Protests like those over George Floyd’s death may soon become a regular feature of life in the Western world.
That the killing of George Floyd would produce both terrible sadness and deep anger was to be expected, and so was a wave of protest. That protest might sometimes degenerate into riot and looting could also, perhaps, have been expected, but the scale of the protests — and of what came next — well, almost certainly not. Part of the explanation lies in double repetition: another killing, replayed again and again, feeding the despair and fueling the rage from cell phone to news bulletin and onto the web.
And yet something else seems to be happening, something that suggests these events are a harbinger of even more serious upheavals in the years ahead. These upheavals will not be averted by justice being done in Floyd’s case, or by reforms in policing, however overdue they may be. And these upheavals (which may or may not be violent) will be “about” a lot more than race. To understand why, it’s necessary to appreciate that the protests over Floyd’s death were both a sincerely felt reaction to an appalling incident (that was itself emblematic of far deeper problems in both policing and race relations), and another round in a broader social and generational fight.
Politics, at its core, is about power. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about both, reportedly (but believably) argued that, in the end, the only political question that counts was “who will overtake whom.” That formulation was later shortened to “who, whom” (“??? ?????”), a reduction of politics to a zero-sum game. There could only be one winner. Someone had to be giving the orders and someone else had to be taking them. In Lenin’s day, that was a reference to the confrontation between Bolshevism and capitalism, but the principle has far wider application.
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