be a­ ffected by political self-interest. The attempted coup d’état was threatening and had the potential to do immense damage to the way Americans were accustomed to being governed. But the unpracticed and decidedly amateurish way it was carried out deserved no more than the four hours it lasted. It did not upend the way our government works. Indeed, the kindest thing one leader of the Proud Boys could say several months later was that the imaginary takeover of the federal government his people planned to bring about had been “a very soft Civil War.”23 For historical reasons, “vigilante lite” would have come closer to capturing what really happened that day. In either case, these assessments remind us that the kind of public trouble Americans are more accustomed to making is better suited for alerting their leaders that some people are mightily displeased about being ignored, discounted, or mistreated in public. The greater public good American unrest serves is that it lets people push their way into amending how the world works, to fix it rather than rebuild it from scratch. Just how committed Americans were to fix the way they were governed rather than getting rid of the government was revealed in how quickly and uncritically everyone who wasn’t part of the insurrection or coup d’état let people in charge of the threatened institutions figure out what had gone

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wrong and what to do about it. These institutions embody everything social unrest and violent upheavals are not: prone to sluggishness, adept at splitting differences, and making haircuts sound like makeovers. Undoing the chaotic potential that breaches of norms, customs, and laws bring to our way of life would be impossible without rituals that help us turn the questions such ­behavior raises into answers we can live with. Public trials in which people are held accountable for what they said and did in such moments cannot take us back to where we were before some Americans tried to turn our world upside down. Acts of restorative justice would not restore everything we lost, including our confidence and any lives that might have been taken from us. What these public trials will do instead is come as close as possible to making up for some of the harm that was done by renewing our commitment to do better and more to ensure we will not be harmed this way again. Clear-eyed assessments of our shortcomings and failures, a therapist or priest might tell us, are the first steps we take so we can deal with the bad thing that came our way or we may have done to ourselves. It is just as important for whole communities and societies to make such self-appraisals, though there is nothing in them that can guarantee something bad won’t happen again. For all their shortcomings, the comfort such ritually infused reviews provide is neither illusory nor purposeless. There’s probably more contrition than promise of redemption built into these restorative acts. But acts of contrition, Father Kearny assured me every time I confessed the same sins to him and was given the identical penance to make amends for them, is good for the soul, even if the practical good they do last only a little while. Should bad things happen again, or we screw up again, we can look back and see not how we got through them the last time but at least go home reassured that we probably will get through them this time, too. This is the larger cultural service rendered by the Congressional reviews, impeachments, and public trials that began immediately after the events of January 6. As I just observed, they should not reassure us that the unrest and violence we all saw on and around that day cannot happen again. But they are a clear and reassuring sign that we have good rituals to call upon to help us work through the messes that were made. And that counts for a lot. There were other less dramatic ways in which Americans showed they wanted to restore more than a semblance of the order that had been unceremoniously disrupted by the people who stormed the Capitol and the President who did all that he could to make it easy for them. These other expressions of restoration complement the three principal ways Americans deal with each other’s less commendable behavior even before they had a country or could call themselves Americans: public shaming, removing people from the community, and mobilizing the community to protect themselves.24

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The earliest and most numerous attempts by people to reclaim some semblance of public order out of the mess left by rioters, the threatened electoral vote, and attempted coup d’état involved expressions of embarrassment, shaming, and recrimination. Members of Trump’s cabinet resigned. Politicians declared their embarrassment for their colleagues’ behavior and apologized to their constituents. Constituents shared their anger with representatives who took an active part in the “stop the electoral vote” campaign. Corporate contributors backed away from the Republican party and Donald Trump. Social media platforms shed the accounts of right-wing activists as if they were covered with cooties. Police Departments and U.S. military commanders worked overtime to identify and remove people sympathetic to white nationalist and racist causes. Photographs of people who stormed the Capitol were prominently displayed in newspaper stories along with synopses of what they had done. Family members and acquaintances of insurrectionists turned them in to the authorities. People openly confessed to having been scammed by the President’s stolen votes and fundraising schemes. True believers in militant and conspiracy-minded organizations struggled to hold onto their beliefs and keep their organizations intact in the face of the prophecy that failed.25 Not everyone felt guilty or ashamed about the part they played in President Trump’s schemes. Many people still supported him fervently and stuck with the story he and his aides made up to justify the insurrection and coup d’état.26 But the list of moments in which people faced public ridicule, confessed their own culpability in supporting insurrectionists and coup d’état instigators, and openly criticized each other was proportionate to the trauma people felt but nonetheless remarkable for its scope and intensity. If not unprecedented in American history, it certainly surpasses anything we have seen since the Civil War. Trump’s support softened a bit as the indictments against him and his closest advisors piled up in 2023 and his four trial dates approached. But coming into late-2023, he still held a commanding lead over his Republican rivals. The shame many people felt and the guilt that would leave hundreds of them in prison clearly was not so widespread and life altering that everyone was willing to share it or put America on a more obviously progressive path. Built into much of the shaming that happened as part of the restorative reckoning Americans shared in the months following January 6 was a fair amount of mobilizing by communities and institutions trying to deal with extremism they may have known was there but suddenly demanded their attention. This might be construed as criticism except for the fact this is another of the ways in which ritualized rebellions work. It also is a crucial feature of the good that ritualized reforms do for us afterward. Their ­effect isn’t as widespread or life altering as some people might have hoped and other people feared. But as I said earlier in the chapter it is a safe way

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people in democratic societies back their way into a future no one can predict but many of them now realize they should have been paying more attention to. The greatest irony surrounding the Capitol insurrection and failed coup d’état isn’t that they happened in our democratic society. It is that the person who did all the norm-breaking and custom-crushing is the same guy who would end up being victimized by the ritualized rebellion he spent four years calling down on himself. It may have been the closest he ever came to being the self-made man he had always fancied himself to be. At the end of the day, it wasn’t so much that the good guys won, and the bad guys lost, though some people might have seen it that way or seen it exactly the opposite way. It was rather that everyone had to take more than a step or two back and look hard at all the bizarre but historically explicable circumstances that had brought us to this point. What lessons we would take from this exercise and how we would put those lessons to good use would be entirely up to us, which I’m pretty sure is what’s supposed to happen in a democratic society. As far as the upcoming election is concerned, I’m voting on us. Notes 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaMxO9Dp9u4; https://theconversation.com/ trumps-use-of-religion-follows-playbook-of-authoritarian-leaning-leaders-theworld-over-140050; Washington Post, October 11, 2023. “Trump as Jesus? Fans go along with martyrs.” Mark Fisher. 2 The New York Times, September 15, 2021. “Republicans, Wary of Political Fallout, Steer Clear of Rally for Riot Suspects.” Luke Broadwater. 3 The New York Times, January 20, 2021. “‘A total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump.” Sheera Frenkel and Alan Feuer; The New York Times, January 29, 2021. “‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s Journey Out of QAnon.” Sabrina Tavernise. 4 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/us/politics/proud-boys-joseph-biggs-­ sentenced-jan-6.html; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 10, 2021. “Accused ­rioter apologizes for entering Capitol.” Robert Patrick. 5 Monti, Daniel, The American City: A Social and Cultural History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 180–189. 6 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2023. “How the ‘MAGA doom loop’ is already threatening Trump.” Greg Sargent. 7 https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/national/capitol-riots/by-the-numbersthe-capitol-riot-two-years-later-january-6th-donald-trump-stop-the-steal/65810c71fe-5144-4277-a591-4898d6f2a948 8 The Wall St. Journal, May 16, 2023. “States Where the Proud Boys Grew the Most Since January 6.” Samuel Stebbins; The Wall St. Journal, September 23, 2023. “The Rise of 15 Unsettling Ideologies and Movements in the US.” Josie Green. 9 https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-susan-collins-west-virginia-c9c15562ad 910bbc0ba6ef1eecbfc158; https://time.com/6243426/jan-6-committees-plan-tostop-the-next-attack-on-democracy/

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10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_and_coup_attempts#:~:text= 1898%2C%20Wilmington%20insurrection%20of%201898,overthrew%20 the%20biracial%20Fusionist%20government; https://www.history.com/news/ wilmington-massacre-1898-coup 11 https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/steve-chapman/ct-column-no-fly-­ capito-riot-chapman-20210119-qx4fagkkwrhjbddyjs2mwp6grq-story.html 12 Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, The January 6th Report. (New York: Celadon Books, 2022). 13 Jackson, Kenneth, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 14 Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 15 The New York Times, January 16, 2021. “Trump’s ‘Law and Order’: One More Deceptive Tactic Is Exposed.” Elaina Plott. 16 Full disclosure: Hawley is one of my U.S. Senators. 17 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 5, 2021. “Proud Boys leader accused.” Peter Hermann and Martin Web. 18 https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs5746/files/Surveying%20The%20 Landscape%20of%20the%20American%20Far%20Right_0.pdf 19 The New York Times, January 13, 2021. “White Riot.” Thomas Edsall. 20 Brown, Richard Maxwell, “Historical Patterns of American Violence,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979) pp. 19–48; Brown, Richard Maxwell, “The American Vigilante Tradition,” ibid., pp. 153–186; Garson, G. David and Gail O’Brien, “Collective Violence in the ­Reconstruction South,” ibid., pp. 243–260; Libman-Rubenstein, Richard, “Group Violence in America: Its Structure and Limitations,” ibid., pp. 437–454. 21 The Intercept, June 19, 2020. “Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception from Police.” Mara Hvistendahl and Alleen Brown. theintercept.com/2020/6/19; mccall.com/news/Pennsylvania/mo-nws-pa-militia/9/ 14/20. “Pennsylvania’s citizen militias say they’re protecting everyone’s rights, but critics say they’re right-wing intimidators.” Kim Strong; The Sacramento Bee, June 11, 2020. “Cops want self-proclaimed militia to stay away from protests. But there’s not much they can do.” Kate Irby; Independent, September 5, 2020. “Trumpsupporting armed militia clash with Breonna Taylor protesters as Kentucky Derby gets underway.” Danielle Zoeliner. Independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/uspolitics; The New York Times, December 12, 2020. “4 Stabbed and One Shot as Trump Supporters and Opponents Clash.” Hailey Fuchs, Pranshu Verma, and Nicholas Bogel Burroughs; The Daily Independent, July 27, 2020. “Tempers flare as temps rise: BLM protesters, counter-protesters exchange heated words, remain physically peaceful in Grayson.” Henry Culvyhouse; The Guardian, July 27, 2020. “The birth of a militia: how an armed group polices Black Lives Matter protests.” Nicolle Okoren; Sierra Nevada Daily, August 9, 2020. “BLM protest in Douglas County draws hundreds of counter protesters.” Kelsey Penrose; Idaho Statesman, August 23, 2020. “‘No Body of Men:’ A militia movement, recast, takes to the streets of North Idaho.” Julia Frankel, Mara Hoplamazian, and Malaika Tapper; The State, August 27, 2020. “Pro-gun SC ‘militia’ group plans rally in Columbia at the same time as BLM march.” David Travis Bland and Maayan Schechter; Merced Sun-Star, September 26, 2020. “Dueling Atwater protests peaceful: Back the Badge, Black Lives Matter make their voices heard.” Shawn Jansen; WMRA Morning Edition, September 23, 2020. “Local Militias Defend Their Presence at BLM Rallies.” Randi Hagi; September 23, 2020. “US: Leaked Chats Reveal ProTrump Militia Plots Against BLM.” Peter Singer. Telesurenglish.net/section/news;

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Stateline, October 13, 2020. “Emboldened Far-Right Groups Challenge Cities, States.” Erika Bolstad; CapRadio, October 28, 2020. “As Election Day Nears, Far Right Groups Surge in Nevada.” Bert Johnson; The Spokesman-Review, ­October 29, 2020. “Police should rein in assembly of armed militias, Spokane City Council proposal says.” Adam Shanks; The New York Times, November 14, 2020. “Thousands rally in Washington as clashes erupt.” Pranshu Verma, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sabrina Tavernise, Zach Montague, Allyson Waller, and ­Maggie Haberman; The New York Times, December 12, 2020. “4Stabbed and One Shot as Trump Supporters and Opponents Clash.” Hailey Fuchs, Pranshu Verma, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 7, 2021. “State capitals throughout nation see protests.” Morgan Lee and Ben Nadler; The New York Times, January 9, 2021. “Fear Spreads in Minnesota Town as ‘Extremist Group’ Moves to Open Church.” Maria Cramer; The New York Times, January 11, 2021. “How White Evangelical Christians Fused with Trump Extremism.” Elizabeth Diaz and Ruth Graham; The Washington Post, January 18, 2021. “Established conservatives planned rallies that led to riot.” Robert O’Harrow; The New York Times, January 19, 2021. “‘This Kettle Is Set to Boil’: New Evidence Points to Riot Conspiracy.” Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Neal Marc Farquhar; The New York Times, January 26, 2021. “Out of the Barrel of a gun.” Charles Homans; The New York Times, February 1, 2021. “77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election.” Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg, and Michael Schmidt; The New York Times, January 24, 2021. “How Democrats Planned for Doomsday.” Alexander Burns; The New York Times, February 8, 2021. “‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself with Militants.” David Kirkpatrick and Mike McIntire; The New York Times, February 12, 2021. “Oath Keepers Plotting Before Capitol Riot Awaited ‘Direction’ From Trump, Prosecutors Say.” Alan Feuer. 22 Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2021. “U.S. Capitol Has a History of Occasional Violence, but Nothing Like This.” Jess Bravin. 23 The New York Times, March 14, 2021. “Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol.” David Kilpatrick and Alan Feuer. 24 Monti, The American City. See especially pages 180–190. 25 The New York Times, November 10, 2020. “Shocked by Trump’s Loss, QAnon Struggles to Keep the Faith.” Kevin Roose; The New York Times, January 7, 2021. “Republicans Splinter Over Whether to Make a Full Break from Trump.” Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 2021. “Ex-Sen. Danforth calls support of Hawley ‘worst mistake’ of his life.” Tony Messenger; The New York Times, January 10, 2021. “Notable Arrests After the Riot at the Capitol.” Thomas Edward Caldwell, Jon Ryan Schaffer, Donovan Crowell, and Jessica Watkins; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 12, 2021. “Business grows skittish about Trump and GOP after riots.” Josh Boak, Brian Slodysko, and Tom Krisher; The New York Times, January 12, 2021. “Live Updates: Homeland Security Chief Resigns; Patriot’s Belichek Won’t Accept Medal of Freedom.” Ken Belson, Katie Benner, Jenny Gross, Mike Isaac, Hailey Fuchs, Dave Philips Anemana Hartacollis, Ellen Barry, Lauren Hirsch, Tiffany Hsu, and Jennifer Steinhauer; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 13, 2021. “More Hawley contributors pause political donations.” Jacob Barker; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 14, 2021. “Protesters say Hawley has ‘blood on his hands’.” Joel Cubaica; The New York Times, January 15, 2021. “Lankford Apologizes to Black Voters for Backing Trump’s Election Deceit.” Emily Cochrane; The New York Times, January 19, 2021. “12 National Guard Members Removed from Inauguration Duties Amid Extremist Threats.” Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper; The New York Times, January 20, 2021. “Qanon believers struggle with inauguration.” Kevin Roose; BBC, January 21,

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2021. “Biden inauguration leaves Qanon believers in disarray.” Shayan Sardarizadeh and Olga Robinson; The New York Times, January 29, 2021. “‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s Journey Out of Qanon.” Sabrina ­Travernise; The New York Times, January 31, 2021. “After Capitol Riot, Elected Officials Under Pressure Back Home.” Halley Fuchs; The New York Times, ­February 4, 2021. “Arrested in Capitol Riot: Organized Militants and a Hoard of Radicals.” Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Grace Ashford, Dennis Lu, Elanor Lutz, Alex Leeds Matthews, and Karen Yourish; The New York Times, Police Forces Have Long Tried to Weed Out Extremists in the Ranks. Then Came the Capitol Riot.” Neil MacFarquhar; The New York Times, February 16, 2021; The New York Times, January 19, 2021. “Pentagon steps up efforts to root out white supremacy and far-right extremism in the ranks.” Eric Schmitt, Jennifer Steinhauer, and Helene Cooper; The New York Times, April 1, 2021. “Dozens of Capitol riot suspects show remorse as charges begin to sink in.” Jacques Billeaud and Michael Tarm; The New York Times, April 3, 2021. “How Trump Steered Supporters into Unwitting Donations.” Shane Goldmacher; The New York Times, April 10, 2021. “A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began.” Matthew Rosenberg; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3, 2021. “Capitol riot charges roil far-right groups.” Michael Kunzelman and Alanna Durkin Richer; Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2021. “Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Forceful on Jan. 6, Privately in Turmoil.” Rebecca Vallhaus, Khadeeja Safdar, and Shalini Ramachandran; Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 26 The New York Times, January 24, 2021. “Arizona G.O.P. Censures Three Top Members Criticized by Trump Loyalists.” Hank Stephenson and Jennifer Medina; The New York Times, February 3, 2021. “The Qanon Delusion Has Not Loosened Its Grip.” Thomas Edsall; The New York Times, March 12, 2021. “Few Republicans fight voting changes in states.” Steve Peoples, Jonathan Cooper, and Ben Nadler.

9 THE FUTURE OF CIVIL UNREST AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA (AND ELSEWHERE)

The earliest Americans learned everything they knew about social order, ­including the ways to shake it up, in the countries from which they emigrated. Though several countries made contributions to what early A ­ mericans knew about such matters, the principal carriers of disorderly customs and troublemaking rituals came mostly from England.1 It seems only fitting that contemporary Americans should return a little of the favor our English and European forebearers paid us by letting us borrow and adapt their disorderly customs. In this chapter, then, I will spend a little time writing about what we did with their legacy and showing how it might inform how Western democracies, but especially England, might deal with future outbreaks of popular unrest involving refugees who arrived on their doorstep recently from the Middle East. Not Quite The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin’s 1963 civil rights manifesto, published two years before ­Martin Luther King held forth on the importance of disagreeing without becoming violently disagreeable, was an homage to temperance and the ­ promise of good things that come from practicing it. The book was also a warning of what would happen if we didn’t. Baldwin imagined the plight of his race and its ultimate redemption would come from lessons whites would take from witnessing their worst acts coming back as accomplishments by the very people whose humanity they had long denied. Such a social and cultural transformation, we have seen here, happens when people kept from being more like other Americans managed to turn their momentary inversions of the regular order they found unsatisfactory DOI: 10.4324/9781032679365-10

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into more permanent changes that benefited their people and the rest of us, too. But permanent changes require patience to make and take time to take hold, and Americans are an impatient people. So, on the one hand, Americans today continue to use half steps rather than make big strides to address the legacy of mistreatment white people put on blacks and others whose religions and backgrounds were disfavored by America’s founders. (In good times, the half-steps move us forward. In less good times, closer to what we have seen lately, people are wanting to take half-steps backward. They try to undo some of the social and political progress black people have seen in the last half-century. Or people thinking they’re doing the right thing for all of us end up proselytizing each other.2 Backward half-steps do not go unchallenged. But the overall effect of all our pushing and shoving on bigger concerns has been to stall rather than to advance the progress Americans have made in becoming a more politically inclusive country.) This makes understandable what Americans have been doing on the other hand. Today we see all kinds of Americans lifting a page from the old Civil Rights handbook that describes the importance of mobilizing one’s people so they can climb onto the public stage with confidence. This is the ground that “Us Too” movements and activists are trying to occupy without having to be beaten up or left bleeding out on the streets of American towns and cities. Their civil rights brand has more to do with transforming people’s personal identities than America’s civic values and public customs. To accomplish their version of civil rights, “Us Too” activists have made turning the “natural order of conscience” into something of a national pastime. The contributors to our newest spectator sport are uncompromisingly liberal and conservative. They are fully committed to their causes. And they are fuller of themselfishness than they are appreciative of what it took for America to become democratized enough so they could march onto the public stage, do their act, and not have to worry about being pelted with anything worse than verbal insults. Earlier and bigger social and cultural changes in the United States inched their way into being with the help of momentary disruptions of a community’s “natural order” like those described in this book. These acts of social and political disconsent showed how receptive the cultural ground beneath us had become to receiving new ideas and introducing variations of the customary ways we kept a community together. Social and political unrest didn’t make these changes happen much faster or lead to many new laws being passed or social programs being implemented. What they did is let people become “accustomed” to the idea that the present arrangement of classes and races might be rearranged without the world coming to an end. Too big to happen quickly much less all at once, such rearrangements would be made in smaller, more digestible pieces. American civic life thrives on dress rehearsals.

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The rise of groups with narrower wish lists and hotter rhetoric but little apparent interest in bigger pieces of inequality may be a predicable consequence of earlier campaigns to make room for much larger groups of ­people who had much bigger complaints. But the success of earlier activists has both popularized and cheapened the cultural currency of ritualized rebellions which only worked because they pointed out larger civic holes that could only be filled slowly and more deliberately than today’s activists are willing to wait. Now, thanks to all the new identity groups we didn’t know were out there waiting for us to recognize, instant cultural gratification is in. Patience and forbearance are out. And backing one’s way into the future is quickly becoming a lost art. There is genius in the way more “conventional” ritualized rebellions and ritualized reforms worked together. The problems pointed out by momentary rebellions were real. The piecemeal reforms they inspired worked. People who were markedly unequal in wealth, power, and social prestige may have had smaller than hoped-for successes but that didn’t make their accomplishments any less unprecedented. Progress came in bits and pieces people could live with. More importantly, in the process of striking deals that left something on the table for everyone, nobody left the table. The idea behind making a society more democratic is that people with good reasons to be wary of each other would stick around after dinner and talk. Without having to point out that was happening, groups with serious disagreements committed themselves to a dialogue kickstarted by an act as shocking to the people on top as it was surprising for people closer to the bottom of the community’s pecking order. If the logic of this argument, which I have returned to on several occasions in this book, hasn’t yet convinced you. Try this. Do you know anyone who wasn’t startled, frightened, and sobered by what happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, at the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests across the country, the first sacking of the Capitol since 1812, and only Presidential coup d’état in our nation’s history? I didn’t think so. Have these events prompted a wholesale transformation of the communities (or nation) where they happened? That’s right. They haven’t. Are we still talking to each other? Yes. My point is that the cultural good public fights do doesn’t show up immediately except for the dialogue people are pressed to continue as they scratch their way into learning better ways to get along than they had before the fight they picked with each other. But as exceptions go, this one matters a lot.

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Though a permanent reconciliation may remain forever out of our reach, implicit in our continuing skirmishes and spats is an acknowledgment that today we all have the right to be taken seriously. That is how violent social unrest came to be more occasional than routine, less vicious, better organized, and less existentially frightening. It is also why “Us Too” activists get more rhetorical pushback than physical abuse when they take their show on the road. It’s just easier to fight nicer when people are haggling over the terms of their mutual surrender because they’ve figured out that neither of them has a good reason to hide or anyplace to run where the other won’t find them. Individual white and black persons, men and women, gay and straight persons, smarter and…less smart people will have to work their personal differences out on their own. Groups and organizations representing the interests of earlier generations of people who were more numerous and more important to discount have already assembled some of the bigger pieces of the puzzle we could still be working on today. The one thing contemporary activists have going for them as they twiddle and fuss around the puzzle pieces that have already been assembled is that they are unlikely to be beaten up or killed when they try to squeeze in another piece. The nicer way of fighting in public groups has learned to make it clear to everyone except their least civilized members that they shouldn’t fight dirty or kill each other anymore. And should people decide to exercise a sumptuary privilege most of us have already given up, they will pay a stiff price. In the United States today, white, black, and brown individuals are a lot closer to working out their personal differences than they were a few decades ago. Among England’s and Europe’s more recent immigrant and refugee populations, people are still waiting for the all-important grudging acknowledgment that they can stay, make a good place for themselves in their new town or city, and stop fighting so much. Once that happens, it is still going to take time for individuals in the majority and minority populations to find more congenial ways to get along with each other. The populations to which long-time citizens and immigrants and refugees belong will come around eventually, because they have already seen firsthand what happens when they don’t. The only questions left to be answered are how long it will take them to make the cultural pivot Americans have had three centuries to practice, and what will happen inside English and ­European cities until they do. I don’t know the answer to these questions. What I do have, however, is a couple of ideas the people who will try to answer these questions already have in mind to try. I know one will work. The other will not and hasn’t worked anyplace leaders have talked about trying it out.

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In England, government programs and reforms to address the kinds of economic conditions that people have long seen as promoting unrest have enjoyed no more success than they have in the United States.3 As I noted earlier in the book, economic inequality is both more difficult to undo and doesn’t appear to be connected to the occurrence of unrest in any case. Much more important are social and cultural differences, which, as it happens, are easier to address but not particularly amenable to government intervention.4 Misunderstandings between different groups of residents or the problems people have with their leaders are responsible for most of the public unrest and violence referenced in this book. These days, a lot of the domestic unrest in Western democracies revolves around the legitimate use of force by state actors, like local police departments, against their own citizens, and the resistance by citizens to its use. We have come to the nub of the problem. If the ultimate power of governments to keep the peace hinges on their claim to be the only party that can use violence in the furtherance of that end, then all extra-legal violence must either help officers of the state carry out their peacekeeping mission or is undertaken by citizens acting on their own behalf to protect themselves. What happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, in all the cities where Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, and in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, qualify as violence that people used to defend themselves against real or imagined abuses by the state. For a moment or two, everyday people upset the regular order of their community or country and reclaimed the sumptuary privilege of using violence to promote or defend civic virtues and customs of great importance to them and presumably to other Americans. Whether the offense was something the rest of us could see clearly, as it was in the killing of innocent black people, or looked crazy, as it did at the Capitol insurrection, makes absolutely no difference. People believed or were acting in defense of a belief that the state had exceeded its authority on a matter of great public concern. While the disorder they made lasted only a little while – for a few days or even a few hours – it accomplished what extra-legal unrest and violence in the United States have always accomplished. It caught our attention. It also challenged and tested important institutions, made leaders react to these challenges, and provided an opportunity for the people in charge to make amends for their misdeeds or reassert their legitimate authority. The disorder people made inverted the natural order. Disorder didn’t permanently damage much less overturn the natural order of conscience and all the customs, codes, norms, and traditions that are foundational to it. At the end of the day, all the real and imagined abuses of state power that different groups of Americans have taken exception to boiled down to how much they would allow each other to practice the same rights and privileges and be held liable for carrying out the same duties and obligations. That is what

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democratization is all about. And Americans have been fighting about who could share a bigger piece of democratic practices and pretensions for 250 years. A big part of working their way to better answers has involved treating newcomers with more regard than they deserve and most likely haven’t yet earned. The big historical surprise revealed in this book is that fighting with other groups in public and with public officials helps people move in the direction of learning how to treat each other more respectfully.5 Governments are good at aggravating people to the point they will act out in public. But encouraging groups to fight in public isn’t something governments are supposed to do. In fact, it’s the opposite of what they are supposed to do. They are supposed to bring people together, not necessarily happily but together. The Greeks imagined that crowds could help bring people together and support what their leaders were doing. Up until the end of our successful revolution against English rule, American leaders did the same thing. But governments since then have pretty much given up on that idea, if only to keep their crowds from attacking them. This is what made Donald Trump’s presidency so unique and disturbing. He spent four years trying to provoke American citizens to attack the government over which he presided, attack him, and attack each other. And when he got the rebellion he’d worked so hard to make, it lasted only four hours, got him impeached a second time, put over a thousand of his most rabid supporters in prison for many years, and failed in its principal goal of keeping him in the White House. As ritualized rebellions go, that sounds about right. Of course, as a citizen I was offended by all of it. As a social scientist and historian who has studied and written about such behavior his whole career, I am beyond grateful to have lived to see the biggest ritualized rebellion ever in United States history and had a chance to write about it. I had a ringside seat at the cultural equivalent of the Big Bang. I especially appreciated the part where everything that was supposed to explode didn’t blow up. Our task now is to clean up the domestic mess the near explosion made and consider how we can put the universe on a better course. As moments begging for ritualized reforms go, this sounds about right, too. On a personal note, if there’s any truth to what I’ve always heard about the singular joys of pigs getting to muck around in the slop they helped to make, right now I am that pig. And writing about all the sloppiness that Americans make and will figure out how to clean up together is my gift back to my fellow citizens. Governments always have a hand in the clean-up, but they never seem to come up with a satisfactory answer to what they can do to make things better. That’s because elected and appointed leaders don’t stick to what they are good at and only they can do: make more citizens and laws ensuring that new citizens will be taken as seriously as people who have been citizens longer and

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until a minute ago thought no one would ever matter as much as they did. The history of Western societies shows that nations take a democratic step forward when they give a bigger voice to people who haven’t had much if any formal voice in government until then. If some of us should try to avoid enforcing those laws or living up to the codes of good behavior and civic virtues embodied in them, we have seen there are lots of people ready to remind them they can do more and should try to do better. That is the singular good that momentary acts of public disconsent do for us. I can hope that Donald Trump’s rebellion will push us closer to making more citizens and making laws that protect these people and everyone who was already a citizen. But I’m not sure that’s going to happen, at least not any time soon. Like all ritualized reform making, this clean-up is going to take a while to play out. Governments that make more citizens and laws to protect them expand the moral and political universe its people inhabit. But governments don’t do an especially good job showing people how to fill it.6 That happens in other, more private civic spaces. Such spaces are occupied by businesses and all the different groups and associations that make up “civil society.” Tocqueville saw these associations as bulwarks of democracy but also as good domestic housecleaners. These organizations and the people who fill them are businesspeople, whose ancestors were the force behind the creation of the bourgeois civic customs we practice today. There also are groups whose members have peculiar cultural and social identities – especially religious and ethnic identities – that make them feel good about themselves. Knowing there are a lot of people who have their back, these groups also have a solid history of giving their members the public confidence to contribute to the larger community.7 These businesses and identity groups fill in important details of how to put a civic culture together and make more room for individuals to fit in or opt out as they like.8 Civil society makers cut deals and make quiet compromises in more ways than government officials can possibly imagine or have the means to carry out.9 “Us Too” movements and activists don’t have the numbers to make this kind of civic magic and are too self-absorbed to make much bigger cultural changes in any case. The unwillingness of governments to make big changes in how ­Americans balance their unequal economic ledgers has been driven home on many ­occasions after a bout of civil unrest. Government solutions to economic inequities that are pushed after public disturbances have little staying power or ability to help us avoid future unrest. That is why governments, including the national one in England that tried to figure out what to do after riots broke out in Tottenham in 2011, always fall short of finding the means to implement most of the public initiatives called for by their own commissions.10

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This may be why English leaders eventually turned to private investors to take the lead in repairing the Tottenham community after riots occurred there in 2011.11 The interest of private developers in redeveloping rundown neighborhoods in collaboration with local people may not have been as great as local people hoped. But the idea of mixing people from different social classes and backgrounds in the same neighborhood is entirely consistent with their goal to make a more socially and culturally harmonious community.12 Except for the fact that harmonious communities, where people get along so well that they rarely disagree and never have big public fights, only work when the same kind of people live there. If America’s experiment in making communities has good lessons to share, it is that neighborhoods composed of people from the same background or social class can be congenial places to live.13 And neighborhoods with a mix of races and social classes can be civil places.14 But life in neither could be called “harmonious” without stretching the meaning of that word further than is warranted. People cannot be expected to be congenial or civil all the time, no matter how alike they are or how much they like each other. They will find reasons to disagree and even fight. The thing about their fights, on those occasions when they happen, is that most of them will not last long or make a mess that cannot be cleaned up. Governments can stand by to ensure that “messy” does not turn into willfully destructive and senselessly violent. Working out the details of how that will work invites further talks and disagreements.15 Doing more than that – figuring out where or when people might act out and doing something to stop it before unrest happens – is a waste of time and more likely to aggravate people than to calm them down. That was one of the big takeaways from the unrest in Ferguson, Charlottesville, all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and Capitol insurrection. The locals prefer to take care of their own business and keep other people out of it. Bad things happen when outsiders stick their noses into other people’s affairs. Just ask the Nazis and other white nationalists who showed up in Charlottesville without an invitation. The real accomplishment of America’s version of the Greek polis is that we have seen city life thriving in places with all kinds of neighborhoods and different combinations of people living in them. There is no one way to fill a city with people who will always get along. But there are many ways for different people to figure out how to get along better than so-called experts like me could possibly imagine or piece together for them. What I have done in this book is lay out some of the more dramatic ways that Americans used in the past and as recently as January 6, 2021, to keep themselves together when that is the last thing it looked like they wanted to do or would be able to do. The cultural accomplishment of people who have used unrest of the sort I have considered here is not that they will never again feel compelled to fight in public. It is, as I have said, that their public fights

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in the future will be less destructive and violent, better organized, and more politically temperate. That may not sound like much of an accomplishment. From a historical perspective, however, it is a big score. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. To be sure, people who live in democratic societies clearly have not forgotten how to cooperate.16 If they had, they would still be insulting, fighting, and hurting each other as much as they did in the past. Terrorism of the sort we have seen recently in the United States and other Western societies would be a commonplace occurrence. The fact that it has not become an everyday occurrence suggests there is something about life in democratic societies that is not altogether chaotic or a lost moral cause. It suggests instead there may be sources of civility, comity, and concord that are taken for granted but need to be identified and celebrated more. The great historical irony at the center of this book is that moments of popular unrest and violence, especially perhaps the ones that happen in cities, are leavening agents that make us more civil in the long run. Such acts make it possible for us to wonder aloud, and more forthrightly than we might otherwise be inclined to wonder, about how we might become better than we are today. You will recall that is what the leaders of ancient Greece had in mind to do with all the different people who were crowded together in their cities. Give them important civic homework to do. A big piece of their civic homework is learning how to get along with people who aren’t like the ones you know best, and you cannot imagine liking better. The history of civil unrest suggests that part of the way people show they are learning to get along better is by fighting nicer. The lesson does not come easily or quickly. At least in the United States, however, groups with little in common upon their first meeting have gradually come to a rough appreciation for each other’s worth and contribution to the community they share. Looking back at their recent experiences with terrorism, the people of Paris, Nice, Istanbul, and Brussels probably would have been happy to trade the murderous attacks they endured for smaller homegrown disorders like the ones in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and most of the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests. They wouldn’t be any more thrilled than we were by the prospect of having their national capitol overrun by screaming stick-wielders looking for electoral bugs that didn’t exist. If that’s to happen, however, our English and European friends are going to have to work harder at fighting nicer and fairer with people they don’t know well and weren’t particularly happy about showing up on their doorstep. Americans would say this is a “big ask.” But it’s something that leaders in Western societies already did several centuries ago. That is when they began sharing – more out of necessity than the goodness of their heart – some of the

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rights and privileges of citizenship with people whose experience with being governed up to then had been much more about performing certain prescribed duties and obligations appropriate for people of their race, class, or religion. The only thing I would say about the world-changing potential of the “big ask” is this. If the perpetually trouble-courting and troublemaking Americans could figure it out, anyone can. This prediction is not based on a too-generous assessment of Americans’ good will or attraction to exotic people from faraway places. Rather, it is a hard-nosed acknowledgment of the customary ways Americans have learned to deal with differences among their own people in the past. Violent fights are part of that history. So, too, apparently, is the capacity to manage differences among different kinds of people in less deadly and destructive ways. As I just observed, this kind of civil disorder was invented by people in England and Western Europe a long time ago. They mastered the art of staging small temporary fights among their own people long before they had reason to worry about foreign immigrants and people whose “race” was very different from their own. All they must do now to buy themselves more peace and quiet is to re-learn how to fight the same way in public with people who aren’t like them. If they can put this into practice, it will become a custom they all can live with. Given the historical lineage of the customary ways we fight in public, what happened or shows evidence of having begun to happen in Ferguson, Charlottesville, all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and, yes, even the Capitol insurrection, was evidence of us re-inventing that old way of acting up in public so that popular unrest looked a bit more like civil unrest. The most civil unrest we make is directed at people and institutions that were considered legitimate parts of the community. It tries to make them more accountable. It took some time for Americans to extend the same courtesy and kind of unrest to newcomers and outsiders in their community and for newcomers and outsiders to demand the same of other people in the community and the institutions we all rely on to provide us with a measure of protection. The lesson in this for our English and European friends is that since they made this work several hundred years ago, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to do it again today. This may not be as easy as I am making it sound, however. The second reason it won’t be easy is that Americans have held onto the practice of reactionary social unrest and violence longer than historians imagined any modern Western society would. Of late, people and organizations in the Western societies we know best also have increased their use of reactionary unrest and violence.17 Their ­national governments, like ours, have been roiled and threatened with being rolled by rightwing nationalist parties.

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There still is a great deal of more progressive unrest and violence in the United States and other Western societies than reactionary unrest. But other Western societies seem to have made the same turn toward using social movements to push rightwing agendas just as people and organizations in America have. Right-wing and left-wing violence in European countries, as it is in our own, also appears to have become less deadly. People may be every bit as upset with their governments as Americans are with theirs. But they are using less deadly violence to make whatever point they want their leaders to hear. In general, democratic societies are more open, accommodating, and inclusive. Unrest and even violence in democratic settings doesn’t have to destroy as much or hurt as many people to make whoever isn’t doing their job work a little harder or at least make a good show of trying. People who live in a more closed social setting with rigid membership criteria, more rules, and less personal freedom have a much higher and tougher hill to climb. Their leaders are disinclined to listen to new people and ideas. Unrest and violence in these settings are far more likely to keep people in their preassigned places in the community. It’s also more likely to kill them. The move to less deadly unrest is an expression of how far democratization has already taken hold in all these countries. The results are clear. The contrasts between progressive and reactionary unrest and violence may have become less stark. Organizations with harder rightwing or leftwing views may both be making softer kinds of unrest and less destructive violence than they did in the past. This is good news. The not-so-good news is that we have become awash in movements and groups bent over by the weight of grievances far less heavy than the ones that people from different races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds used to carry. We have too many “Us Too” movements pushing an ever-growing number and variety of groups clamoring for our attention and groups objecting to whatever it is the “Us Too” people are complaining about. The more politically ambitious and accomplished among us have seized on all the clutter and cultural confusion created by all the social movements and activists pushing their new causes in our face by crushing them with bigger and less forgiving leftwing and rightwing orthodoxies. Our problem isn’t that we have too few moral educators to train us and our children.18 It’s that we have too many. This brings us to the first reason why it will be harder to appreciate the progress we have made in making popular unrest more civil and the world more accommodating. We still talk about making big changes but seem satisfied with spectacles that are more distracting and easier to make. Theatrical displays have always been a big part of ritualized rebellions. But they were never the main attraction. The storyline and challenges being made by upset people were. Today, the calculated outrage ginned up by

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moral crusaders is more about mobilizing their supporters for political gain than making important changes in our civic culture. Our public battles aren’t so much about life and death anymore. They are more like a series of jousts where the objective is to score points by knocking the other guy off his horse. The losers limp back to the protection of the smaller out-of-the-way corners of the world they occupied before deciding to go public, which is not something Tocqueville thought would be good for democracy. The winners wait for another would-be hero to make a bid for public recognition and glory. Each contest provides distracting moments but no democratically inspired compromises, which Tocqueville thought people in democratic societies should be able to do better than people did in the aristocratic societies he knew best. All the jousters are supposed to live and have a chance to fight another day. But those of us watching these contests from the bleachers have cultural whiplash trying to keep track of all the true believers parading in front of us, itching for the chance to be knocked off their high horses. I’m not saying having so many contestants bidding for attention is a bad thing, just not a particularly helpful or edifying thing to watch. Well-choreographed public spectacles keep us from taking a clear-eyed look at how much progress we have made in moving past our most time-honored grudges and prejudices. We have been given the time space to make slow but steady progress and kept from bragging about the more transformative changes some of us really wanted and shaming everyone we would have had to step over to make them. That’s a good thing. But a new generation of activists has tried to capitalize on these successes and staged smaller, distinctly unviolent, but still quite noisy rebellions they hope will earn them cultural status points and lead to reforms specially tailored for their kind of people. The problem is that there’s just so much public magic to go around and more claims of victimhood than the rest of us have the patience, attention span, and means to deal with. Even white people have gotten into the grievance-making industry. And that is a problem for at least two reasons. First, there are so many of them. They can’t be ignored. Second, the only way we have come up with so far to redress white people’s grievances and satisfy their claims of victimhood is by diminishing some of the citizenship rights and canceling the social privileges of people who haven’t enjoyed them for very long. The public magic some white people want to undo has led to fights like the ones we saw in Charlottesville and at the Capitol insurrection. The fights we saw in Ferguson and all over the country with Black Lives Matter protests show that the citizenship rights and social privileges being contested by white people aren’t as settled and uncontestable as we might have thought. “Us Too” movements and culture wars are sad proxies for these fights.19 They are distracting and annoying but won’t make our civic lives much better or happier. That none of these movements has turned violent so far is no accident.

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Both their existence and non-violent nature are part of the legacy of earlier, much bigger, and more violent fights of the sort we were reminded of in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Capitol insurrection. The downside to the successes that historically marginalized populations realized by ritualized rebellions and reforms carved out with them in mind is that it inspired smaller groups of marginalized people to make loud declarations about their sovereignty. The relatively modest reforms our bigger ritualized rebellions piled up on behalf of historically marginalized people have stalled in the face of all the noise and chest-puffing that “Us Too” activists and culture warriors are doing today. Learning to fight nicer saved lives and property. It also encouraged a new generation of activists to make more and louder partisan noises on behalf of people just like them. This has fractured our national dialogue. It hasn’t advanced it. The uncompromising clarity of their sermons and prophesies leaves the same message. Follow them and they will end the threat every other moral reformer represents to our way of life. Unlike the North Carolina mill workers who only needed a couple of days off to recuperate from the bug bites that didn’t exist, latter-day culture warriors and “Us Too” avatars have good ideological and marketing reasons to sell their campaign as the answer to the existential crises they stir up. It’s necessary for their brand and good for their business. Here Are Some Other Takeaways

Popular unrest and violence in the United States are every bit as surprising and upsetting as people make them out to be. They can really mess with the way a community is arranged and how different people relate to each other. But the effect of their messes is short lived. They do no permanent damage. The reason why is that many of the routine ways groups get along and show their regard for each other in public are only temporarily turned around and used to show they are upset. When the “inversions” of people’s “natural order of conscience” – the customs, codes, and values people typically draw upon – don’t succeed in pushing people to deal with their differences more forthrightly, sometimes the pushing and shoving turn violent. Communities can come back quickly from such misadventures. How quickly and well people come back depends in no small way on how democratically organized and run their society or community is. In democratic societies, people draw on and share the same strategies for making trouble and keeping the peace. In less democratic societies, only the people on top get to use both. The people on the bottom only get to do things that keep the peace. People in less democratic settings tend to fight over who among them has the right to be treated as a legitimate member of the community and draw

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on the full range of peacekeeping and troublemaking strategies that are available, but only one side gets to use. Who wins and loses isn’t hard to figure out. These fights are often nasty and deadly affairs. In more democratic settings, people who are recognized as legitimate members of the community sometimes fight when they can’t work out any of the other differences they may have. The specific content of these disagreements is less important than the way people work through them. The resolutions to their disagreements turn on how successfully different groups make themselves and each other accountable for how their members publicly address and treat people from the other side. These fights tend to be less dangerous and destructive in part because different groups draw on similar ways to keep the peace and make trouble. People representing different groups may look and sound respectful and solicitous even when their feelings toward each other aren’t particularly warm and fuzzy. That’s part of the price people pay to live in more democratic societies. The troublemaking scripts people follow in less democratic societies would be called “asymmetrical.” The unrest and violence used in less democratic societies tend to be reactionary in character. It keeps the existing arrangement of groups and social classes intact. The scripts used in democratic societies are more “symmetrical.” The unrest and violence in these societies tend to be more progressive in nature. They are more likely to amend a community’s existing arrangement of social groups and classes than to keep it intact. The interesting thing about these markedly different scripts and the unrest and violence they produce is that they all tend to reinforce the legitimacy of a community’s existing institutions and civic virtues. This happens because the act of tearing up a community’s social and cultural script in moments of social and political disconsent is followed up ­almost immediately with rituals people use to restore, renew, and reform their way out of the fight some number of them just had. Moments of disunity create the appearance of a world that has been turned upside down. They also invite speculation about how the world might look if the moment became permanently enshrined in the way the community was organized and how people were supposed to act. Rituals of restoration, ­renewal, and reform return the world to something that looks more right side up than upside down.20 The way all this turning upside down and turning right side back up worked out in Ferguson, Charlottesville, in all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests, and Washington, D.C., has important historical lessons to teach us. Let’s begin with the biggest moment of misrule and disconsent I have written about here and work backward.

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The simulated rebellion that happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was the single most consequential moment of social and political disconsent in United States history. It was a big element in the sitting President’s plan to throw a coup d’état in honor of himself. The Capitol insurrection also happened to be the first time in Western history that a public official who behaved badly enough to provoke popular unrest and violence against the government he ran was the same person who instigated a rebellion that highlighted just how serious his reign of misrule had been. The events of January 6, 2021, were as twisted as the man who was instrumental in bringing them about. The unprecedented unrest and violence that happened in the national Capitol were foreshadowed by many more and smaller acts of disconsent in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and across the country in Black Lives Matter protests. These other moments weren’t as unprecedented and surprising as the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup d’état. But each in its own way showed how American civil unrest and violence end up reenforcing the legitimacy of important social and political institutions. All four public disturbances raised serious questions about how accountable public officials were for what they did and said about matters of compelling interest to the public. In none of these events was the question of people’s right to express their concerns and press their claims in public contested. That included Nazis and Antifa supporters. The violence associated with these events, regrettable as it may have been, was not as deadly as earlier fights in American history involving groups that couldn’t get along or out of each other’s way. In many cases, our contemporary unrest also wasn’t as destructive as other American disturbances had been in the past. People who were worried about their social status took a while to work themselves into a violent fit. They tried both legal and extra-legal means to explore what might be done to address their concerns. Protests and other forms of popular unrest were among the extra-legal strategies they used to redress their grievances. People who were more certain about their rights and privileges as citizens weren’t nearly as timid. They took no time at all to use violence to protect their rights and defend themselves. There was great historical irony in this cultural turn. Most of the white people who used violence in these disturbances were unsure about their social standing and needed time to work up to violence. They viewed themselves as cultural “outsiders” looking to regain a measure of respectability. The black people who used violence were more certain about their social standing. They needed little time to turn to violence once they were publicly insulted. Their unrest and violence were not pleas for ­sufferance but demands for an instant upgrade in their status as citizens.

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The unrest and violence used by outsiders in Charlottesville, in the cities where Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, and in Washington, D.C., was reactionary in character. It was intended to restore the civic identity of white people as America’s most privileged citizens. The unrest and violence used by black people in Ferguson was more progressive. It was designed to help them renew and expand their claim to rights and privileges local white people had long taken for granted. The unrest and violence made by black and white residents of Charlottesville and their supporters had a strong reactionary streak but protected and renewed the importance of progressive civic customs and virtues local people had come to embrace some time ago. A similar argument might be made about the civic customs and virtues being renewed and protected by the people who defended the Capitol and the legislators inside who were putting the final touches to the 2020 election. Contemporary unrest and violence in the United States reflect a complex mix of reactionary and progressive social and political impulses that continue to do Americans more good than harm. How much if any difference knowing any of this will make in the lives of people in other Western societies remains to be seen and will be in their hands. That’s how democracies work, and why the magic they make is special and needs to be preserved. Black Americans, especially accomplished black Americans, can make more civic magic than we have asked of them, or they have been willing to take on. They seem stuck on the idea that America is just as racist today as it was a century ago and there may be little they can do about it.21 It isn’t. But I understand why they and their white supporters think it is. People like me make it easy for them. Exactly 100 years ago, people like me provided scientific evidence of women’s, immigrants’, and black people’s biological inferiority.22 It was all racist and sexist nonsense, of course. But it helped justify all the crap that white people piled on black people, immigrants, and women so they would stay in their preassigned places…behind and beneath white men. A century later, people like me provide reams of evidence to support the idea that black people can’t succeed no matter how hard they try because American society is inherently and unalterably racist. Well, that idea is nonsense too. The growing number of success stories that black, brown, and off-white people have been writing for decades and more than ever lately is living proof of how much less racist and sexist American society has become. It’s way past time for us to give our nonsense a quick and unceremonious burial and move on. But until we do, women, people who are black, and people in all the other shades people come in that aren’t white won’t be making enough of the civic

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magic we need them to make. There is a profound and compelling need for Americans to move past “grievance making” and do more “people making.” The “people making” that the United States needs most involves black Americans. The bigger and more accommodating world they could show the rest of us how to build would be more ethnic in its construction than it is racial, a whole lot more Booker T. Washington and a whole lot less W.E.B. Du Bois.23 Making more black civic magic would still be hard, even if we were told how the trick works. After all, it is not like black people have not talked about making this kind of magic, come close to pulling it off in different cities in the past, or did not work hard to overcome the obstacles thrown in their way when they tried. It is just that accomplished black Americans have not shown much interest lately in making an “ethnic turn” in the way they think about their place in the world. More importantly, perhaps, they don’t appear to have given nearly enough thought to how less powerful, esteemed, and well-to-do black Americans might fit in it with them. For what it’s worth, neither could elites in ancient Greek cities. Until black people try harder, however, we will continue to be treated to endless and seemingly irreconcilable spats between black and white scholars and activists who act as if a “Booker T. Washington approach” and a “W.E.B. Dubois approach” to remaking the world cannot be reconciled. My own position is that putting a bottom-up approach and top-down approach together would have to work better than relying on a “Talented Tenth” of the black population to serve as role models and aspirational figures for the remaining nine tenths of black people to emulate or at least regard respectfully from a distance. Nearly a quarter century ago, Harold McDougall, a law school professor who would easily qualify as one of the persons W.E.B. DuBois had in mind when he talked about the “Talented Tenth,” told us how to marry a top-down and bottom-up approach to help black people. At the heart of McDougall’s proposal is that black Americans must fashion themselves into a modern ethnic people, something like my friend Naomi’s “Jewish Americans” and the tribe of “Italian Americans” with whom I grew up. The members of a “Black American” ethnic group wouldn’t have to be best friends or much more than fellow members of their own tribe. They wouldn’t have to hold the same views or belong to the same churches and voluntary associations. They just had to be prepared to step up and take one for the team when their help and talents were needed. The problem, as McDougall saw it, was that the “civil rights” strategy laid down by DuBois and his supporters protected more accomplished and ready-to-step-up black people from government abuse but divided the mass of black people and their vernacular culture from the middle-class blacks who would be their leaders.

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Booker T. Washington had focused his attention on the mediating institutions of the black community – the churches, fraternal associations, and small businesses – that provided a solid foundation from which black people could move more into the civic world that white people controlled.24 DuBois focused on more upwardly mobile and aspiring black people to make a difference as race leaders. McDougall thinks they both have a role to play in the emergence of a serious, butt kicking, deal making Black American ethnic people. No one should think less of better-off black Americans for not being “on the front lines” in most recent moments of popular unrest or showing up only after a mess has been made. Wealthier, more powerful, or more socially esteemed white people in American cities began ceding control over the use of street disturbances to their less-accomplished peers by the 1830s. There is no good reason to think that more well-off or accomplished black men and women should have behaved differently at the end of the 20th century or the beginning of the 21st century. No criticism is intended for all the accomplished black people who didn’t act up in Ferguson, Charlottesville, or in the two thousand and more towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests. Nor should criticism be implied in the fact that many of them may not have been any more politically engaged the day after such outbursts than they were the day before unrest happened. After all, outbreaks of civil unrest in the 1960s certainly did not improve the life chances of most black inner-city residents any more than the federally inspired reforms that were made just as all the violence was about to begin. What our reforms mostly accomplished was the emptying of many inner-city black neighborhoods of their more successful and engaged residents and leaders. What I just said also shouldn’t be taken as a thinly veiled putdown of white people who are still struggling to figure out on whose side they should be standing or have decided to throw their support to political leaders who need them to stay angry at black and brown people so they can slither their way back into office. White people are having a hard time figuring stuff out too. None of this, of course, is likely to discourage activist-minded white and black scholars from talking about racial disorders as if they have a bigger political impact than they do. The more conservative-friendly take on violence I have proposed here is consistent with the experience of other marginalized outsiders and newcomers who, like black Americans, struggled to become just as American as the people who were here first and did not like them. The point of popular unrest and violence is that it should make all of us uneasy and inspire even more of us to jump into arguments about the kind of community that newcomers and outsiders would like a better shot at sharing with groups that have been here longer. The impact of such a dialogue, as I have tried to make clear, is real and more important than many of the

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“political” and economic changes commentators argue endlessly about promoting but haven’t made much progress in figuring out how to make happen. The good news is that regular Americans who hold a variety of leftwing, rightwing, and middle-of-the-road ideas about such matters continue to put themselves on the streets and show our leaders what they have learned about fighting nicer and getting along better in public. Some of these people are in prison because of what they did in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. We should ask them what they think, too. I believe their stories and insights would be well worth taking down and thinking about. While we speculate on what rioters who were in Charlottesville and the Capitol might say, here are the points I said I would revisit at the end of the book. Lesson 1

What happened in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter protest in towns and cities, and the Capitol insurrection reflected changes in popular unrest and violence that took 250 years to accomplish. The complicated history revealed in these outbursts showed up in the way both community people and organizations became involved, in the mix of reactionary and progressive goals being pursued, and in the relatively more restrained violence that was used by people and groups on both sides of the public fights being waged.25 The involvement of organizations in popular unrest and social movements had been described earlier by historians and social scientists. The reduction in lethal violence was as well. The persistence of reactionary unrest and violence, the mix of progressive and reactionary goals in the same outburst, and the change from unrest about community membership to questions of public accountability had not been identified in earlier work on unrest. Lesson 2

Popular unrest and violence are not crazy. (Neither are the participants.) These events are not orderly like ordinary life, but there is order and purpose to them, nonetheless. Just beneath the surface of public disturbances one sees important customs and rituals at work. At least in the United States, the rituals included, first and foremost, the practice of disorder itself. It could be used to reinforce customary duties and obligations. Or it could expand the rights and privileges enjoyed by people more accustomed to being excluded from important public affairs and left uncovered by protections afforded by institutions to which other people can turn for assistance. In any case, disorderly public acts were recognized as a legitimate and well-practiced means to register a complaint and plea one’s case before the whole community.

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The timing and content of disorder was left to the discretion of aggrieved parties. It was a surprise that leaders ruefully acknowledged with every small concession they made to their fellow townsmen. That was until their ­fellow townsmen asserted their right and privilege to exercise it whenever they liked, against whoever they had a mind to insult and abuse, and with little apparent regard for how violent and destructive the abuse became. The temporary withdrawal of the people’s assent to be governed or restrained in the expression of their prejudices was acted out in ways everyone recognized, just not as agreeably as they had in the past. Over a period measured in centuries rather than decades, less esteemed and privileged members of the community would come to use unrest to press for the right and privilege to be treated just like their better regarded neighbors. The use of unrest and violence to achieve such progressively inspired goals was as measured and limited as was that which had long targeted a community’s leaders. The democratization of unrest and violence was completed. Working out the details would remain an ongoing project. At the Capitol insurrection and in Charlottesville, both sides used reactionary unrest. On one of the two sides in Charlottesville, the one with local people and their supporters on it, used reactionary unrest to defend the community’s more progressive civic values and customs. A case might be made that the people who fought the rioters in Washington, D.C., also used violence to renew a commitment to a host of hard-won civil rights for historically marginalized groups that most everyone who wasn’t storming the Capitol shared. The other rituals we use to work on the problems identified by our ritualized rebellions have been put to good use in restorative public trials, reforms to the way agents of the state are expected to conduct themselves, and the renewing power of the next election and every election following it. Public leaders and regular citizens are preparing, mobilize for a future assault that may not happen but they want to be better prepared for.26 A great many people have been shamed for how they behaved. Hundreds have been temporarily removed from their communities, families, and friends. Our ritualized clean-ups and reforms are doing what we expect of them. Lesson 3

Acts of popular unrest and disconsent last only long enough to do the work they are designed to do. They challenge public leaders and the institutions they oversee to reexamine what they do and how the rest of us are affected by what they aren’t doing well enough or at all. These reexaminations are reinforcing the legitimacy of the institutions and leaders whose work was questioned. The government of Ferguson has largely stopped abusing its own citizens and is trying to put more of them in a position to mind the public’s business.

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Charlottesville’s leaders took important steps to clarify the boundary line between free speech and unacceptable public actions. They made white people who were outsiders accountable for the trouble they caused. Black Lives Matter protests revealed how cultural changes favoring more progressive civic values and customs had spread across the country. The Capitol insurrection and Presidential coup d’état led to public leaders being charged with crimes and being put on trial. Lesson 4

Economic inequality is as durable today as it has been for centuries. We are working harder than ever to identify and deal with our social and cultural differences. We are not beating ourselves up over it nearly as often or as enthusiastically as we did in the past, however. We continue to struggle politically with finding a more agreeable balance in the rights, duties, privileges, and obligations citizens are expected to follow. More groups than ever are engaged in these discussions. They aren’t beating up each other as often or viciously as they once did here either. Our political dancing and balancing act may only delay an inevitable reckoning over economic inequality. But it will prove invaluable in showing us how to work through that reckoning without having to kill each other off in the process.27 Lesson 5

What didn’t happen in Ferguson, Charlottesville, in all the towns and cities that had Black Lives Matter protests and violence, and at the Capitol insurrection and Presidential coup d’état gives us the best clues to how all our future in-fighting will turn out. People in Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area are showing they can get along more respectfully and keep their distance from the good and bad sides of town and the metropolitan area. They’ll figure out how to get along even better when the distance between the good and bad sides of town grows smaller. The white people who picked a fight in Charlottesville were serious, but not deadly serious. The statues they were all worked up about are gone. The racists and antisemites have not come back to challenge the more progressive civic customs and virtues everybody else in Charlottesville seems to favor. The ones who ended up in jail won’t be showing up anywhere for a while. The activists on both sides of the Black Lives Matter protests and violence didn’t do nearly as much damage as they might have done, if the protest supporters hadn’t been on the right side of history and the protest protesters had shot all the guns they were showing off. I have looked for evidence in

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these towns of a public comeback by white nationalists, racists, antisemites, and Nazis. I haven’t seen any. They may come out again in the run-up to the next national election. But there won’t be as many of them this time making a lot of noise and threatening people with guns they won’t be shooting again. Black people didn’t show up at the Capitol. All Americans should recognize and commend them for what they didn’t do on January 6, 2021. What President Donald Trump didn’t do on January 6, 2021, was not commendable. He did nothing to stop his followers from storming the Capitol and interfering with the peaceful transfer of power to the next President. This willful disregard of his oath of office constitutes a treason against the government of the United States. I looked it up.28 Treason was not among the illegal acts he was charged with committing. Neither was he charged with obliterating the line between free speech and speech that incited violence. This was a line that legislators in Charlottesville made much clearer after the people who came to their town to incite violence were run out of their town. I understand why federal prosecutors decided not to charge the former President with treason. I also understand why they didn’t think it wouldn’t play well, given all the other and easier to sell charges waiting for him in four different courtrooms. But this last line, the one he crossed and the one that rioters in Charlottesville crossed, will now be left for other Americans to think about and work into the customs and codes, which, as I have said, are foundational to the natural order of conscience they can live with. That’s the problem with democracies. There’s always something else to work on. I can live with that. We all can. Notes 1 Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 2 The New York Times, September 21, 2023. “Book Bans Are Rising Sharply in Public Libraries.” Elizabeth Harris, and Alexandra Alter; The New York Times, September 24, 2023. “The Moral Theater of Social Justice Parenting.” Tyler ­Austin Harper. 3 The Guardian, March 28, 2013. “2011 riots inquiry recommendations ignored by government, says Lammy.” Vikram Dodd. 4 Bannister, Jon and Ade Kearns, “The Function and Foundations of Urban Tolerance: Encountering and Engaging with Difference in the City.” Urban Studies. Vol. 50 (3) (2013): 2700–2717. 5 Bannister, Jon, Nick Fyfe and Ade Kearns, “Respectable or Respectful? (In)civility and the City.” Urban Studies. Vol. 43 (4–5) (2006): 919–937.

The Future of Civil Unrest and Violence in America  327

6 The New York Times, April 12, 2016. “How To Fix Politics.” David Brooks; The New York Times, December 10, 2020. “What Really Saved the Republican from Trump?” Tim Wu. 7 Stid, Daniel, “Civil Society and the Foundations of Democratic Citizenship.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (August 16, 2018); Handy, Charles, “­Tocqueville Revisited: The Meaning of American Prosperity.” Harvard Business Review. (­January, 2001). 8 Monti, Daniel, The American City (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Monti, Daniel, Engaging Strangers (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). 9 Bannister, Jon and A. O’Sullivan, “Civility, community cohesion, and antisocial behavior,” Journal of Social Policy. 42 (2013): 91–110. See page 97. 10 If violent outbursts of the sort studied here are almost always a surprise, our afterthe-fact explanations for them are not. This odd conjoining – the big, destructive, and all-but-impossible-to-predict event coupled with the all-too-predictable account for why it happened – is a singular cultural accomplishment. See: Barnes, Harper, Never Been a Time. (New York: Walker Publishing Co., 2008); Katz, Michael, Why Do not American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Lipsky, Michael, Michael and David Olson, Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977); Lupo, Lindsey, Flak-Catchers: One Hundred Years of Riot Commission Politics in America. (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2011); Fogelson, Robert, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos. (New York: ­Doubleday & Co., 1971); Waskow, Arthur, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967). 11 Dillon, Denis and Bryan Fanning, “Tottenham after the riots: The chimera of community and the property-led regeneration of ‘broken Britain’.” Critical Social Policy. Vol. 35 (2) (2015): 188–206. 12 Bannister and O’Sullivan, “Civility, Community Cohesion, and Antisocial Behavior.” 13 Frantz, Douglas and Catherine Collins, Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999); Baumgartner, M. P., The Moral Order of a Suburb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 14 See endnote 54 in Chapter 2. 15 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-nypd-aclu-settlement-will-only-bringthe-city-more-chaos/ar-AA1gRxbZ?cvid=92d030428c694da19fe620a8e9dde43 d&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=15; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/ nyregion/nypd-settlement-protesters-penning.html 16 Sennett, Richard, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 17 https://acleddata.com/2021/01/25/political-disorder-in-europe-10-cases-fromacleds-new-expansion/ 18 Brooks, David, “How America Got Mean.” The Atlantic (September 2023): 68–76. 19 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 16, 2021. “‘Culture wars’ ramp up in state legislatures.” Andrew Demillo. 20 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 13, 2020. “Judiciary becomes ‘the last wall’.” Rosalind Helderman and Elise Viebeck. 21 The New York Times, September 23, 2023. “An Ambitious Antiracism Center Scales Back Amid Allegations of Poor Management.” Stephanie Saul; https:// glennloury.substack.com/p/the-false-god-of-antiracism. 22 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.

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23 McDougall, Howard, “Class Contradictions in the Civil Rights Movement: The Politics of Respectability, Disrespect, and Self-Respect.” Howard Human & Civil Rights Review. Vol. 45 (2017): 45–85. Also see: Kennedy, Randall, “Lifting as We Climb: A Progressive Defense of Respectability Politics.” Harper’s Magazine (October 2015): 24–34. 24 McDougall, Howard, Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 20. Also see: Anthony D. Smith’s treatment of the difference between “elite” ethnic peoples and “demotic” ethnic peoples in his book The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 25 Most of our unrest early on was reactionary in character and involved attacks against people who posed a real or imagined threat to the way of life everybody else was practicing. It also was directed at officials who weren’t doing their job or, in the case of businesspeople, not treating their workers or customers fairly. This kind of unrest and violence reinforced the larger community’s sense of right and wrong, how accountable people would be for how they acted, and the kind of people who would be welcomed as permanent residents. Community leaders who didn’t live up to these community standards might be treated in a disrespectful and physically abusive way; but their membership in the community was not questioned. Groups of people considered to be outsiders were often treated much worse. Their membership in the community was challenged. At some point in our history, Americans added more progressive forms of unrest to the repertoire of petition-making and grievance-making strategies they used to manage relations between insiders and outsiders. We still had reactionary unrest that challenged community leaders who didn’t live up to people’s expectations. But once different groups of outsiders earned the privilege of being members of the community the unrest they used and was used against them became more like that directed at a community’s leaders. It was all about making insiders and outsiders more accountable for their performance as community members and living up to a more accommodating set of community standards that everyone was supposed to follow. 26 The Daily Progress, September 18, 2021. “‘We Have to Pay Attention’ C’ville groups rally against threats to Democracy.” Hawes Spencer. 27 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/editorial-why-skeptical-californians-shouldrethink-cash-reparations-for-slavery/ar-AA1gQlZu?cvid=cb55ba6dedd1443bb25 bf048c4592a96&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=57 28 https://constitutionallawreporter.com/article-03-section-03/#:~:text=If%20 someone%20is%20guilty%20of,death%2C%20but%20not%20past%20 that.

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INDEX

Abortion 19, 21, 60, 83, 90, 237 Abuses by the state 309 Accountability 63, 74, 112, 113, 182, 185, 226, 227, 230, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263, 266, 269, 272, 286, 293, 323 Accountability riot 263 Accountability trials 272 ACLU 170, 173, 176 Activism 87, 237, 263, 268, 269 Activists 13, 22, 36, 38, 59, 60, 65, 70, 75, 88, 89, 91, 109, 139, 153, 159, 166, 167, 171, 173, 177, 182, 183, 220, 222, 230, 239, 249, 250, 263, 264, 269, 273, 274, 284, 297, 300, 306–308, 311, 315–317, 321, 325 African American Heritage Center 217 Alike and different 43, 91, 264, 290 Allen, Danielle 135 America 3, 10, 11, 14, 20, 25, 31, 32, 35, 36, 40–42, 49, 52–54, 58, 61, 64, 68, 70, 90, 106, 107, 110, 115, 118, 159, 176, 181, 202, 230, 233, 237, 251, 281, 282, 287, 289, 293–295, 300, 305, 306, 312, 315, 320 American dilemma 17 American Revolution 33, 66, 92, 112, 138, 184

Americans 1–8, 10–17, 19, 20, 22–28, 31–39, 41–46, 49, 52–55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 70, 75, 76, 80, 83–85, 88, 90, 92, 103, 105–111, 113, 114, 116, 120, 127–131, 138, 139, 141, 156, 159, 160, 161, 183, 185, 195, 196, 205, 213, 218, 220, 222, 224, 233, 237, 240, 242, 244, 251, 252, 254, 255, 274–276, 281–292, 295, 296, 298–300, 305, 306, 308–315, 320–323, 326 Antifa 3, 12, 22, 38, 66, 75, 193, 248, 249, 269, 270, 319 Antisemitic 42, 193, 195, 199, 211, 272, 292 Anti-vaccine 239, 240, 281 Arbery, Ahmaud 266 Aristocratic societies 316 Arrest 154, 156, 165, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176, 196, 227, 240, 248, 265, 272, 285, 287 Arson 34, 43, 92, 150, 154–156, 158, 161, 168, 180, 181, 184, 212, 231, 248, 261 Asian 90 Associations 48, 49, 82, 171, 175, 180, 311, 321, 322 Asymmetrical troublemaking 318 Athenian 135, 287, 298 Athens 133, 135

Index  343

Back, Kurt 77 Baker, Mike 272 Baldwin, James 11, 305 Baltimore, Maryland 156 Banfield, Edward 79 Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York 79, 86 Beliefs 18, 52, 53, 114, 115, 137, 141, 199, 281, 290, 300 Belonging 23, 35, 61, 71, 82, 83, 85, 86, 105, 109, 127, 212, 232, 237, 240, 266, 291, 292 Biden, Joe 16, 22, 39, 52, 283, 292 Biological inferiority 320 Black Lives Matter 3, 4, 7, 12, 17, 21, 25, 35, 37, 38, 45, 55, 58, 61, 66–74, 91, 92, 103, 104, 110, 121, 128, 130, 131, 147, 149, 154, 165, 194, 222, 223, 237–241, 243, 244, 247–250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259–261, 263, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271–276, 281, 291–293, 296, 297, 307, 309, 312–314, 316–320, 322, 323, 325 Blacks 3, 14, 34, 63, 66, 127, 128, 146, 147, 149, 151, 154, 156, 195, 199, 218, 257, 261, 289, 291, 306, 321 Boogaloo Boys 240 Bourgeois 76, 141, 311 Boycotts 43, 123, 172, 253 Brawls 43, 61, 82, 85, 201, 239, 262, 268 Brooks Brothers Riot 32, 33 Brown, Michael 25, 150–153, 157, 162, 163, 172, 173, 181, 194, 203, 215, 227–229, 231, 297 Bug bites 123, 179, 229, 274, 317 Bush, George 33 Business 6, 16, 24, 26, 31, 39, 54, 61, 70, 73, 82, 86, 88, 91, 109, 113, 150, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 171, 172, 175–177, 180–183, 204, 206, 215, 216, 218, 221, 223, 224, 227, 231, 232, 237, 246, 248, 249, 261, 262, 264, 271, 272, 292, 311, 312, 317, 322, 324 Businesspeople 22, 73, 74, 123, 150, 158, 171, 172, 177, 181–183, 212, 231, 246, 311

Canfield Gardens 151 Capitol Insurrection 3, 4, 7, 12, 17, 22, 25, 35, 37, 55, 58, 61–75, 81, 92, 103, 115, 129, 147, 149, 154, 194, 208, 209, 222, 237, 239, 240, 249–251, 262, 268, 270, 273, 275, 282, 283, 286–288, 292, 294–296, 298, 301, 309, 312, 314, 316, 317, 319, 323–325 Catholic 3, 290, 291 Celebrate 12, 16, 40, 44, 56, 90, 120, 138, 161, 198, 247, 250, 272, 283, 286, 313 Censorship 90 Chambersburg, Pennsylvania 256 Charlottesville, Virginia 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 25, 35, 37, 52, 54, 58, 61, 66–74, 91, 92, 103, 104, 110, 114, 115, 135, 147, 149, 154, 193–212, 214–233, 242, 243, 246, 249, 262, 268, 270–272, 281, 291–294, 296, 297, 307, 309, 312–314, 316– 320, 322–326 Chauvin, Derek 259, 266 Chicago, Illinois 87, 88, 147 Christian 7, 20, 110, 199, 243, 251, 281, 289, 290, 296 Churches 129, 179, 221, 321, 322 Cities 3, 4, 9, 14, 18, 23, 25, 26, 34, 41, 45, 47, 48, 56, 58–62, 66, 67, 69–74, 78, 79, 88, 92, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 127–135, 138, 140, 141, 147, 149, 154, 160, 165, 182, 184, 213, 222, 238–240, 242, 244–249, 251, 252, 255, 258, 260–263, 265, 266, 268–272, 281, 289–293, 297, 306, 308, 309, 312–314, 318, 320–323, 325 Citizen 10, 12, 14, 17, 31, 38, 45, 48, 55, 60, 72, 74, 83, 92, 112, 113, 130, 133, 134, 136, 146, 151, 156, 157, 160, 170, 172, 176, 182, 184, 193, 200, 205–207, 213, 215, 227, 230, 233, 242, 243, 245–247, 252, 256, 257, 261, 266, 269, 272, 276, 284– 286, 288, 298, 308–311, 319, 320, 324, 325 Citizenship 5, 12, 33, 251, 314, 316

344 Index

Civic culture 14, 65, 68, 69, 113, 132, 140, 202, 205, 208, 209, 218, 219, 223, 243, 262, 269, 311, 316 Civic magic 311, 320, 321 Civic protests 87 Civic sensibilities 296 Civic space 311 Civic values 195, 248, 285, 306, 324, 325 Civic virtues 2, 6–8, 14, 21, 195, 211, 216, 240, 243, 247, 249, 250, 262, 264, 288, 295, 309, 311, 318 Civil Rights 14, 36, 59, 63, 67, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 106, 14, 160, 204, 248, 251, 292, 296, 297, 305, 306, 321, 324 Civil society 48, 311 Civil unrest 3, 8, 25, 26, 28, 32, 39, 47, 52, 68, 72, 75, 91, 93, 113, 160, 243, 254, 305, 311, 313, 314, 319, 322 Civil War 9, 15, 61, 92, 105, 138, 213, 223, 252, 294, 298, 300 Civilian-Police Review Board 157, 227 Civility 65, 104, 133, 141, 313 Civilized 20, 24, 27, 28, 62, 63, 65, 76, 79, 88, 92, 104, 122, 130, 213, 220, 308 Class 11, 14, 18, 24, 31, 33, 48, 57, 77, 82–84, 89, 90, 105, 113, 120, 131–136, 138, 141, 146, 149, 160, 163, 179, 202, 232, 269, 293, 296, 306, 312, 314, 318, 321 Clayton, Missouri 155, 157 Clean-up 15, 156, 159, 160, 178, 180, 183, 228, 262, 271, 310, 311, 324 Clubs 199, 287, 197 Codes 40–42, 46, 49, 57, 309, 311, 317, 326 Collective behavior 77, 78, 80, 81, 104, 114, 179, 184, 273, 274 Colonists 43, 76 Comity 48, 313 Commemorate 56, 117, 120, 121, 217, 247, 250, 295 Commission 140, 156, 177, 212, 243, 288, 311 Communal 13, 61, 67, 74, 75 Community 5–10, 15, 19, 22, 23, 27, 31, 32, 37, 39–43, 48, 56, 60,

61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 73–76, 78, 80–88, 90, 91, 104, 106–113, 115, 116, 118–122, 128, 130, 131, 134–136, 138, 139, 147, 148, 150, 153–160, 168, 174, 175, 178, 180, 182, 183, 194, 195, 198, 202, 205–208, 210, 212, 213, 215–221, 223–226, 228, 230–233, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250, 252–260, 262–267, 269, 272, 275, 276, 282, 284, 286, 287, 293–297, 299, 306, 307, 309, 311–315, 317, 318, 322–324 Community membership 63, 64, 74, 112, 202, 205, 225, 230, 232, 256, 257, 265, 293, 323 Community-based unrest 60, 84 Complain 36, 56, 62, 74, 87, 89, 106, 107, 109, 119, 151, 160, 163, 164, 168, 170, 181, 183, 201, 248, 257, 307, 315, 323 Compromise 90, 116, 220, 270, 311, 316 Concord 48, 313 Confederate 3, 25, 193, 199, 201, 203, 208, 216, 217, 221, 223, 233, 252, 260 Confession 53, 285, 286 Conflict escalation 75, 86–88, 208 Consciousness of hierarchy 40, 41, 46, 218 Consent 8, 9, 120, 123, 196, 246 Conservative 8, 14, 24, 27, 46, 55, 66, 70, 90, 91, 103, 111–113, 123, 139–141, 182, 195, 203, 212, 232, 239, 260, 263, 306, 322 Constitution 83, 118, 281, 287, 288, 294 Contagion 77, 179, 249 Contentious acts 268 Convention 4, 21, 36, 56, 76, 80, 86–89, 106, 112, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122, 128, 137, 139, 140, 150, 154, 179, 231, 260, 274, 307 Counter-protesters 128, 195, 196, 199– 202, 204, 207, 208, 214–217, 221, 225, 228, 229, 238, 239, 257–260, 262, 263, 266, 268, 269, 275, 293 Coup d’état 12, 15, 17, 25, 53, 54, 104, 209, 268, 281–289, 291, 298, 300, 301, 307, 319, 325

Index  345

Courts 48, 84, 117, 119, 150, 203, 206, 209–211, 217, 221, 243, 275, 285, 298 Covid 237–240 Crazy 76–78, 80, 123, 178, 267, 297, 309, 323 Crime 44, 45, 137, 151, 173, 211–215, 246, 261, 284, 287, 292, 325 Critical race theory 65, 90 Crowds 35, 36, 104, 105, 127–138, 147, 168, 169, 178, 199, 226, 243, 244, 247, 248, 260, 285, 286, 288, 310 Crown Heights, New York 263 Cultural change 14, 63, 107, 108, 130, 206, 247, 250, 291, 297, 306, 311, 325 Cultural differences 10, 11, 91, 116, 309, 325 Cultural inequality 116, 220 Culture 4, 11, 14, 18–20, 23, 43, 60, 69, 113, 132, 134, 140, 202, 205, 208, 209, 218, 219, 223, 232, 243, 249, 254, 262, 269, 290, 311, 316, 317, 321 Culture warriors 19, 60, 65, 67, 68, 254, 317 Culture wars 11, 19, 20, 232, 249, 254 Customs 2, 7–9, 14, 15, 31, 40, 48, 49, 66, 76, 103, 113–115, 117, 120, 122, 130, 133, 137, 139, 141, 156, 178, 185, 210, 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 224, 226, 231, 239, 243, 245, 248, 250, 252, 259, 262–264, 267, 269, 284, 286–288, 290, 294–296, 299, 305, 306, 309, 311, 317, 320, 323–326 Defiance days 77, 288 Delhi, New York 240–242, 244, 247, 250, 275 Democracy 1–3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 27, 52, 53, 55, 59, 93, 103, 137, 202, 204, 281, 287, 294, 305, 309, 311, 316, 320, 326 Democrat Party 54, 71, 284 Democratic societies 1, 17, 27, 267, 301, 313, 315–318 Democratization 12, 27, 33, 39, 60–64, 68, 69, 135, 294, 306, 310, 315, 324

Demonstration 12, 25, 35, 43, 56, 70, 78, 83, 89, 108, 123, 131, 136, 138, 140, 158, 161, 166, 169, 184, 196, 210, 214, 228, 238, 239, 244, 247, 248, 250, 253, 255, 269 Detroit, Michigan 6 Dialogue 14, 24, 25, 165, 210, 224, 247, 250, 251, 260, 283, 307, 317, 322 Disconsent 9, 13, 103, 117, 120–123, 148, 205, 216, 224, 233, 237, 243, 244, 246, 259, 267, 268, 271, 272, 274, 286, 289, 295, 306, 311, 318, 319, 324 Discretion 17, 173, 175, 201, 225, 228, 324 Disorder 17, 18, 27, 32, 52, 56–58, 67, 75, 92, 103, 105, 112, 115, 118, 132, 136, 139, 156, 159, 160, 161, 167, 177, 178, 184, 185, 197, 200, 220, 288, 293, 305, 309, 313, 314, 322–324 Diversity 23, 24, 60, 64, 140, 141, 245, 260 Diversity training 260 Doing community 23, 68, 275 Domain of the unenforceable 48, 140, 141 Draft Riots 73 DuBois, W.E.B. 321, 322 Duke University 77 Durable inequality 10, 116, 219, 220, 325 Duties 5, 6, 12, 33, 60, 66, 67, 88, 108, 150, 182, 265, 286, 309, 314, 323, 325 Eastern Europe 41, 290 Economic Inequality/differences 10, 11, 14, 48, 83, 84, 88, 116, 145, 168, 205, 219, 309, 311, 325 Election 16, 22, 32, 35, 52, 54, 59, 60, 73, 90, 157, 237, 240, 243, 269, 270, 284, 286–288, 292, 295, 297, 301, 320, 324, 326 Elias, Norbert 47, 62, 88, 122 Elite 32, 33, 60, 84, 130, 131, 134, 137, 223, 286, 321 England 14, 31, 32, 55, 79, 147, 156, 172, 181, 305, 308, 309, 311, 314 Equal Rights Amendment 83

346 Index

Ethnicity 4, 9, 14, 22, 24, 45, 47, 48, 53, 57, 61–65, 70, 82, 83, 85, 86, 105, 113, 116, 123, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 140, 148, 154, 202, 263, 296, 311, 315, 321, 322 Ethnocentric 53, 64, 210, 264 Ethnocentric narcissism 53 Europe 13, 14, 31, 34, 38, 41, 43, 59, 67, 82, 129, 130, 131, 147, 268, 305, 308, 313–315 Extralegal 31, 35, 194, 207, 284, 285, 297, 309, 319 Facebook 230, 241 Fairness 10, 23, 119, 174, 183, 224, 228, 275, 313 Father Kearny 299 Fedder, Ed 24, 25, 250 Federal law enforcement 73, 238, 239, 268 Ferguson Effect 145, 172, 173 Ferguson, Missouri 3, 4, 7, 12, 15–17, 21, 25, 35, 37, 54, 58, 61, 66, 67, 69–74, 91, 92, 103, 104, 110, 118, 128, 134, 145–147, 149–162, 168–177, 180–184, 194, 195, 197, 202–206, 210, 215, 217–220, 222–225, 227–233, 246, 261, 262, 268, 269, 271, 273, 281, 291–294, 296, 297, 307, 309, 312–314, 316–320, 322–325 Fields, James Alex 197 Fights 5–8, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 36–38, 44–49, 53–55, 57– 74, 77, 82–88, 91–93, 105–108, 110, 113–118, 122, 128, 133, 134, 137, 141, 147, 152, 160, 166, 171, 172, 174, 176–178, 183–185, 193–196, 199, 200, 204, 205, 208–214, 218, 220, 221, 223–226, 228–233, 239, 240, 249, 251, 253–255, 257, 260, 261, 263–270, 272, 274, 275, 292–294, 307, 308, 310, 312–314, 316–319, 323, 325 Figure stuff out 241, 242, 275, 282 Fischer, David Hackett 135 Floyd, George 15, 17, 55, 71, 73, 237, 238, 241, 242, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 257, 258, 261, 265, 266, 268, 272, 275, 297 Forward looking 114

Founding Fathers 288 Fraternal associations 322 Free Speech 206, 209, 233, 242, 243, 270, 325, 326 Fuller, Robert 272 Garder, Megan 130 Gays 21, 90, 232, 308 Gender 11, 19, 20, 22, 53, 57, 65, 83, 135, 274, 293 Goluboff, Risa 208 Gould, Stephen Jay 214 Government 8, 26, 35, 44, 48, 53, 54, 59, 61, 73–75, 78, 81, 86, 88, 89, 92, 108, 122, 123, 128, 146, 151, 152, 155–157, 159, 160, 170, 172, 181, 183, 203, 206, 218–222, 224, 227–229, 233, 237, 238, 246, 247, 252, 262, 266, 270, 281, 284, 286–289, 298, 309–312, 314, 315, 319, 321, 324, 326 Greater good 23, 46, 58, 267, 286 Greece 133, 136, 285, 286, 313 Greeks 66, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 142, 242, 245, 286, 288, 310 Greitens, Eric 165 Grievance 1–3, 9, 10, 31, 53, 59, 60, 62, 69, 73, 77, 79–81, 85, 89, 105, 109, 122, 127, 138, 150, 164, 200, 204, 229, 252, 253, 276, 293, 296, 315, 316, 319, 321 Grievance politics 59, 60 Grievance redress 9, 69, 85, 89, 204, 276, 296, 316, 319 Grimshaw, Allen 34 Groups 2–5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21–24, 26, 28, 33–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 52–54, 56–58, 60–65, 67–71, 74, 75, 78, 80, 82–91, 93, 104, 105, 107–110, 112–116, 122, 123, 127, 133, 135, 137, 140, 155, 157–159, 165, 170, 184, 193–196, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210–212, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223–226, 229–231, 233, 237–241, 247, 249, 252, 256, 257, 262–264, 267–270, 272, 285, 290, 292, 293, 295–297, 307–311, 313, 315, 317–319, 322, 323–325

Index  347

Grudge 1, 46, 316 Guilt 274, 285, 298, 300 Gun control 237 Guns 3, 54, 71, 75, 104, 110, 147, 152, 153, 162, 170, 196, 201, 205, 207, 214, 221, 237, 249, 251, 272, 289, 292, 294, 325, 326 Harlem, New York 79, 86 Harmony 133, 312 Hate crimes 44, 45 Hawley, Josh 283, 292 Heyer, Heather 197, 200, 229 Hispanic 84, 90, 184 Historians 8–11, 13, 14, 25, 26, 44, 52, 55, 56, 59, 67, 68, 80, 84–86, 88, 109, 132, 135, 147, 159, 194, 195, 202, 225, 239, 252, 295, 310, 314, 323 History 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12–15, 17, 19, 25, 31, 32, 36–40, 46, 54, 55, 59–64, 67–72, 74, 75, 77–82, 84, 87, 91, 93, 108, 109, 115, 116, 119, 131, 137, 138, 146, 150, 160, 172, 174, 177, 181–183, 194–196, 201–203, 205–207, 210–212, 215, 216, 220, 222, 224–226, 231, 243, 245, 246, 248, 252, 255, 256, 259–261, 263, 268, 282, 284, 287, 289, 290, 295, 296, 298, 300, 301, 307, 310, 311, 313, 314, 317–319, 323–325 Hobsbawm, Eric 159 Hofstadter, Richard 44 Horowitz, Donald 14, 44, 47, 48, 62, 63, 140, 177, 201, 250 Hughes, Langston 35 Hypothesis 62, 78, 86, 174, 296 Hysterical contagion 77 Identity 19, 20, 22, 60, 64, 65, 66, 82, 83, 89, 90, 198, 254, 296, 307, 311, 320 Identity politics 19, 20, 64, 82, 89, 90 Illiberalism 2, 3, 6, 281 Immigrants 3, 11, 32, 34, 41, 43, 110, 112, 213, 260, 262, 263, 290, 308, 314, 320 In-between races 41 Individual rights 274 Insiders 14, 59, 69, 90, 154, 172, 212, 230, 232

Institutional stability 14, 25, 26, 27, 52, 68, 115, 118, 128, 220, 222 Institutions 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27, 49, 52, 63, 65, 68, 73, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 114, 115, 116, 118, 128, 136, 137, 145, 146, 148, 150, 158, 164, 165, 167, 182, 183, 201, 203, 205, 206, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 233, 237, 245, 249, 250, 264, 282, 283, 285, 298, 299, 300, 309, 314, 318, 319, 322, 323, 324 Insurrection 3, 4, 7, 12, 17, 22, 25, 33–35, 37, 55, 58, 61, 66–75, 81, 92, 103, 115, 129, 147, 149, 154, 194, 208, 209, 222, 237, 239, 240, 249–251, 262, 268, 270, 273, 275, 276, 281–289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296, 298, 300, 301, 309, 312, 314, 316– 319, 323–325 Integrity 38, 43, 60, 61, 81, 118, 119, 121, 228, 286 Invented tradition 135, 159, 178, 185, 271 Inversion 117, 118, 131, 139, 140, 154, 180, 255, 271, 288, 305, 317 Irish Elk 214 Irrational 77, 80, 159, 178 Italian American 321 Jackson, Stonewall 193 January 6 12, 25, 33, 53, 54, 77, 91, 154, 208, 209, 233, 240, 268, 275, 281–285, 287–289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297–300, 309, 312, 319, 326 Jews 3, 195, 199, 201, 205, 263, 290, 291, 321 Jewish American 321 Jim Crow 193 Kenosha, Wisconsin 249, 261, 266 Kerckhoff, Alan 77 Killing 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 25, 26, 34–36, 45, 63, 69, 71, 72, 75, 88, 92, 104, 105, 110, 113, 117, 122, 127, 128, 132, 136, 147, 148, 150–154, 161, 162, 164, 167, 175, 179–181, 184, 194, 197, 200, 203, 212, 213, 215, 221, 227–229, 231, 238–240, 242,

348 Index

244, 246, 247, 249, 252, 261, 266, 268, 270, 272, 284, 289, 292–294, 297, 308, 309, 315, 325 King, Martin Luther 117, 160, 185, 261, 275, 292, 305 KKK 3, 67, 71, 193, 195, 196, 199, 201, 207, 210–212, 226, 232, 238, 243, 289, 290 Krewson, Lyda 165, 177 Ku Klux Klan 54, 67, 289 Labor 6, 61, 67, 73, 82, 133 Labor unrest 6, 73, 82 Latino 90 Law enforcement 54, 73, 74, 84, 92, 157, 160, 173, 175, 199, 201, 203, 222, 230, 238, 239, 268, 269, 273, 286 Laws 33–35, 40, 44, 48, 53, 63, 120, 172–174, 177, 208, 210, 212, 215, 216, 252, 264, 271, 288, 299, 306, 310, 311 Leaders 4, 6, 8–10, 14, 22, 31, 32, 45, 56, 60, 61, 69, 73, 74, 80, 81, 87–91, 112, 113, 116, 122, 129, 130, 133–135, 145, 146, 150, 155, 160, 161, 163–167, 171–173, 175–180, 182, 183, 194, 196, 201, 203, 206–211, 215–227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 237, 240, 242–247, 252, 258, 263, 266, 270–272, 282, 285– 288, 290, 292, 293, 295, 297, 298, 308–310, 312, 313, 315, 321, 325 Lee, Robert E. 25, 193 Leftwing 22, 59, 60, 71, 75, 237, 240, 249, 250, 269, 270, 315, 323 Legacy 2, 3, 25, 46, 66, 70, 117, 129, 132, 205, 218, 263, 267, 305, 306, 317 Legitimacy 6, 9, 10, 17, 48, 61, 74, 77, 79, 108, 114, 118–120, 122, 140, 178, 203, 205, 213, 225, 228, 233, 263, 282, 291, 296, 309, 314, 317–319, 323, 324 Lesbians 90 LGBTQ 237, 251, 274 Liberal 2, 3, 8, 11, 14, 24, 27, 46, 66, 79, 90, 103, 111–113, 116, 123, 139, 140, 141, 195, 203, 233, 306

Liberalism 2, 3 Long, Corey 196–203, 211, 214, 215 Looting 26, 43, 79, 148, 150, 153–156, 158, 161, 168, 175, 180, 181, 184, 212, 231, 248, 261, 270 Lower orders 246, 264 McDougall, Harold 321 Malcom X 160 Malkin, Naomi 290 Marches 28, 35, 43, 86, 87, 89, 108, 117, 121, 123, 153, 155, 162– 169, 171, 176, 193, 201, 208, 228, 229, 242, 247, 248, 292, 306 Mardi Gras 87 Marx, Karl 11, 212 Mass killing 4 Mass unrest 3, 13, 19, 104, 147, 150, 162 Maywood, New Jersey 291 McAdam, Doug 250 Mediating institutions 322 Membership 5, 40, 63, 64, 74, 76, 112, 113, 180, 195, 198, 202, 205, 225, 230, 232, 250–252, 256, 257, 259, 263, 265, 281, 291, 293, 315, 323 Membership riot 263 Memorial 53, 117, 266, 267, 283 Mennell, Stephen 47 Miami, Florida 32 Middle-class 89, 179, 321 Middle East 305 Military-grade weapons 3, 45, 157 Militia 54, 75, 238, 248, 249, 262, 265, 269, 292, 293, 297 Millersport, Ohio 256 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 156 Minneapolis, Minnesota 15, 71, 73, 237, 247, 248, 252, 255, 261, 266, 272, 297 Misrule 226, 246, 318, 319 Mississippi 167, 252, 268 Mob rule 137 Mobilization 59, 66, 89, 91, 165, 203, 230, 231, 237, 260, 273, 284, 290, 297, 299, 300, 306, 316, 324 Mobs 136, 154, 178, 183, 208 Mocking 72, 87, 109, 123 Moral crusade 245, 316 Morgan, Edmund S. 135

Index  349

Moscow, Idaho 256 Motivation 202, 255 Moulton, Lord John Fletcher 141 Murder 3, 15, 17, 19, 21, 34, 45, 47, 55, 71, 73, 152, 161, 162, 181, 213, 242, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 261, 265, 266 Myers, Vonderrit 153, 161, 162, 164, 168, 175, 176 Myrdal, Gunnar 17 NAACP 71 National Guard 92, 157, 158, 165, 180, 184, 203, 231, 249, 261 Natural order of conscience 118, 306, 309, 317, 326 Nazi 7, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 201, 207, 210, 211, 226, 243, 269, 312, 319, 326 Neighborhoods 61, 73, 74, 79, 85, 145, 167, 168, 172, 177, 180, 257, 261, 293, 312, 322 New Social Movements 274 New York City 79, 86, 87, 241, 262 Nixon, Richard 33 Nome, Alaska 256 Non-Christian 233, 251, 293 Non-event 11, 12, 83, 247 Non-government groups 159, 183, 239 Non-violent 83, 85, 86, 130, 160, 168, 174, 217, 238, 244, 268, 292, 296, 317 Normal order 9, 58, 131, 215, 282 Norms 76, 140, 215, 221, 284, 288, 294, 299, 301, 309 North 9, 106, 147, 160 North Carolina 54, 79, 179, 229, 274, 287, 288, 317 O’Hehir, Andrew 241 Oath Keepers 3, 22, 38, 54, 66, 67, 75, 157, 205, 240, 269, 270, 281, 290 Obama, Barak 39 Obligations 5, 6, 12, 33, 60, 66, 67, 88, 108, 150, 182, 275, 309, 314, 323, 325 Occupy SLU 163 Order 9, 14, 17, 22–24, 27, 39, 56, 57, 105, 118, 133–135, 253 Orderly 35, 56–58, 61, 66, 68, 76, 80, 81, 104, 107, 129, 131, 132, 138, 141, 172, 221, 245, 253,

257, 261, 163, 288, 298, 299, 305–307, 309, 323 Organization 4, 13, 19, 35–38, 48, 49, 52, 54, 58, 59, 63–67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84, 86, 88, 89, 115, 127, 151, 152, 155, 157, 159, 172, 178, 183, 193, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 206–217, 220–223, 226, 229, 230, 232–234, 237–240, 248–251, 270, 273, 274, 278, 281, 289– 293, 295–300, 308, 311, 314, 315, 323 Outsiders 4–7, 9, 11, 14, 32, 40, 42, 43, 49, 59, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 84, 85, 90, 112, 115, 134, 149, 154– 156, 172, 198, 202, 204–207, 210, 212, 213, 218, 224–226, 232, 233, 241, 243, 245, 246, 261, 263, 270, 285, 290, 291, 294, 296, 312, 314, 319, 320, 322, 325 Paducah, Kentucky 256 Parades 28, 56, 87, 131 Parody 87, 109, 123, 184, 253, 255 Patriot Prayer 269, 270 PDX Dad Pod 271 Pestello, Fred 161, 175, 225 Petition 2, 8, 31, 42, 53, 56, 59, 74, 85, 86, 89, 108, 131, 134, 193, 203, 204, 210, 215, 221, 228, 229, 258, 293, 296 Pinker, Steven 13, 14, 45, 47, 48, 62, 63, 88, 106, 107, 122, 174, 201 Pliny the Elder 42 Police 3, 15–17, 34, 45, 54, 55, 67, 70, 71, 73, 92, 117, 128, 130, 146– 178, 180–185, 194, 196, 201, 203, 214–216, 219, 221–223, 225, 227, 228, 230, 231, 237, 241, 242, 244, 247–249, 252, 256–262, 265–269, 271–273, 275, 287, 293, 297, 300, 309 Polis 129, 132, 312 Political Inequality/Differences 10, 48, 59, 82 Portland, Oregon 72, 73, 156, 238, 248, 253, 255, 261, 266, 269–273 Prejudice 17, 40, 316, 324 Preston, Richard 196–203, 211, 214 Princeton University (ACLED) 238

350 Index

Privacy 19 Privileges 5–7, 12, 21, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39–42, 52, 83, 88, 107, 108, 110, 112, 118, 127–131, 141, 149, 154, 157, 182, 242, 243, 246, 251, 253, 264, 275, 308, 309, 314, 316, 319, 320, 323, 324, 328 Problem of order 129, 132, 133 Progressive 2, 5–8, 13, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 66–68, 74, 75, 88, 89, 92, 93, 111–116, 121, 139, 194, 195, 203, 205, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224, 232, 237, 240, 249, 250–252, 257, 260, 263, 264, 269, 278, 290, 300, 315, 318, 320, 323–325 Property damage 16, 32–35, 41, 63, 69, 72, 73, 81, 92, 105, 116, 122, 123, 127, 132, 133, 135, 136, 148, 149, 160, 170, 174, 176, 178, 180, 184, 203, 212, 213, 221, 228, 231, 239, 246, 248, 254, 261, 265, 268–270, 293, 294, 317 Prosperity 48 Protest/Protestors 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17, 21, 25, 35, 37, 42, 43, 45, 55, 58–61, 66–74, 86, 87, 91, 92, 103, 104, 108, 110, 121, 128, 130, 131, 136, 140, 147–150, 152–154, 159, 161–172, 176, 177–179, 182–184, 194, 201, 209, 222, 223, 230, 237–244, 247–250, 252, 253, 255–262, 265–268, 269, 271–276, 281, 291, 293, 296, 297, 307, 309, 312–314, 316–320, 325 Protestant 290 Protestriots 15, 75, 248, 252, 292 Proud Boys 3, 22, 38, 54, 66, 71, 75, 240, 269, 270, 281, 290, 298 Psychological 79, 80 Public accountability 63, 74, 112, 182, 226, 230, 260, 266, 293, 323 Public customs 222, 239, 248, 306 Public good 18, 32, 271, 298 Public space 158, 160, 251, 266 Punish 33, 43, 55, 64, 119, 120, 129, 130, 134–137, 165, 206, 211– 213, 215, 232, 272, 284, 285, 287, 288

Race 15–17, 19, 22, 25, 41, 45, 46, 49, 58, 59, 61, 67, 70, 82, 148, 173, 198, 256, 260, 264, 272, 274, 305, 314, 222 Racial violence 34, 47, 61, 62, 78, 154, 159, 181, 262 Racist/Anti-racist 7, 42, 65, 68, 114, 145, 157, 178, 193–196, 198, 199, 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216, 218, 219, 226, 228, 233, 258, 291, 292, 297, 300, 320, 325, 326 Rallies 35, 67, 108, 163 Ranger, Terence 159 Rational 45, 76, 78, 80 Reactionary ideas 7, 8, 52, 88, 92, 111, 112, 114, 137, 237, 240, 252, 260, 263, 264, 281, 289, 290, 295, 323, 349 Reactionary unrest 6, 7, 8, 13, 66–68, 74, 75, 89, 90, 92, 93, 111–115, 121, 139, 194, 195, 202, 203, 205, 209, 213, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224, 226, 232, 239, 240, 249, 251, 263, 295, 296, 314, 315, 318, 320, 323, 324, 349 Rebellion 14, 47, 66, 89, 149, 282, 300, 307, 310, 315–317, 324 Rebuking 126, 136, 228 Reckoning 2, 16, 67, 91, 131, 146, 243, 245, 246, 250, 264, 267, 271, 286, 287, 294, 295, 297, 300, 325 Reform 8, 11, 75, 80, 116, 118–122, 130, 135, 176–178, 194, 209, 218, 222–224, 227, 230, 233, 237, 245, 247, 251, 267, 268, 290, 291, 295, 298, 300, 307, 309–311, 316–318, 322, 324 Refugees 3, 11, 305, 308 Regular order 61, 221, 305, 309 Religion 4, 9, 18–20, 22, 24, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 52, 53, 57, 61, 63–65, 70, 82, 83–87, 90, 105, 113, 116, 123, 127, 133, 135, 148, 166, 179, 198, 232, 263, 264, 269, 290, 293, 296, 306, 311, 314, 315 Removal 25, 199, 201, 260 Renew 2, 120–122, 195, 216–218, 222, 224, 233, 237, 243, 247, 267, 284, 285, 286, 295, 296, 299, 318, 320, 324

Index  351

Repertoires 42, 85, 89, 261, 265, 268, 274 Republican Party 54, 71, 300 Resilience 10, 17, 69, 117, 118, 249, 264, 282, 287 Respect 5, 9, 15, 23, 26, 34, 44, 59, 69, 85, 116, 135, 164, 174, 185, 199, 201, 205, 206, 213, 218, 220, 287, 310, 318, 319, 321, 325 Restorative 217, 272, 299, 300, 324 Restore 3, 7, 8, 68, 120, 171, 195, 209, 216, 218, 222, 224, 237, 243, 267, 284–287, 289, 291, 299, 318–320 Restraint 4, 6, 11, 13, 26, 27, 32, 35, 45, 53, 69, 72, 75, 105, 167, 173, 174, 184, 204, 205, 211, 213, 220, 221, 224, 225, 231, 239, 244, 251, 254, 260, 263, 274, 289, 294, 323, 324 Rights 5, 6, 12, 14, 20, 35, 47, 59, 60, 63, 66, 67, 77, 83, 88, 90, 108, 131, 135, 174, 182, 206, 207, 223, 233, 237, 250–252, 260, 265, 274, 275, 287, 293, 309, 314, 316, 317, 319, 320, 323, 325 Rights Revolution 13, 14, 63, 106, 107 Rightwing 4, 21, 22, 39, 54, 59, 60, 71, 84, 157, 240, 249, 250, 269, 270, 295, 297, 314, 315, 323 Riot Ribs 271 Riots 3, 4, 12, 14, 15, 25, 32, 33, 37, 43, 47, 48, 58, 62, 70–75, 78– 80, 82, 86, 88, 116, 117, 134, 136, 138, 140, 145, 147–162, 166, 171–176, 178–181, 183, 184, 200, 203, 204, 210, 211, 214, 215, 219, 223, 225, 227, 228, 230, 231, 238, 243, 246, 248–253, 261–263, 269, 273, 282–285, 287, 289, 242, 293, 294, 300, 311, 312, 323, 324, 326 Ritual 17, 117, 120–122, 216, 233, 267, 271, 286 Ritualized crises 119, 122 Ritualized rebellions 149, 224, 282, 287, 300, 301, 307, 310, 315, 317, 324

Ritualized reforms 118, 119, 122, 300, 310, 311, 324 Roemer, Derek 174 Rules 27, 48, 49, 54, 76, 80, 108, 109, 111, 112, 136–139, 141, 148, 170, 173, 182, 185, 208, 209, 246, 256, 258, 259, 265, 266, 310, 315 Rumor 194, 268, 271, 272 Saint Charles, Missouri 168 Saint Louis, Missouri 72, 118, 119, 121, 145–158, 161, 162, 165–170, 172–174, 177, 180, 182–185, 194, 200, 228, 229, 261, 268, 269, 271, 272, 325 Saint Louis American 167 Saint Louis County 121, 145, 173, 176, 180, 182–184, 194, 228 Saint Louis Post-Dispatch 167, 169 Saint Louis University 161, 163, 164, 167–169, 175, 197, 225 School desegregation 118, 260 Seattle, Washington 15 Shaming 130, 136, 181, 212, 266, 284, 285, 299, 300, 316 Sharing 10, 47, 53, 60, 66, 86, 105, 211, 213, 252, 273, 274, 296, 313, 322 Sharp, Sam 24, 25, 250 Shellow, Robert 174 Shopping areas 79, 167, 168, 170, 176, 178, 203, 292 Sick days 77, 288 Simulated rebellion 14, 66, 282, 288, 319 Sit-ins 123 Small private circles 264 Smart mobs 159, 178 Smith, Anthony D. 135 Smith, Anthony Lamar 152, 155, 161, 162, 165, 176 Social change 65, 75 Social class 11, 18, 24, 31, 33, 48, 57, 90, 105, 113, 134, 135, 141, 149, 160, 232, 269, 293, 296, 312, 318 Social crimes 211–215, 246 Social/cultural differences 10, 11, 18–20, 25, 43, 47, 55, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 105, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 131, 133, 134, 137, 140, 194, 197, 218, 219,

352 Index

228, 229, 233, 240, 255, 262, 290, 299, 308, 309, 314, 317, 318, 325 Social media 70, 159, 160, 162, 178, 180, 183, 230, 231, 249, 262, 273, 274, 300 Social movements 21, 22, 36, 64, 88, 89, 104, 114, 237, 239, 249, 250, 263, 264, 274, 295, 315, 323 Social scientist 13, 26, 55, 69, 78–80, 84, 109, 147, 162, 202, 228, 261, 295, 323 Sociology 58, 77, 78, 86–88, 129, 133, 174, 179, 274 South 9, 15, 34, 77, 80, 106, 127, 147, 179, 219, 233, 289, 290 Soviet Union 24, 25 Speech 33, 44, 196, 201, 206, 207, 209, 211, 216, 217, 231–233, 242, 243, 270, 271, 325, 326 Spencer, Richard 199 Stockley, Jason 152, 154, 155, 158, 161, 166, 176 Stone, Roger 33 Strangers 127, 132, 133, 247 Stress test 80, 118, 146, 216 Strikes 37, 43, 67, 123, 140 Structural impediments 78, 88, 219 Students 117, 121, 151, 153, 163, 164, 193, 225, 226, 230, 232, 233, 241, 255, 256, 291, 292 Suburb 23, 106, 118, 121, 127, 145, 147, 149, 151, 168, 229, 246, 261, 268, 269, 272 Sumptuary laws/privileges 33–35, 42, 52, 127, 128, 149, 154, 308, 309 Sundown city 146 Surprise 7, 16, 22, 38–40, 54–56, 66, 112, 122, 123, 160, 163, 185, 198, 199, 201, 204, 208, 220–222, 226, 228, 229, 238, 254, 257, 258, 282–285, 292, 310, 324 Symmetrical troublemaking 318 Talented Tenth 321 Temperate 47, 313 Theatrical displays 55, 108, 129, 134, 255, 315 Themselfishness 306

Threaten 43, 56, 120, 139, 146, 173, 265 Three Percenters 66 Tilly, Charles 10, 67 Tocqueville, Alexis de 20, 40, 41, 49, 80, 91, 118, 218, 264, 311, 316 Tolerance 42, 72, 174, 201 Tottenham, England 311 Town-gown 15 Towns 69, 76, 81, 88, 108, 119, 121, 127, 130, 145, 150, 151, 156, 158, 163, 168, 169, 176, 180, 181, 183, 184, 194, 198, 199, 201–208, 210, 211, 215, 217– 220, 223–228, 231–233, 239, 241–244, 247–249, 255–258, 262, 265, 288, 270, 271, 287, 289, 291, 292, 308, 325, 326 Traditions 7, 15, 20, 31, 89, 90, 106, 114, 115, 120, 135, 137, 150, 156, 159, 166, 172, 175, 178, 184, 185, 195, 212, 218, 231, 271, 291, 296, 309 Treason 326 Troublemaking 107, 131, 268, 305, 314, 318 Trump, Donald 12, 16, 33, 37, 39, 52, 55, 68, 73, 129, 194, 228, 238, 268, 275, 281, 283, 284, 286, 288, 295, 297, 298, 300, 326 Twitter 70, 159, 178, 230, 273 U.S. Department of Justice 156 Unconventional 87, 88, 122, 137, 139, 140, 252, 265 Unite the Right 193, 194, 198–204, 207, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 221, 227, 229 United Auto Workers 6 United States 1, 4, 5, 8–10, 13, 14, 21, 25, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44, 49, 54, 59–62, 64–68, 72–75, 82, 83, 89, 91, 105, 110, 113, 140, 142, 145, 147, 153, 156, 159, 160, 173, 178, 201, 202, 204, 212, 218, 222, 237, 238, 241–244, 248–250, 252, 260, 261, 268, 281–283, 285– 287, 289, 291, 292, 294, 297, 306, 308–310, 313, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321–323, 326 University of North Carolina 79

Index  353

Values 14, 15, 18, 24, 27, 40, 48, 53, 57, 58, 66, 103, 106, 18, 111– 115, 120, 123, 134, 139–141, 195, 205, 209, 212, 213, 218, 221, 226, 248, 253, 275, 285, 294–296, 306, 317, 324, 325 Victimhood 316 Vietnam War 75, 84, 92 Vigilante 284, 285, 296, 298 Violence 1, 2, 4–19, 21, 22, 24–28, 31, 32, 34–48, 52–64, 66–93, 103–106, 108, 110–117, 120, 122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 137, 138, 142, 145, 148–162, 165, 167, 172–174, 177, 178, 181, 183, 184, 194–197, 201–206, 209–222, 224–226, 228, 230–233, 237, 238–244, 246, 248, 249, 254, 260–264, 267, 268, 270

Washington, D.C. 7, 8, 12, 21, 25, 70, 72, 74, 75, 110, 114, 115, 135, 154, 209, 243, 249, 288, 292, 294, 296, 297, 309, 318–321, 323, 324 Washington, George 73 Washington Mall 283 Washington Square Park, New York 262 Washington state 262, 276 Waskow, Arthur I. 160, 167 Weapons 3, 4, 66, 71, 155, 157, 160, 170, 173, 175, 184, 197, 199, 214, 254, 269, 292 Western societies 5, 8, 9, 47, 60, 62, 75, 115, 210, 221, 252, 311, 313–315, 320 What didn’t happen 12, 83, 163, 196, 215, 283, 325 Whiskey Rebellion 73 White House 79, 310 White nationalist 3, 7, 38, 54, 71, 74, 75, 84, 113, 115, 194–197, 199, 200, 207–212, 215, 221, 226, 228–230, 233, 238, 240, 243, 248, 249, 251, 252, 267–269, 272, 281, 290–292, 294, 296, 297 White supremacist 193, 196, 199, 201, 209, 217, 220, 225, 269 Whites 13, 14, 34, 40, 42, 63, 66, 87, 128, 146–149, 154, 156, 158, 206, 219, 229, 250, 251, 261, 262, 291, 305 Whose streets 153, 154, 170 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania 256 Wilmington, North Carolina 54, 287 Wilson, Darren 150, 153, 181, 227 Wirth, Louis 140 Woke 11, 19, 21, 60 Woodly, Deva 58 World War I 58, 59, 147 World War II 106, 295

Wall of Moms 271 Washington, Booker T. 322

Young people 160, 167, 175, 225, 226, 258

University of Virginia 193, 208, 215, 222, 225 Unrest 2–19, 21, 22, 24–28, 31–39, 42, 45–48, 52–79, 81–93, 103–105, 108, 110–122, 128, 130–132, 134–139, 145–150, 154, 155, 158–162, 168, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 181, 194, 195–197, 201–206, 209–211, 213, 215– 233, 237–240, 243, 245–247, 249–255, 258, 259, 261–274, 276, 282, 283, 286, 289–299, 305, 306, 308, 309, 311–315, 317–320, 322–324 Urban 14, 24, 57, 58, 85, 118, 127, 128, 132, 133, 140, 145, 184, 245, 247, 290 Urban League 223 Urban way of life 23, 24, 130–134, 140, 245, 251 Us Too movements 20–22, 37, 88–91, 104, 109, 210, 263–265, 274, 306, 308, 311, 315–317