Do you think there will be a 'silver lining' or any long-term results from these protests?
I think the biggest effect of this will be that a lot of white suburban Klobuchar-ites will be more apprehensive of keeping the police as it is and a lot of progressives (like me, I always thought it was a class matter disguised as a race one) will take identity politics and racism more seriously and see themselves as privileged white people because it's become pretty hard not to. There will also be a lot of people in poor countries who will relate to the experience of being brutalized by the police and see the US as increasingly like them. I'm Brazilian and I honestly can't really see how is the US any better than my country anymore and in my state I scarcely see the police with more than batons and only in Rio de Janeiro (where drug gangs hide in the mountains and the state government is run by the party led by a former military officer) is the police really comparable.
Organizers might see that strength in numbers does little against FOX News and other media outlets so serious organization (proper mottos for example) might be taken more seriously.
Black people might be energized enough by this to turnout at an equal rate to white people despite the institutional barriers, which hasn't happened since Obama.
The MPD is being defunded over the next year or so; that's a pretty big change. Both the LAPD and the NYPD have had their budgets redirected. NYPD officers are no longer allowed to use chokeholds.
There's a House bill for sweeping police reform (although it will be vetoed by you know who, if it even survives the senate).
Plenty is happening. "Silver lining" is too negative a while to phrase it.
The Minneapolis city council made a dramatic announcement, but I haven't seen any details yet on how they're going to go about it. Have you?
Brazil is so much worse than the US it's not even funny. In 2018, the US murder rate was 5.0 per 100,000, for a total of 15,498 murders. In 2018, Brazil had a murder rate of 24.7 per 100,000 people, for a total of 56,101. We have roughly 5 times the amount of murders. In the US a widespread paranoia leads people to buy guns and fear minorities on a relatively safe country. On top of a racist and brutal police force, Brazilians are not paranoid but justified in their constant fear of pervasive crime and influential, country-wide crime cartels that work in collusion with politicians and illegal militias that are largely composed of corrupt cops and control entire communities.
And that's the tip of the iceberg.
And the difference is probably even more pronounced due to under reporting, something I assume is less of an issue in Germany.
The problem in countries like Brasil is that under reporting is practiced by police itself. For example, when an execution is reported as legitimate police work it doesn’t count as murder. So it’s even harder for independent researchers to get a sense of the actual numbers. But they’re pretty much guaranteed to be higher.
We must follow your example ;)
I'd normally be the cynic and say no, but shit's clearly different this time.
Protests are still growing. Hell, now there are two in my backyard and that has quite literally never happened before. Calling it a protest is a bit of a stretch I think, more like a friendly march around town complete with good cops joining in the fun, no violence from cops or protesters, not even graffiti. We had one dumpster fire. This is new and it's powerful if it's penetrated this far into white rural America where it has never been before.
The other reason I'd say no is because in about six months the nature of these protests is going to change and intensify. The reality of America's economic rot hasn't set in yet. Once the federal government refuses to pass any economic reforms or stimulus, that's going to become the focus right into the election. I'll say it now, Trump is toast. He may even lose by a record setting margin.
We all get to vote by mail for the first time in American history. That's a level of voter participation we've never even dreamed of, and it is never going to go back to just voting booths again. This unexpected vote by mail not only busts gerrymandering, it reverses it and stacks the deck against those who unwisely weakened their strong districts to shore up weaker ones.
These crowds are forming real world social connections at a stupefying rate country-wide and giving Americans a sense of shared trauma. That's the real stuff that sticks around, unlike internet mobs.
The world changed, and there's no going back.
Vote by mail doesn't seem to be universal in every state yet:
Here's where your state stands on mail-in voting
Could you explain to me how voting by mail eliminates gerrymandering? My understanding is that these votes would still go to whatever district they went to previously?
Sure thing. It's not the vote by mail specifically, it's the fact that vote by mail knocks down basically every barrier there is to voting. You don't have to do it on a specific day/time and get time off work. You don't show up at the voting booth and talk to fifteen people who give you doubts about how you are going to vote. You don't have that moment in the voting box where you second guess yourself and have to deal with a clusterfuck of a digital voting machine that's designed to get you to click on the wrong names.
Instead you can sit down on your own time and look into everyone on the ballot, make your own decision, fill out the form, and then just drop it in the mailbox. This means voter participation is going to be monumentally massive, possibly even record-setting.
That's the part that busts gerrymandering. You can find plenty of examples googling, such as this older article. It explains how large turnouts often end up reversing the effects.
Agreed, I live in suburban Whites-ville and thousands of people showed up to March on Sunday, and with crowds still swelling and nothing really going on right now, I don't see this becoming a passing trend.
Isn't the USPS in danger of bankruptcy though?
They are, and that's definitely something we need to address. My mind boggles at the mere thought that the post office is under threat. That is an eternal and necessary American institution.
When a business goes bankrupt that means a change of ownership, not necessarily that they stop operating. Basically, the stockholders lose their investment and the creditors take over, and if the business is worth more alive than dead then it will keep going, possibly with some changes. (There are complicated negotiations worked out with a bankruptcy court's oversight.) This is called Chapter 11 bankruptcy, versus Chapter 7 bankruptcy where the business shuts down.
The US Post Office is such a special case that I don't know what will happen, but when the local electric company (PG&E) went bankrupt, nobody lost power and we got electric bills as always.
Also Hertz just went bankrupt and they are still operating.
Huh. Does that mean we will have mail-in voting anyways? Weird. They could change it last minute though.
I don't think anyone knows what they would do but perhaps some combination of raising rates and changing how often mail gets delivered.
The question becomes whether what replaces it can be a viable model for other cities or if it slowly ends up regressing. People keep pointing to Camden, NJ as a success story but Camden is a much smaller city and they didn't fundamentally change policing so much as disband their own precinct and off-load the work to State police instead.
Granted, a State Police bureaucracy is less likely to get corrupted and more likely to be managed better than a local once. (Just due to scale and more professionalized management practices). But it also doesn't address underlying social issues driving crime the way people are hoping for.
Uh, where are you getting that it's the state police? Everything I've read says they replaced it with a Camden county police department. They also have more funding.
The cynic in me says that probably no substantial change is going to come from these protests. I don't see it really much different than the Ferguson aftermath in roughly 2015 or Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Maybe there's something this time around, but I just don't see it.
We're still ~150 days out from Election Day and a lot can happen in that time. The optimist in me says that people will remember and go out to vote, but the nagging pessimist says things are likely to have been forgotten by then.
The sheer size and energy of these protests dwarfs both of those examples in my opinion. Protesters have extremely clear demands - defund the police, end qualified immunity, etc. The coalition of people supporting this is extremely broad, which certainly wasn't the case in at least Ferguson. And we're already seeing broad public opinion shift - a majority of white Americans say now that police treat black people with racial bias, for example. It is very possible that not much will come from this, but I do think this is clearly a different type of movement than what we saw in either of those cases. If tens of thousands of protesters are facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray in sweltering heat for multiple days in a row, I feel hopeful they'll also be willing to go to the polls for a few hours (at worst) in November.
At the very least one long term change we will see is that BLM is now a popular movement, and I think there will be more acknowledgement of systemic racism among the general population. I think more people will be likely to acknowledge that institutions as well as people can be racist.
My hope is that the Biden campaign doesn't drop the ball and weaponizes this entire year against Trump in the debates. Maybe it won't change any Trumpist minds, but it will keep now-current events somewhat fresh in people's minds in the lead up to November.
Of course if my hope lies entirely with the Biden campaign not dropping the ball, then I suppose I should prepare to be disappointed.
So I don't have high hopes for meaningful long term change.
I think part of the reason is that everyone keeps talking about 'going out and voting'. If that system was working, there wouldn't be massive protests, let alone violent ones.
Voting only works when you have a choice of a representative that will listen to and facilitate your concerns as a constituency. Every time I've reached out, via letters or email or phone, I've never gotten anything other than a 'thanks for your feedback' platitude, never from the representative themselves.
Last I checked, many politicians run effectively unopposed, especially at state and local levels. It's hard to setup and run a competing campaign. It's even harder to displace an incumbent of the majority party in your neighboorhood.
I reviewed my local legislator's bill sponsorship and voting record. The vast majority of their history is dedicated to 'honoring person X' and voting on standard re-authorizations. Meanwhile, a neighboring representative is heavily involved in all sorts of meaningful legislation.
It made me contemplate trying to run as an alternative, but I gave up shortly after. The odds of successfully running as opposing party are 0, third party barely above zero, and trying to primary a minority woman in a largely minority district (even with clear policy goals) as a white man is a horrible idea. Especially given I can't dedicate several months or more to building a political base without going homeless.
This scenario likely plays out all across the country in different forms. People are sick of the status quo, but don't have the time or resources to try to challenge the system. They barely have the time and resources to learn more than a sentence or two about voting in local elections, let alone run themselves. There are still politicians in office from before I was born, and that is a travesty.
Several months? Try years. Look at the backgrounds of the people on Run For Something. They're mostly fairly successful in their chosen professions or have years of background as activists or in leading community organizations like a PTA or Church group.
Persistence and sustained involvement is where political change comes from. You can't just walk in on the back of some sloganeering and expect people to just trust that you know what you're doing.
Obvious exemption excluded.
It may be best to try and make yourself a thorn in their side, and play to your outs as a concerned citizen, @vord. Get a Facebook group going together, bang some pans together at city hall, you have an awful lot of runway to get what you want without having to campaign for office.
I think a lot of people draw the wrong lesson from Trump getting elected. The key takeaway is not that he's just a loudmouth blowhard who rode it to victory. It's that he's a vacuous empty suit who vocalized all the subtext that the mainstream conservative movement has been riding for years. Trump didn't win because of his Trumpyness. He won because he just parroted Movement Conservative and Fox News talking points without any of the filtering that centrist Republicans, who want to actually govern in some kind of "responsible" way, have to do.
There is no Trump without a vast infrastructure of Right Wing television, Right Wing radio, and conservative book clubs that game the best sellers lists. This infrastructure doesn't exist in the progressive sphere. The best we have is one-note brocialist outlets and alternative zines that preoccupy themselves with constant infighting, impenetrable jargon about "theory" and "praxis," and motivated reasoning for why doing anything at all (besides donating to their patreon) is "problematic." They don't have the reach but, more importantly, they don't have the discipline to make the most of a bad hand. They're too wrapped up in scrub mentality, bound by self-limiting beliefs that will prevent them from ever being much more than big on social media.
Adding on to this, I'd like to point out that the pretty much every major movement that's resulted in any real change in the united states was much, much, much more violent than what we are seeing now. Lots of people died during the civil rights movement. There was a great twitter thread yesterday about this reminding people just how violent it was:
The reality is that when there are no real consequences, there are no real changes. Sure a PD burned down, but we can rob the taxpayer of money to rebuild another, so why should those in power care? And lets ignore Minneapolis for a second, why should the mayor of another major city which hasn't had the same kind of violent confrontations such as San Francisco or Kansas City make any concessions?
It really takes both sides of the coin. Gotta speak softly AND carry the big stick. Without the stick your voice gets smothered. But if all you have is the stick people see you as an adversary to be defeated rather than an ally to be assisted. Trump looks like a doof because he charged peaceful protestors and it was plain for everyone to see. But there might not have even been that many peaceful protestors if we didn't know there were people among us who could throw down when necessary. They'd have been intimidated off the streets or run over by Proud Boys.
Oh I agree, but the 'run for office' thing was fairly rhetorical, even when I contemplated it myself. But it demonstrates the broader problem that many politicians run unopposed due to inertia and broader inability to mount an alternative.
Then again, for all my rhetoric, I'm not exactly a charismatic leader who can easily motivate people to join causes. Anxiety-ridden, armchair commentator is more my profile, and my main hope is that I can sway at least one other person with more ability and motivation to question the status quo.
Cause the status is definitly not quo.
To combine a reply to both you and @moocow1452...
Your points are all very valid. And that's part of the problem. Even those of us who are fairly well off don't neccessarily have the time to dedicate months/years to build enough support to accomplish meaningful change at the city council level let alone anything else. Myself, I'm in a bit of a 'pick two' situation between 'provide for family,' 'spend time with family,' and 'be an active participant in building a better future.'
And I'm in a very priveleged position to even have that choice. I suspect most others are in the same or worse situations, and feel trapped in their bubbles without seeing a way out.
So at risk of being labelled a terrorist, it would honestly be easier to be a part-time revolutionary than trying to make substantial change within the system. Provide food, funding, and shelter to those fighting the fight, possibly do minor legal disruptions like creating a diversion.
I could do those things inside 10 hours a month, or even while doing other things, without substantially risking my family's wellbeing, which is very selfish, but likely a motivator for a ton of people. Trying to run for office, attend bureaucratic meetings to influence policy changes, or even try to advocate via phone banking are higher cognitive burdens than what I mentioned for someone with anxiety issues.
There are causes I try to support within the system when I can. The ACLU is an awesome group fighting the good fight as best they can. But it's a slow process hampered by stacked courts. Bernie offers a glimmer of hope, and helped mobilize a new progressive movement. Some of the newest reps are coming in on the coattails of his campaign, which might have been far more important than the campaign itself.
I guess the moral to my rambles, if there is one, is to fight the good fight while you're young and unencumbered. It's a much tougher choice later on.
Those are much less than 10 hours a month. My neighborhood advisory council meets monthly, and I'd be surprised if the people on it spent more than 3 or 4 hours in between doing any prep or followup work.
When I was young and unencumbered I was also naive and did not understand how personal dynamics work or how to build institutions that can last and that can resist entropic forces that drive them towards becoming insular, groupthinky cliques. I have management experience now and have a clearer understanding how the political system works and who the people involved are. Being "encumbered" also gives you a whole lot more perspective on what's important to people and makes you much more likely to understand the deeper impacts of seemingly minor policy issues.
I can't speak for the US protests, but I'm almost certain that the protests held here in Australia last weekend will achieve bugger all for indigenous people. The only thing our protests will achieve is a small spike in the number of coronavirus cases, just as we were edging closer to eliminating the virus like New Zealand has done.
We're not going to get systemic change from these protests. Maybe, as @cfabbro tried to tell me, the protests achieved a secondary goal of raising the general public's awareness of indigenous people's circumstances - but it'll take years or even decades for that awareness to translate into better conditions for indigenous people.
Meanwhile, people have already been protesting about the plight of indigenous people in Australia for years and even decades. Those of us with long enough memories (a polite way of saying "old") remember the massive protests that happened around Australia's Bicentennial celebrations back in 1988, marking 200 years since the first European settlement on this continent. We had a Royal Commission back in 1991 into Aboriginal deaths in custody, which made recommendations to improve things (almost none of which been implemented 30 years later). There was a Reconciliation March back in 2000, where quarter of a million people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge. There are the annual Invasion Day protests on Australia Day. It's not like Aboriginal people and their allies have been silent.
8 years after the Reconciliation March,. 11 years after the Bringing Them Home report recommended an apology, and 20 years after the Bicentennial, a Prime Minister finally stood up in Parliament and officially said "sorry" to the Aboriginal people for their treatment since European settlement. (He was a new Prime Minister heading a new government that replaced the government and the Prime Minister who rejected the Bringing Them Home report's recommendation for an apology.)
Great. The blackfellas got an apology. How nice for them! It was a powerful symbolic gesture, and something they'd been asking for for decades, but it needed to be followed up with practical measures.
So they also got the program called "Closing the Gap" - started in 2008, and intended to close the gap between Aboriginal Australians and everyone else in a number of areas, including life expectancy, child mortality, and educational outcomes. However, this 25-year program was effectively abandoned when the government that implemented it was voted out of office 5 years later. The next governments didn't have the same commitment to the program and let it lapse. It has kept going out of inertia, and because noone is brave enough to say they're going to close down this high-profile program intended to improve Aboriginal lives. But, it dropped down the government's list of priorities.
A couple of years ago, the Aboriginal communities across Australia gathered at Uluru (which Europeans called Ayer's Rock) and issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart (a pun on "from the heart" meaning honest, and "from the centre of the country" because that's where Uluru is). One of the demands of the Uluru Statement is that the Aboriginal people be given a voice to Parliament, and that this voice be enshrined in the Australian constitution. The government in power rejected this concept. They will not create "a third chamber of Parliament" (even though that's not what Aboriginal people are asking for). They've wriggled and manouevred themselves into a position where they might create a legislated (not constitutional) entity for Aboriginal people to advise the government (not Parliament) - after a referendum of the Australian people (but we don't need a referendum if we're not changing the constitution). Delaying tactics. Watering down. That's what we get. And that's with an Aboriginal man in place as the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs - the first Aboriginal person ever to hold this position.
It seems to depend more on which government is in power than what protests are being held. We have to wait for the political pendulum to swing again and elect a left-wing (ish) federal government. For various reasons, that likely won't be the next election. So, we've got 5-year wait until about 2025 before a federal government possibly gets elected that will even look at the issues of Aboriginal people again with any motive to change things.
Will these protests today change anything? Not really.
Here's my simplistic model of how it might work: if a government has a majority that's sympathetic (or at least not opposed), combined with a lot of protests, it could result in lasting change. Either one alone doesn't seem like enough.
So, we're seeing the beginnings of action in some places that have Democrats in power. Public opinion is changing pretty fast too. But is that going to last through November to get more Democrats elected into power, and then, next year, are people going to hold them to it?
It doesn't mean people have to be protesting for months on end, but will they vote, and then protest more next year if needed to keep momentum going?
I don't think I can predict the election, but it seems likely that eventually another horrific video will have people protesting again.
We're in the rapids of history right now, and I don't think it's responsible to say what could or couldn't happen right now, but I don't think this is something that can be undone, corrected for, or made impotent. This is an idea and a pattern, not a policy, I think it will stick around.