Kontextmaschine

1st June 2017

Link reblogged from left unity with 791 notes

Portland Republican says party should use militia groups after racial attack →

dagwolf:

White people see white nationalist violence and decide white people are under attack. Cool beans.

Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, however, told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to “abandoning the public square”.

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”

Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: “Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”

Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: “Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”

Can’t make this shit up. Like this is a public call for armed white supremacists to show up to protests, rallies, marches and to “protect” Republicans from us. These white men cannot help but support racist violence even when confronted with its abject harm to all.

Alright, I see this close up and I got sympathy for the Multnomah Republicans.

A thing to address the underlying “how can they do X, and expect Y?” is the people doing X and expecting Y here don’t see themselves as the same. The MultCo Republican Party aren’t behind the free speech-branded events designed to pit based stickmen v. antifa - that’s a YouTuber from Vancouver WA.

(And BOTH these social media alt-righters AND the Republicans had independently told the slasher off when he’d showed up to events, on the grounds he wasn’t an ally, just a fighty weirdo asshole looking for a pretense. The Portlanders I know most involved in left protest have been trying to push back on blaming even alt-righters, cause they know that “that guy showed up, I hope no one holds him against us” feel. Also they point out he’s rootless and unstable, been shot in the face by cops and spent years in prison, maybe where he learned that deadly but unsexy down-the-jugular slash, and had the habit of latching on to any cause that lets him antagonize people.)

What the actual Multnomah Republicans have been up to lately is:

• A “March 4 Trump” in a park in the country clubby suburb of Lake Oswego - that drew Good Night White Pride types but cops kept the peace. That’s where the slasher-to-be showed up and they told him off.
• The 82nd Street Rose Parade in Portland. The Republicans had a section, some SJNGO resume-polisher said he’d rally to resist it and separately some riseup email threatened to physically disrupt it. The organizers asked for more police, the city said no, so they called the whole thing off rather than give in to demands to exclude the Republicans. (The neighborhood fixtures are SE Asian immigrant neighborhood businessmen with all the anticommunist rightism that implies, the county party holds meetings at one of their restaurants, so.)

As far as the party’s concerned, they’re doing anodyne Norman Rockwell stuff - a picnic rally in a friendly neighborhood, marching in a civic parade - long accepted as perfectly proper. That at least violence-avowing skirmishers are harrying them isn’t ideal, but when the authorities bother to keep the peace (as in Lake Oswego) things work. But when they don’t, as in Portland, they don’t. And so they’re acting in reaction to that right now.

And yeah, if your major party can’t even hold Norman Rockwell events because your rivals in city administration won’t bother to defend them from political paramilitaries, cause maybe #resistance, that’s a problem, and I sympathize with the notion that it’s those guys’ duty to address it completely at their own expense.

And the slashings aren’t something that would make the GOP accept this, and they take claims that that makes it ok, or even necessary, as further provocation, an insulting non sequitur. The recent killer voting Bernie and Stein is way too thin a reed to pin it on leftism, but I’ll say it’s reasonable grounds for the Republican Party to not feel on the hook for a guy they specifically ran off on their own initiative long before.

If there’s a lesson, as far as the Republicans are concerned, it’s that heated tensions attract and empower hotheads, and that tensions should be calmed. And that while “one major party, the currently ruling one, accepts that they cannot hold Norman Rockwell-type events in rival-administered cities” might calm tensions on this subject, it is a wrong answer, un-American, and that “political and civic society institutions reaffirm and enforce that Norman Rockwell-type electioneering, even that which empowers rival forces, should be respected, even when disliked”, which would also calm tensions, is right.

Liberalism! It has its charms. And yes, this particular communique is a threat, and the threat is “if you abrogate liberalism, and backstop your rule with political paramilitaries it doesn’t mean we roll over and you just win, jfc.”

It’s a Weimar escalation cycle all over again, for all that leftists fault the SPD for trying to reign in left-streetfighters, mainline rightists faulted it for not crossing their base to discipline the ruffians enough, “what choice did you leave us but those who would?”

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