Roland Fryer at the Wall Street Journal:
This also explains [Martin Luther] King’s fierce opposition to riots, even when he understood the rage behind them. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he said in 1967. But he immediately added that riots were “socially destructive and self-defeating.” As historian David Garrow documents, King believed that violence collapsed the moral clarity the [civil rights] movement depended on, allowing repression to masquerade as order. Riots were strategic failures. They destroyed the information the movement was trying to convey and pushed society back toward the bad equilibrium.
This isn’t just historical rationalization; the same logic applies to today’s immigration protests. If the protests were disciplined and nonviolent, they could do what King’s strategy was designed to do: separate types, force belief-updating among moderates, and make repression politically costly. Instead they quickly turned visibly violent—objects thrown, clashes with officers—and federal officials predictably framed the unrest as a public-order problem, even raising the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.