Blood in the Streets: America's Police are Rioting as Fascists Fear Change

Seventy-five years old.

The man is seventy-five years old, standing on an American street in broad daylight, attempting to speak with a police officer, before he is shoved down into the concrete, where he is left, bleeding from his ear, motionless, as a phalanx of police officers step over his broken body.

I wish I could say this was an anomaly, but in recent days we have been overwhelmed by images and videos and instances of America’s police force behaving like an occupying army. The incident in Buffalo on Thursday was just a vivid example of the brutality as officers have repeatedly beaten people with their batons, arrested them with no cause, slung them to the ground, harassed them with pepper spray and rubber bullets, and generally rioted across the United States of America.

In politics, President Donald Trump and like-minded fascists like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton have escalated their rhetoric, calling the protestors “terrorists” and calling for the military to sweep into the streets to put down this “insurrection,” presumably systematically killing hundreds if not thousands of American citizens. Day by day, as numbers show that the protests are having an affect on how people see the world and are changing the way we consider law enforcement, race, inequality, and the concept of what the state should and should not do, the fascists are growing more and more concerned that real and tangible change might be at hand.

Crises have a way of producing clarity. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the effects of hypercapitalism while exposing the truth that the wealthy and powerful value their wealth and power over the lives and well-being of their fellow people. Despite media attempts to normalize Donald Trump, this crisis has revealed his true nature as a dictatorial authoritarian with absolutely no regard for law, institutions, or basic human rights. This movement in the streets has exposed brutality and fascism within United States law enforcement that has been there for generations, only it has drawn it to the surface for easy recognition.

Unfortunately, these things are all woven into American culture with their fair share of myths and lies. Hypercapitalism, through Reaganism and the Republican Party, has become a bedrock of American identity and has created a world wherein the wealthy are nations unto themselves. Trump’s authoritarianism is shades of past presidents, as well as a consistent play upon American concepts of masculinity, toughness, and resolve, all part of our militaristic culture, not to mention that his fake and dangerous presidency is held up by a media and culture obsessed with the American presidency as a legitimating office. And, the topic of law enforcement in America is both one of its longest ills and dangers, and our history and cultural learnings and popular culture all enable fascistic, extralegal behaviors while propagating prejudice, racism, and inhuman violence.

These are poison pills. They eat away at our shared society, endanger us, and ensure that we will stay unequal, afraid, and divided. It is the machinery of fascism that has hummed beneath America’s smiling, flag-waving veneer since the Founding.

But this crisis is revealing so many things, because fascists are weak. That weakness and insecurity defines them. The behavior we are witnessing now, with police ravaging Americans as cowards like Trump and Tom Cotton cheer them on, as the wealthy and powerful consider full-blown totalitarianism in the streets, we can take hope and comfort from the fact that they are frightened of change and see change as a possibility. States do not brutalize their people unless they are afraid their people might gain power. These protests and this movement has them shaken to their very cowardly core and their behavior reveals that truth.

There is no hiding this inhuman philosophy when people exercise their rights. They want an America where people have the right to speak out but are too afraid to use it. They want an America where they can push that seventy-five year old man down in the street and watch him bleed without fear of a camera watching it all unfold.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.