American carnage: US under Trump staring into the abyss

America has been here before, but never quite like this. Following the murder in police custody of yet another unarmed black man, racism – what one late-night commentator called the country’s pre-existing condition – has risen out of the still-glowing embers of the coronavirus crisis, resulting in violent protest in every one of the 50 states, from New York to California, and the promise of worse to come.

As the drama plays out, it is not only the police who are in the dock, but President Trump, whose bellicose response has been to threaten the protesters with being shot by the “thousands of soldiers” and police he is apparently prepared to mobilise against them:

“If cities and states fail to control the protests and “defend their residents,” he tweeted, he would deploy the army and “quickly” solve the problem.

In a hastily cobbled-together address from the grounds of the White House, he said later that all Americans were sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd, but that his memory must not be “drowned out by an angry mob”. Protests outside the White House on Sunday were, he said, “a total disgrace”.

“I’m dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”

This was not what America needed to hear. The President was not, in the manner of his predecessors, seeking to bind the nation’s wounds. Instead, like a mob leader, he was issuing a call to arms, with the people as the enemy.

Suddenly, we were back to the days of the Kent State massacre in 1970, when 13 students protesting the Vietnam War were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard. Just as alarming was the echo of Governor George Wallace, who in Alabama in the 1960s felt able to use state troopers as the defenders of white supremacy, proudly proclaiming, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.

Hard cases are said to make bad laws, but they can also as catalysts for change. The murder on 25 May of George Floyd, an unemployed black man, by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee against his neck for almost nine minutes while he lay on the ground, handcuffed and unable to move, provoked nationwide revulsion. There could be no doubt who was the criminal and who was the victim. What happened was videoed by a spectator and his unedited record of what took place immediately went viral. African-Americans, incensed by what they saw, took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, supported not only by large number of white liberals, but by anarchist groups bent on provoking a nationwide revolt.
Floyd’s name was added to a growing list of black victims of police brutality in pretty well every state of the Union. Suspected of passing off a forged banknote, he was immediately surrounded by a squad of uniformed officers who threw him to the ground, handcuffed him and then watched as one of their number, Derek Chavin, slowly suffocated him, ignoring the victim’s pleas not to kill him until he passed out and subsequently died.

Chauvin has since been dismissed from the force and charged with third-degree murder, or negligent homicide, a crime that, upon conviction, could see him spend no more than five years in jail. According to Minneapolis’s police chief, who is himself black, the three officers who stood by and did nothing were complicit in Mr Floyd’s death, but no charges have thus far been brought. What we do know is that the case against Chauvin will be led by Minnesota’s attorney-general Keith Ellison, a Muslim, who, prior to taking office in 2019, was the state’s first-ever black Congressman.

Had the Floyd case been a one-off, or even a rare event, the furore might have faded in a matter of days. The problem is that African-Americans are suffering injustice today much as they have always done. It took a century and more for the black community to move from slavery, via segregation (accompanied by lynching), to the fiction of equality. By now, the civil rights movement ought to be part of history, like the Civil War. Instead, it has to re-fight its battles every day of the year.

Police forces across the US are at the heart of the problem. Racism is hard-wired into the mindset of a large minority of officers, including black officers. Retraining has done nothing to turn the tide. Behaving as they do, the police faithfully reflect the communities they serve, whose majority white residents would feel significantly more at ease if the estimated 42 million of their fellow citizens who are black had opted to return to Africa after being granted their freedom instead of polluting the American Dream.

Does this mean there is no hope? No. Because young whites under the age of 30 are measurably more liberal than their parents, who in turn had for the most past moved away from the hardline attitudes of the Wallace era. But there is a long way still to go. White liberals, while praying for a more enlightened society, still expect the police to protect them from criminality, and criminality is still associated in the public mind with African-Americans. Black men are already three times more likely than their white counterparts to go to jail, but if it were left up to the police in some cities, most young blacks would be locked up automatically as a precautionary measure.

The resentment this presumption creates, especially in the immediate aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is always there, but normally erupts into violence only when a manifest injustice occurs, such as the death of George Floyd. Black church leaders, civil rights activists and elected officials, including members of Congress, tend almost always to tamp down violent feelings, but from time to time, as in this instance, they feel obliged to go with the flow.

So will the widespread rioting, and almost equally ubiquitous looting, continue at its present level for weeks to come? It is impossible to say. Some 150 cities are currently under curfew But the ingredients of a sustained insurrection are there for all to see. There have been many false dawns in the past, including over the past five years, but it could be that what we are witnessing right now is an American Moment – an episode that bypasses democracy and jump-starts real and lasting change.

If events do unfold differently this time round, it will be Donald Trump – pouring petrol on the flames – as much as the unchanging face of the police who will have made the difference. The President appears increasingly unhinged by events. His spectacular mishandling of the health crisis, combined with his likely impotence in the face of the economic recession now rushing towards him with the force of a Tsunami, is turning him into a version of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope. The deeply-felt racisim that he has held in only with maximum effort during his time in the White House looks set to explode.

The act of sending in armed troops against the advice, and indeed the instructions, of state governors and city mayors would test not only the constitution and the military – whose top brass would face a potentially life-altering dilemma – but the patience of his country. Yes, there will be millions of hardline Republicans out there cheering him on, but millions more Americans, black, white and Latino, will be horrified and resolved more than ever that, come the election, this man must be removed as Commander-in-Chief.

America’s Original Sin, that began with the near-total genocide of its native peoples before evolving into two centuries of black enslavement, is never far beneath the surface. But with people going crazy on the streets and a madman in the White House, some sort of tipping point may at last have been reached. The next few days should be as compelling, and revealing, as any in the nation’s history.