Everybody is talking about insurrection, in the wake of the MAGA assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and Trump’s and his co-conspirators’ upcoming trials for inciting it. The underlying assumption is that the extreme Right, desperate not to lose the presidency and its scourge of coercion and control, was behind the insurrection; and moreover, that the extreme Right resorts to violence casually.
I think this is clearly true. But we ought not to lose sight of the fact that insurrection has long also been in the far Left’s toolbox. I’m not the first to point out that urban rampages in the name of “social justice” since the Occupy days, which flare up almost every time there’s a new George Floyd or Breonna Taylor incident, have been exclusively committed by leftwing, progressive, anarchist and woke elements. Anyone who lives in or near downtown Oakland is well aware of the dangers that the Black Bloc continues to pose to our common safety.
This fact was brought home to me, once again, when I read an essay entitled “Pragmatism, Racial Injustice, and Epistemic Insurrection,” by Jose Medina, a well-known leftist professor of philosophy at Northwestern, whose website says his work concentrates on “critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory and social epistemology.” Dr. Medina is an icon in academic woke circles, the type of progressive educator whose “long march through the institutions” has impacted so many colleges and universities. In a TikTok video he made recently, Medina said, “As educators, our duty is to leverage whatever privileges we carry in order to dismantle the educational systems that are still prevalent today that continue to marginalize certain student communities.” The operative word here is “dismantle,” as in destroy, deconstruct, demolish. Not change through gradual transformation or persuasion, but devastate.
Medina asserts that “the tragedy of racial injustices” justifies “insurrectionist challenges” to them. “I will argue,” he writes, “that pragmatism can and in fact should allow for insurrection and radical change in response to radical forms of exclusion and subordination such as those we can find in the American racist past and present.” He lists “slavery” as first among these “radical forms of exclusion” but also includes “systematic and institutional racism,” his phrase for what is more often called structural racism. (Pragmatism refers to a branch of philosophy which argues that abstract, airy-fairy philosophical navel-gazing is pointless without actionable objectives.) “An insurrectionist pragmatism,” Medina claims, “should…make available not only reforms…but also a broad spectrum of insurrectionist possibilities…”. Medina does not call outright for violent insurrection, but when he urges Leftists to “resist these injustices through deeply transformative—insurrectionist—thought and action,” one might question more deeply what he means by “action.”
The problem for philosophers like Medina is that few people actually read them. Instead, sympathetic interpreters filter the message down to the masses. (We saw this with Mein Kampf, which almost no one read). It’s not hard to follow the thread from Medina’s writing to the insurrectionist tendencies of the Left in Oakland. Radicals such as Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks and even Pamela Price may not be so stupid as to publicly call for downtown riots, but they come right up to the line. When Brooks says “Black folks…are, you know, immediately trying to figure out how to respond, how to protect ourselves, how to protect our communities” against “white violence,” she’s speaking in the wink-wink code of armed and violent insurrection, a modern-day, more discrete version of the “By any means necessary” rhetoric of her hero Malcolm X, who dangled the image of angry, machine-gun wielding Blacks to intimidate White Americans into complying with his revolutionary demands.
“If the police department,” Fife says, “or any other agency of government that has been institutionalized, is not responsive to the needs of the people, then the people are going to have to learn how to control them.” Are we not justified in asking how Fife intends “to control” cops? There’s a lot of intentional ambiguity there, and angry radicals could easily interpret this suggestion by a fiery leader as a call to violent action.
I dislike this talk of insurrection on both sides. Each knows it can’t win an outright majority of support, so they harbor fantasies of murder and revenge against their perceived enemies. Unfortunately, as we know from History, such fantasies can erupt into reality, especially in the incendiary political atmosphere in which America finds itself, wherein Trump constantly pours oil on the flames, and Leftists do the same to incite their more unstable adherents. One of the reasons why we started the Coalition for a Better Oakland was to bring a level of civil discourse to our citywide conversations, in which truth and common sense prevail over propaganda and ideology. This goal has proved elusive, because voters keep electing insurrectionists to our higher political offices. Recalling Price will not be (to paraphrase Churchill) “the end. It [might] not even [be] the beginning of the end. But it [could be], perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Cheers to the end of the beginning of the fall of wokeism! On this day after Christmas morning, I wish you all safety and peace.
Steve Heimoff