Militarizing a Response to the George Floyd Rebellion Won't Work

Protests continue in Seattle. I can hear the helicopters from my apartment. 

In the nation's capital there is what appears to be a complete military occupation:

Less than two hours before Washington’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Tuesday, military vehicles assumed positions across the city.

A crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House appeared to be at least twice that of a day earlier, and swelling.

With the imminent arrival of military units and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic used for battles with insurgents abroad, now applied on U.S. soil — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.

Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.

“There are real problems here,” he said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”

While the evening ended with only flashes of confrontations, the city’s downtown is being flooded with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection, and several other agencies, along with the military. Transportation Security Administration officers have also been called out of airports to help protect federal property.

The militarization of the response to the protest has stirred deep concerns and drawn widespread criticism, including from retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”

“I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlantic published on Tuesday, adding that America’s cities and towns “are not ‘battle spaces’ to be dominated, and must never become so.”

Trump's Wallacite/Nixonian "law & order" response is not going to solve the problem. There are not enough troops to extinguish a nationwide rebellion. Remember Eric Shinseki? He was the Army Chief of Staff during the run-up to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq who rocked the boat by saying that the occupation would require several hundred thousand ground troops. The United States has a population ten times greater than the size of Iraq's 2003 population; its entire active-duty and reserve force adds up to about 2.1 million troops. Is Trump going to abandon overseas bases to occupy the homeland?

In "The George Floyd Election," Thomas Edsall susses out the ongoing rebellion's impact on the presidential election, whether it will break for the right or for the left. Edsall starts off by looking at 2020 through the prism of 1968 and the riots in wake of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. It is argued that Humphrey lost because of the protest and riots of 1968 and Nixon and Wallace won.

Edsall goes on to reject parallels between '68 and 2020. For starters, the percentage of the electorate that is white has shrunk by 23% since 1968. More importantly, Trump is completely boxed by an economic collapse that will only grow worse in the near term:

What makes the moment unique is that the combination of widespread racial discontent, the pandemic and the economic implosion is taking place at a time when the scope of deprivation and need is extraordinary.

The number of people who are out of work without income now tops 40 million. There is the prospect of an “avalanche of evictions” forcing millions of renters into homelessness as legal protections and government assistance come to an end. The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute estimates that “42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.”

Families will increasingly begin to experience the incalculable depth of loss as the election approaches, and traditional political maneuvering will be subordinated to the less familiar and highly volatile politics of scarcity.

Scarcity can being out the best and the worst in us, but with Trump in the White House for the next seven months the likelihood of a beneficial outcome is slim to none.

This is a presidential election that pits George Wallace (Trump) against George H.W. Bush (Biden) during a Great Depression.