Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online looks ahead from today’s nationwide protests.
That the killing of George Floyd would produce both terrible sadness and deep anger was to be expected, and so was a wave of protest. That protest might sometimes degenerate into riot and looting could also, perhaps, have been expected, but the scale of the protests — and of what came next — well, almost certainly not. …
… And yet something else seems to be happening, something that suggests these events are a harbinger of even more serious upheavals in the years ahead. These upheavals will not be averted by justice being done in Floyd’s case, or by reforms in policing, however overdue they may be. And these upheavals (which may or may not be violent) will be “about” a lot more than race. To understand why, it’s necessary to appreciate that the protests over Floyd’s death were both a sincerely felt reaction to an appalling incident (that was itself emblematic of far deeper problems in both policing and race relations), and another round in a broader social and generational fight. …
… There are ways in which the events of the last few days have made for a perfect storm: a hideous death (another hideous death) available on social media for all to see, a president who seems incapable of finding the right words and rather too capable of saying the wrong ones. And then among the consequences of COVID-19 are the measures that have thrown 40 million Americans out of work and denied millions more the opportunity to get out and about in cities where bars, restaurants, cinemas, and sometimes even parks are shut down. …
… The rise of identity politics among the young, like the mounting popularity of the more apocalyptic strains of environmentalism, is part of their broader hard-left turn, which began in the early years of this century.
