How to Think About the "Failures" of the George Floyd Protests

As it's been more than three years since the largest protest movement of my life, I've had plenty of time to reflect on why nothing really happened in response, save a smattering of tepid reforms.  This reflection has been greatly aided by others writing at length about their own theories.  Some are cautiously optimistic about the future, others are more critical about the state of social justice movements, and others (appear to) fall somewhere in the middle.  The common thread among most such reflections is that they focus on the movement itself and the people that make up the movement.  While self-critiques are good and necessary, I feel that this overwhelming focus misses the mark in an important way.

What helped to spur this specific realization was a pair of investigations that were released back-to-back last week.  The first provided additional detail into CBP's involvement in quashing the protests:

"The agency is generally authorized to operate within 100 miles of land and coastal borders, though that remit can be extended. On June 26, 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing numerous agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency — to provide assistance for “the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property” amid the mass protests. 

The documents reveal that CBP officers provided “situational awareness” for police departments, conducted “general law enforcement activities” and “crowd control,” monitored encrypted online chat rooms, and even arrested protesters."

The second showed how activist energy and dollars were funneled into an anti-racist celebrity's vanity project that, as far as I can tell, did next to nothing:

"But several former staff and faculty members, expressing anger and bitterness, said the cause of the center’s problems were  unrealistic expectations fueled by the rapid infusion of money, initial excitement, and pressure to produce too much, too fast, even as there were hiring delays due to the pandemic. Others blamed Dr. Kendi, himself, for what they described as an imperious leadership style. And they questioned both the center’s stewardship of grants and its productivity.

“Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule,” said Saida U. Grundy, a Boston University sociology professor and feminist scholar who was once affiliated with the center."

How these seemingly disparate stories relate to each other is that they both demonstrate how larger, systemic forces appear to have precluded any chance of the protests "succeeding," at least in the short-term.  Our law enforcement apparatus, perhaps the most efficient counter-insurgency machine ever created, polices our streets with ruthless ferocity.  Our system of higher education, richer and more expansive than any such body in existence, does the work of policing thought, and helps direct a good deal of potential radical energy towards toothless grifters and charlatans.  We can blame ourselves all we want, but as I've remarked on before, this misses the point and plays directly into the enemies' hands.  Any analysis that is not centered on the durable, well-constructed machinery intent on continuing to suppress human flourishing is simply not useful towards our ultimate goals.

How to Think about YIMBYs Part 4

Hey it's another post in this series!  Instead of focusing on paranoid/reparative readings that seek to assume common goals between YIMBYs and the left, let's look at a more concrete and knowable difference.  This was inspired by this article, which is short and sweet to the point that I think these two lines effectively summarize the whole thing:

"The root of the problem is that housing is treated as an instrument of profit, one in which the exchange value is prioritized over its use value. The sole solution is to decouple housing from profit and make it a human right."

This is a simple statements of normative values that you would think everyone could get behind.  But of course, that is wrong.  One specific strain of rebuttal, while annoying, at least served to be illustrative:

I'm not going to claim, like last time, that this perfectly represents YIMBY thought (though I do see a few familiar faces above).  But it speaks to this specific disconnect that, when faced with a simple rights-based argument, so many people counter with a demand for specific policy.  While I know that the author of the piece is more than capable of opining on policy-specific demands, the more important point is that not every utterance one makes needs to be tied to a concrete policy proposal.  Polemics based on rights, values, and normative statements are perfectly valid and are necessary in their own right.

Once you start to look at the YIMBY question from this angle, it starts to tie to the larger picture much more easily.  I've remarked on this same disconnect between specifics and the bigger picture recently with respect to abolition.  This was, in my estimation, the biggest weakness in the most recent book I read, as the author undercut his seeming desire for fundamental rights with fealty to market solutions.  The larger transition in American governance from rights-based frameworks to policy wonkery was well-documented in one of last year's hot new releases.  And if you squint, you can even see a younger, more naïve Mike wrestle with this same problem and come to a similar, if less explicit diagnosis.

The simplest (and most likely) explanation for all of these threads and more is this: YIMBYs and their analogues are fundamentally committed to capitalism, and thus can only conceive of solutions to problems through the pathways that capitalism allows for (ie. the market).  Whereas the left is committed to rights, to ideals, to people, and through much study and reflection has come to the conclusion that the only way to fully address the problems of capitalism is to transcend capitalism itself.  Put another way, we did not choose socialism, it chose us.  This is of course an oversimplification: I assume at least some YIMBYs are earnestly committed to the same rights as the left but have drawn a very different conclusion about how to secure them.  And I know there are plenty on the left that are driven by more impetuous and self-righteous motives to oppose capital.  But if you really dig in and try to determine the root assumptions and the fundamental commitments of your opponents, you'll often find that these very different animating principles explain most of the contradictions between you and others who are seemingly fighting for the same outcomes.