Police riots

There is a connection between what is happening these days in Portland and what happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. In both places, the police rioted. They used force unnecessarily to try to frighten demonstrators from exercising their constitutional rights.

There is more method in this madness. Donald Trump needs to prove that his deployment of Customs and Border Protection officers is justified. There is no better way than to use those officers in ways that are likely to arouse a violent reaction, or at least generate lots of video showing chaos.

There is a difference between Selma and Portland: John Lewis and the other civil rights demonstrators were far more disciplined about nonviolence than the demonstrators in Portland have been. When attacked, they ran. They knew the police had at their disposal overwhelming force. They also knew their cause would benefit from the police violence.

Sadly, the demonstrators in Portland have been unable to restrain the relatively few of their number who are determined to meet violence with violence. The result is an ambiguous signal to the rest of the country. Those who want to believe the deployment of Federal forces is justified get enough evidence to make them feel comfortable with that opinion.

The Portland demonstrators have had it right when they deployed mothers and veterans in the first line confronting the police. Those are clever moves, but as the evenings wear on that discipline seems to break down. It is of course possible there are agents provocateurs among the demonstrators, placed there for the specific purpose of generating the violence the Federal agents want. But it is also possible, even likely, that there are a few radicals who think violence will generate support.

It will not. People don’t come out in the same numbers for violent demonstrations as for nonviolent ones. Nor is sympathy for demonstrations as strong if they are violent. This one Navy veteran, who stood up nonviolently to rioting Federal agents in Portland, has generated more sympathy for the demonstrators than dozens throwing projectiles:

Anyone who doubts whether the police rioted in Selma is welcome to watch this:

It is hard not to feel fury when seeing these videos, which will have been shown worldwide.

But the Pettus Bridge is already remembered more for what John Lewis did there than anything Pettus, who was a racist rebel against the United States, accomplished. President Trump will likewise be forgotten except for the corruption and lies that mark his singularly undistinguished time in the White House.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The trick is to make sure we stay in a moral universe, not the immoral one that Trump and his minions prefer. John Lewis, who will be remembered for courage and conviction, crossed the bridge in Selma for the last time today. Let’s keep the faith with him, not with Pettus and Trump.