At the end of the day, if Trump is reelected, all of the crowd’s outrage and eloquent words will have no lasting impact. A reelected Trump would thwart them and their proposed reforms at every step of the way.
Race is an explosive issue, and there are crowds in the streets.
Democratic leadership, of the crowd in the streets, is nowhere to be found.
It is as if an entire country just discovered that there is a long history of racism and racial oppression in the country.
Everyone is gobsmacking their forehead, expressing growing anger at one outrage after another.
A crowd, without leadership, becomes a mob, governed by the unpredictable passions that may sweep through its members at any particular moment. It is essentially irrational, and easily manipulated.
See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895).
There is no guiding, calculating intelligence directing the crowd, or at least this crowd, except potentially on the part of outsiders who understand mob psychology and seek to manipulate the crowd for their own purposes.
(We may never know who instigated snd coordinated the violence and the looting that occurred over the last 10 days, but we can certainly say it has served Trump’s interests and it would come as no surprise if he and his followers turned out to be behind it.)
With so many people so emotionally involved, indeed understandably so, there does not seem to be a guiding purpose or unifying plan of action to guide the crowd.
Martin Luther King, Jr. mobilized millions of Americans, black and white, to take part in massive demonstrations. But he had goals, and usually a plan, and used mass demonstrations to secure important objectives as part of a larger strategic plan or vision.
Today, in Minneapolis, the crowd demanded that the city disband the police department. A loud demand to “defund the police” is heard in many cities.
This is the irrational behavior of a crowd. The idea, however appealing on an immediate emotional level, is utter nonsense.
Why would the Democrats, or even the demonstrators, want to turn every police officer in the country against Joe Biden and the Democatic Party?
You can see the political commercials the crowd is making for Donald Trump, of masses of people demanding that police departments be dismantled, so that looting and violence can again achieve free reign.
You can also see Trump setting up his campaign line that the country is threatened by mobs in the streets engaging in violence, arson, and looting.
Where are the Democratic leaders?
Are they afraid of the crowd?
Is there no one who can influence the crowd to not give ammunition to Donald Trump for his electoral campaign?
Has there been any Democratic leader who could urge the members of the crowd, strongly, to absolutely wear masks and to try to maintain physical distancing, as we are still in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic?
See
Ross Douthout, “Why the Coronavirus Is Winning; A virus doesn’t care about our ideological preconceptions,” New York Times, June 6, 2020.
Aren’t there any Democratic leaders who can do more than cheer the outrage of the demonstrators, and help steer them toward achieving concrete objectives?
Aren’t there any Democratic leaders who can channel the energy and outrage of the crowd into specific voter registration and turn-out-the-vote programs that can help defeat Trump?
Will every demonstrator register to vote, and then vote in November?
Where is the Democratic leader who will urge all the members of the crowd to make a solemn pledge to register to vote and to vote on November 3, 2020?
This is the least that we can ask of the Democrats and of the crowd.
We should also ask the House Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry into the Leader’s abuses of power and violations of the law and the Constitution over the last three and a half years. They don’t have to approve the articles of impeachment unless the votes show up in the Senate. That could happen. They just have to be ready.
The Democrats are not going to waltz to a victory over Trump and the Republicans in November.
They had better start fighting.
As part of that fight, they should seek to guide the crowd so that it does not engage in actions that feed into Trump’s campaign narrative, while channeling the crowd’s energies toward achieving real objectives in the brutal world of power politics.
At the end of the day, if Trump is reelected, all of the crowd’s outrage and eloquent words will have no lasting impact. A reelected Trump would thwart them and their proposed reforms at every step of the way.
We all need to focus, soon, regardless of whether the demonstrations continue, on the 100-year catastrophe of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the battle to save our democracy at the polls on November 3 — or to remove Trump earlier through the impeachment process if that becomes possible.
The ultimate battle with Trump is over whether we want a government and a society ruled by Reason, or by Unreason.
It is time for the Democrats to step up to the plate and fight, with all that they have, for a world of Reason.
The Trenchant Observer
