How Hard Is It to Not Set Things on Fire?
Boy, these mostly-peaceful protests sure seem to devolve into violent chaos pretty often!
1. ICE Are Very Nasty People Doing Very Nasty Things
The Trump administration’s immigration policy is an unmitigated disaster. Not only are we leaving trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk, we’re hiring masked stormtroopers to pull billion-dollar bills out of business owners’ pockets and throw them on the ground too.
Even worse, it represents the most blatant backsliding on liberal American norms since… maybe forever? Trump’s populistic nativism is completely noxious to me—he’s trying to turn us into a European ethnostate, and I won’t stand for it!
Trump’s assault on immigration is also an assault on my most cherished of government institutions—our Deep State. When he deports foreign students over their speech or whisks legal residents away to Salvadoran prison camps, he’s obviously doing something very bad. But when his administration resists Supreme Court rulings against their actions, something far worse is going on: a direct challenge to the only semi-empowered body of technocratic philosopher-kings in the country; an attempt to put control of our nation permanently and completely in the hands of populists.
So, to be clear: I dislike Trumpist immigration policy very much. I think it’s a perfect example of all the man’s worst qualities and all his movement’s most frightening threats. It’s all very bad!
However,
2. America Loves Trumpist Immigration Policy
Well, maybe not loves—but it’s his best issue by far, and the only one where he polls above even:
Americans are mostly blind to the big-picture economic effects of immigration, but tend to be very swayed by propaganda about migrants committing violent crime (which, in fact, they do less often than natives) and migrants stealing American jobs (they tend, in fact, to start lots of businesses which employ natives).
So progressives who oppose Trump’s policies in general are in a bit of a bind. Immigration feels like an issue he’s very obviously completely wrong about—but it’s also one where you’re pretty unlikely to find swing voters who disagree with him.
What should Resistance Libs do? As I see it, they have two options:
Mostly just forget immigration and talk about your good issues inside. Point to tariff chaos and the Republicans’ crazy, debt-exploding, benefit-slashing budget. Hell, maybe even bring the whole abortion thing back!
As far as I can tell, some Democratic groups are trying to do this. I was driving through rural Pennsylvania yesterday, and between Trump-Vance billboards, I saw a couple ads saying things like “The Republicans Are Cutting Medicaid” or “Trump Wants To Take Away Your Grandma’s Social Security.” This is good! More of this!
Or, if you really really want to, I guess you could try to change people’s minds about immigration. Of course, if you want to do this well, you’ll have to be very careful and very persuasive. You’ll need to say popular things and point to the very most visibly terrifying effects of Trump’s policies. Highlighting the ICE agents who break into neighborhoods and violently arrest hardworking immigrants is a good idea! Framing your cause around the harm anti-immigration policy does to small businesses makes sense.
Better yet, you should try to put real human faces on it all—point to the Kilmar Abrego Garcias and Peter Sean Browns whose lives have been torn apart by wrongful detention and deportation. Most of all, you need to make your position hard-not-to-sympathize-with. “People are suffering under Trump’s evil reign; whereas my side is peace-loving and good”—that’s gotta be the message. Understood? Good!
Alright, immigration-defenders, how’s it going?
3. Bad, It’s Going Bad
On Friday June 6, after a number of ICE raids in Hispanic enclaves in Los Angeles, some small protests broke out. When the police responded, a few real smart cookies got the idea to throw chunks of concrete at the cops. The LAPD responded with tear gas and flash-bangs, and the protesters were dispersed without too much more trouble that evening.
Over the weekend, everything got much worse.
Protesters began throwing Molotov cocktails at police, and police began shooting rubber bullets at protesters. The protests weren’t so widespread, but Trump sensed a messaging opportunity and ordered the National Guard in, against the Governor’s wishes.1
Naturally, the protesters then did the exact worst possible thing for their cause, and started lighting random crap on fire. A favorite target were Waymo self-driving cars, for some reason:
And then, of course, the protesters decided it might be cool to wave a Mexican flag around over the flaming wreckage:
All of this begs a number of questions:
Why?
What the fuck?
What are you thinking?
Why are you doing this?
What the hell is going on?
Who thought this would be a good idea?
Why?
What the fuck?
Instead of asking those questions, progressives across the country looked at these images and thought, “Wow, so cool and good for my cause! Let’s do it here too!”
To be totally clear—those are planned protests. Not spur-of-the-moment reactions like the first LA demonstrations were—there are operatives with networks and platforms and funding who looked at what was going on in LA and said, “Yes, good, make it happen here too.”
Any violence up to this point could’ve maybe been shrugged off as just rogue actors rogue actor-ing—the Democratic establishment and the progressive movement could’ve kept their hands (mostly) clean.
But not anymore! All the lunacy from here on out—and the violence in San Francisco on Sunday tells us there’ll probably be a lot of it—is the result of a real conscious choice made by American progressives.
I want to try to express, in the clearest terms possible, why it was an incredibly brain-dead choice.
4. Why This Was An Incredibly Brain-Dead Choice
Remember, progressives are playing the immigration-game with a deck stacked against them. They were supposed to be careful and persuasive; to do popular things that made people like them; to be sympathetic and relatable to the average swing voter.
You know what swing voters really dislike?
Rioting, looting, and random arson!
Remember this?
It’s the obviously good and correct take that got David Shor fired one million years ago!
Believe it or not, it’s still an obviously good and correct take!
The modern American progressive movement is apparently incapable of keeping protests entirely peaceful. Yeah, often they end up “mostly peaceful”—but every single person in America knows “mostly peaceful” is code for “there are scary pictures of shattered windows and burning everything, but we’d rather you not look at them please.”
It’s not a good political strategy, and we should stop doing it!
Of course, the Mexican flags only make everything worse.
Popular pro-immigration rhetoric has always emphasized assimilation as an uncomplicated good. The tired, poor, and huddled masses come here and then they become our tired, poor, and huddled Americans.
Trump is selling an image of the median immigrant as an anti-American invader. The true median immigrant is an America-loving and hardworking opportunist. He wants to be successful, and he knows that this is the best place in the world to do it. He came to America because he thinks America is awesome!
Mr. Median Immigrant puts his head down and works hard on the construction site, and his right-leaning supervisor befriends him and becomes less xenophobic. Then, when ICE comes along and deports Mr. Immigrant, the right-leaning supervisor realizes he might not actually like Trump all that much!
This is the story you want to tell—this is the only story you want to tell.
What you don’t want to do is highlight the immigrants who are overflowing with nationalist sentiment for their home country. You don’t want Mexican flags flying at a protest which, fundamentally, is claiming that immigrants are and should be Americans! Don’t take it from me; take it from Barack fucking Obama:
Of course, what you especially don’t want are Mexican flags flying over scenes of chaos and destruction.
Because then the president can say things like “the protesters are insurrectionists” and “send in the Marines” and he’ll look non-crazy to most of America. In fact, he’ll look like a law-and-order protector-of-the-people! Trump becomes Mr. Security, Mr. Calm, Mr. Normal.
If—when—these protests get worse and more widespread and more violent, his approval rating on immigration is sure to climb.2
I continue to be astounded by how bad left-wing America is at politics. How hard is it to not do insane shit all the time? How hard is it to act in a minimally pro-social way?
I like living in cities that aren’t burning to the ground, and so does the rest of the country. The more chaos you sow, the more everyone becomes eager for a strongman to restore order.
On June 14, Trump is planning to hold a massive military parade. It’s the Army’s birthday, and it’s his too. Dozens of tanks are rolling into the nation’s capital in preparation:
If I were a bit more prone to catastrophizing, I’d say this was full-on 1930s-fascist stuff. I’d worry that if news broadcasts were cutting between Trump’s orderly column of awe-inspiring tanks, and scenes of burning wreckage in Los Angeles, that the militant strongman might come out on top in the court of public opinion.
In such a crazy far-fetched scenario, I’d probably ask myself who I expected to end up running the country in four years. And whether they’d have to win a free and fair election to do it.
…I wouldn’t much like our odds.
First time since LBJ did it to protect civil rights protesters in the 60s!
Let me caveat a couple ways I could see this not being the case:
Trump might do a crazy overreaction and start spraying fire hoses at children or something, making more of the public more sympathetic to the protestors. Of course, for this to happen, most of the protests around the country will have to stay pretty peaceful, and I find that very unlikely.
Trump might do something else wildly unpopular, like carry out way more mass deportations at construction sites, or start detaining and deporting-without-trial lots more innocent people.
Honestly, I don’t think either scenario is very probable, and so my median forecast is still “his net rating on immigration will climb something like 1-5 pp.”
This is a very good post, but I think you’re committing another error that Democrats need to correct if they want to come out on top here: you treat “immigration” and “illegal immigration” as synonyms.
Democrats often tie themselves in knots trying to come up with reasons voters saying “I’m fine with immigrants, but they need to come in the right way” are lying and are actually just nasty racists - but a lot of those voters really are being honest!
You can’t go on forever about “law abiding migrants” while ignoring the elephant in the room that their very presence is inherently unlawful. Maybe it shouldn’t be! I’m actually largely on your side that immigrants are an economic and cultural good thing, and we should make legal economic migration easier than it currently is - but you need to actually make that argument, and spend political capital to change immigration law!
At the end of the day, yeah, you can probably get some moderate voters to flip back due to Trump’s overreach and the bad optics of overly militaristic raids. But you’re going to run into a hard limit because I think most voters still believe that deportation is an appropriate consequence for being in the country illegally. You can say it should be more humane, involve more due process. But “defund ICE, declare sanctuary cities” is always going to be a hard sell.
Every 5 th child in Ca has 1 parent who is here illegally. I agree that we should close the borders, but breaking families is a very bad idea. Those who work and pay taxes need to be legalized, criminals out, border closed, problem solved. But carefully with courts and without raids.
I think the problems with democrats is that they talk slogans. Putting real faces on the facts is very powerful, but somehow its a fires we see rather than families torn apart.