Over the past week, protests and riots in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been met with increasingly menacing calls to restore order, writes New York Magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice. But chaos isn’t going anywhere soon.
Over the past week, protests and riots in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been met with increasingly menacing calls to restore order. But chaos isn’t going anywhere soon. Order, in this context, just means forcing chaos back where it belongs. There are positive signs for the near future, especially if one understands the dissent as aimed primarily at reducing police violence. Public sentiment is on the side of the dissidents; a recent Monmouth poll found that more than half of Americans thought the torching of the Minneapolis police’s Third Precinct station on May 28 was at least partly justified. Repudiations of Floyd’s manner of death, under the knee of now former officer Derek Chauvin, have been mostly bipartisan. Minneapolis schools have kicked out the police department, and the city council has announced it may rebuild the force from the ground up.
Yet when President Trump came out of hiding on June 1 to demand in a conference call that America’s governors “dominate” the dissidents, and threatened to deploy the military to their cities if they couldn’t, he could also claim to be speaking for most of the country: In one poll, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they supported dispatching soldiers to help local police quell the unrest.
This may seem like a contradiction. To support the protests but endorse their policing by light infantry looks like ideals at odds and could suggest anything from a polling quirk to a refusal to contemplate the contradictions of one’s political impulses. But the split is plausible through a particularly American understanding of order: Disruptive tension is put down by violence without being properly resolved, even when its causes are deemed worthy in principle. What qualifies as “disruptive”? That differs by person and era, but the word rioting is a constant across generations.
