The situation is fluid, we may all be dead tomorrow. But it is interesting to examine the splits going on right now within the establishment.
It’s clear that no matter what the MAGA chuds will continue whacking off to fantasies of slaughtering everyone to show How Real Power Works. But the establishment has come to a consensus on strategy: They know a slaughter would mean unwinnable war, so they’re desperately trying to split liberal POC from leftists.
There’s basically two variants of this strategy:
1) the liberal one where a few thousand get selectively raided and put away for vandalism
2) the conservative one where they round up anarchists for ideology crime and use us as show trials for election/base advantage.
Probably both of those things will happen in some fractured chaotic mess.
But the main flaw in their strategy right now is that the cops are more fashy chud than establishment apparatchik. And the fash aren’t wrong about the necessity of overwhelming force to secure the existing power / world.
The ruling class is trying to get middle class woke liberals to see the protests as an opportunity for instagram clout, in implicit exchange for turning on the radicals that launched the protests.
Portland has only 900 cops, but it has thousands of potential “peace police” woke liberals who will subdue the uprising for them and help arrest anyone actually committed to revolt.
But the fatal flaw in this strategy is that cops are rabid dogs that can’t really fathom power beyond the blunt application of force.
So the establishment tries to rush normie liberals out to the uprisings to turn them into inane toothless self-policed protests — and then the cops brutalize the liberals.
Who fucking knows, the brutalized liberals could grow a spine and fight? But what’s more likely is they’ll retreat for now, desperately trying to play clout and electoral games at the expense of folks in actual revolt.
But also the liberal ranks will only further radicalize. Because for all the opportunist would-be protest managerial class, one thing we’ve seen in all of this is the abrupt and probably permanent polarization of a huge array of institutions and civil society against the police. To see and openly name them as wartime adversaries. Teachers, bus drivers, social workers, reporters…. EVERYONE is getting their eyes opened.
The cops are the cops. They’re brutal thugs drawn to a simplistic worldview of clean hierarchies assured by direct violence.
A few “woke” career bureaucrats aside, rank-and-file cops cannot but behave as they are, structurally and culturally.
This makes them backfiring tools.
A smart ruling class would want to replace the clunky medieval police with more adept and diverse tools.
But they’re locked in, because at the end of the day there’s far fewer rulers than there are cops, and the cops’ blunt gangsterism trumps the rulers’ more dexterous power. Hardesty is an anti-cop radical who was elected by anti-cop radicals… and yet she ordered the curfew that is getting her campaign staff brutalized. Because what else can she do? The cops will just assassinate her. They’ve no doubt blackmailed her to hell.
Right now the ruling classes, at all tiers, are chained to the institution of the police.
The lower level ruling establishment now realizes they’re in a direct adversarial struggle with the cops, and the upper rulers are largely to afraid (rightfully) of police retaliation.
And then there’s the Trumpistan cancer on the establishment. Which are just fashy thugs entirely in sync with the cops, and they all just want to slaughter and imprison a few hundred thousand people to retain power.
…Unaware that this would now push everything else against them.