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What’s behind the monthslong violent protests in Portland, Oregon, and are they coming soon to a city near you?

Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, demonstrators in Portland have taken to the streets every night, often smashing windows, setting buildings on fire, and scuffling with local and federal law enforcement as well as fellow city dwellers. Lately, protesters have been entering residential neighborhoods in the early morning hours, shining lights into windows and telling people to literally and figuratively “wake up” to a world the protesters say is made intolerable by racism, income inequality, the presidency of Donald Trump, and more.

Veteran journalist Nancy Rommelmann has been covering the Portland protests for Reason. She knows Rose City like the back of her hand, having lived there for 15 years. Nick Gillespie spoke with her about the roots of the unrest in Portland, what she’s learned by talking with the protesters and authorities, and what might be coming next. Rommelmann paints a disturbing picture of mostly young demonstrators who are becoming increasingly restive, prone to violent rhetoric, and unfocused in their demands.

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The Cato Unbound  symposium on the 50th anniversary of economist Albert O. Hirschman’s classic work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States now has multiple additional contributions. Mercatus Center scholar Adam Thierer, author of the lead essay, has now posted a response to the three commentators, including pieces by, sociologist Mikayla Novak, Max Borders, and myself. Borders’ commentary itself was posted only recently.

Here’s an excerpt from Thierer’s reply:

The response essays by Mikayla Novak, Ilya Somin, and Max Borders demonstrate the continuing relevance of Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty fifty years after its publication. Each author makes important contributions to a better understanding of what Hirschman’s book—and each of the terms in its title—mean today.

Mikayla Novak rightly points to the importance of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in thinking about how digital technologies can “help to reduce the costs of collective action along various margins” and “catalyze the creation and amplification of contentious voices…”

Somin stresses “the continuing importance of physical freedom of movement” in ensuring that our rights our honored. “No technological innovation provides an adequate substitute for the power to ‘vote with your feet’ by choosing where to live and work.” Somin’s latest book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration and Political Freedom, drives that point home powerfully.

I agree wholeheartedly that we must never ignore the physical component of the exit equation. In fact, in an essay earlier this year, I made “The Case for Sanctuary Cities in Many Different Contexts,” as “a way to encourage experiments in alternative governance models and just let people live lives of their choosing.” In theory, sanctuaries can help advance exactly the sort of foot voting Somin desires. Unfortunately, today’s sanctuary movements are quite one-dimensional, focusing exclusively on single causes like immigrant rights, gun rights, or marijuana decontrol. Worse yet, selective morality runs deep when it comes to the support they garner…

Consistent with what Somin advocates in his essay and recent book, I believe there is a profoundly positive case for embracing sanctuaries and the free movement of people among them regardless of what the cause is. Greater localized decisionmaking, policy experimentation, and alternative governance arrangements have value in and of themselves. The question is whether sanctuaries can scale and become a more meaningful and lasting form of exit to help us capitalize on the dream Somin and I both share….

Max Borders calls me out for adopting this more incrementalist approach. Borders is distressed that I am even willing to entertain the idea of seeking small victories when we should be swinging for the fences instead…

Jefferson’s call for a rebellious spirit and periodic resets of government has long animated my life’s work, but, as I noted I my opening essay, “repeated revolutionary acts… would be difficult to accomplish and certainly highly disruptive to society and economy alike.” Borders prefers we go further, so much so that his essay raises the question whether we should have any loyalty whatsoever to our current constitutional order. Alas, he shies away from discussing just how far we should go, preferring instead to merely say that we need to be “constructive revolutionaries, accelerating those innovations most likely to undermine the apparatuses of state power.”

As can be seen from this excerpt, Thierer has more disagreements with Max Borders than with the other two commentators. I actually agree with most of what Thierer says in the response essay, including his reply to Borders, and most of his comments on sanctuary jurisdictions.

I myself have written extensively about immigration sanctuary cities (e.g. here and here). I am even one of the relatively few people who is sympathetic to both liberal immigration sanctuaries and conservative gun rights sanctuaries. Thierer is right that there is a good deal of inconsistency and “selective morality” in the discourse over sanctuary cities. But even hypocritical sanctuary movements can still provide valuable foot-voting options, and protect people against overreaching federal government policies.

I will likely have more to say in further comments at the Cato Unbound website, as the symposium continues. Stay tuned!

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Protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the shooting by police of Jacob Blake degenerated into lethal violence Tuesday night, with two dead and one injured. Who did what last night is still unclear, though a suspect is in custody.

While we’ll learn more details, what’s unlikely to change is the chaos in the streets, with multiple hard-to-identify factions and unaffiliated individuals joining up in loose alliances or squaring off in volatile confrontations. That’s the face of modern social unrest, and a sight with which we’ll become very familiar if the situation in this country continues to spiral out of control.

“Two people were killed and a third injured in a shooting at a used car lot on the corner of Sheridan Road and 63rd Street overnight Wednesday by a man armed with an AR-15-style rifle,” Kenosha News reports. “The man, who was white, was seen on social media with a group of armed men described online as ‘militia’ who were at a small used car lot on the northwest corner of Sheridan Road and 63rd Street.”

“Militia” could mean anything at this stage, from local people defending businesses to organized groups from elsewhere participating in the scrum. For what it’s worth, at least one Boogaloo Boys group disavows any connection to the shooter.

But there are any number of possible participants. In Portland, Proud Boys and antifa (and others) tangled over the weekend while police pulled back. In communities around the country, residents and business owners have faced-off against protesters and sometimes shot looters. And lone individuals—advocating police reform, or else supportive of cops, or just wanting to see shit burn—have shown up to participate in protests or to just stir the pot.

That’s all too common a pattern, and an unpleasant indicator of where the whole country could be headed if the growing political and racial tensions of recent years follow the path on which the people of Kenosha, Portland, and elsewhere are already walking.

In terms of where those tensions are taking us, the possibility of domestic strife as serious as a second Civil War has been a topic of conversation in recent years—sometimes mockingly (#secondcivilwarletters, anybody?)—but other times more seriously. Three years ago, Thomas E. Ricks scared the hell out of a lot of people when he casually asked “smart national security thinkers” their spitball estimates of the near-term chance of a second civil war and came up with an average estimate of “about 35 percent” for a piece in Foreign Policy.

Most Civil War 2 discussions dwell on a red states vs. blue states battle, as if clear geographical divisions and well-defined sides are a standard feature of civil wars. But social unrest in the modern world is usually messier.

“The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a battle between three factions—the Bosnian Muslims, Croats (Catholic) and Serbs (predominately Orthodox Christian),” the U.S. Army notes of the experience of Hajrudin Djedovic, who left the Yugoslav Army in 1992 as that country was falling apart to fight for Bosnia and Herzegovina. “It was strange fighting against people he had served with only a few years earlier, he said. One day, they are neighbors and friends. The next day—they attacked his village, killed his friends and members of his family.”

Countries don’t have to collapse for chaos to reign. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Italy muddled through the anni di piombo—years of lead. The Economist summarizes the confusion of that time, which still cast a shadow over Italians’ lives:

Marxist extremists, notably the Red Brigades, began kidnapping and assassinating ‘anti-worker’ officials: policemen, judges, journalists. Their right-wing opponents bombed civilians to ‘drown democracy under a mountain of corpses’. Both sides hoped to weaken the state and to spark revolution or a military takeover. Members of the Italian secret service nudged things along, working with neo-fascist killers to frame the left.

For a taste of the uncertainty of a country plagued by factional violence, it’s worth seeing the 2014 movie ’71. Set in Belfast at the start of “The Troubles,” it follows an accidentally stranded British soldier whose fate depends on the loyalties of the neighborhoods through which he passes, and the inclinations of whichever paramilitary has him at its mercy— not just unionist or nationalist, but specific factions thereof.

The U.S. as a whole is not yet immersed in its own version of “The Troubles” or the “years of lead,” let alone a Balkan-style civil war. But we’re not as far from that state as we were six months ago, let alone a decade ago.

We started this year with nearly six in 10 Americans believing that political tensions in this election year would lead to protests and rioting, according to Ipsos polling. The source of those fears is obvious, given the contempt in which the country’s major political factions hold each other. Fifty-five percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the party opposing their own is “not just worse for politics—they are downright evil,” according to a 2019 YouGov survey. As a result of those hostilities, just over 20 percent of both Democratic and Republican respondents believe violence is at least somewhat justified if their side loses the election, according to the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

To that political tension, we’ve added pandemic-fueled panic and lockdown orders that have crippled the economy and increased stress. We’ve also seen an eruption of long-simmering resentment over police treatment of civilians—especially African-Americans. The killing of George Floyd brought that anger against law enforcement abuses to a head, and it continues to this day.

The result has been protests, which have all-too-often morphed into violence in the streets in multiple cities. That violence features antifa, Proud Boys, Black Lives Matter, Boogaloo Boys, neighborhood watches, and other factions and individuals of every and no ideological flavor. They interact in various shades of support, conditional alliance, and outright opposition—sometimes resulting in bloodshed.

And we haven’t even arrived at Election Day, which had Americans so on-edge at the beginning of the year.

Kenosha doesn’t have to be a vision of America’s future. Neither does Portland. But the fact that the violence is continuous and seems to be escalating is cause for concern. To avoid the spread of that conflict, we’re going to have to find a way to live with each other, or to leave each other alone. If we don’t, the violent social unrest that plagues some of our communities will become a feature of many more.

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Joe Biden’s long history of promoting draconian sentences, hard-line anti-drug policies, and proliferating death penalties is an easy target for any politician who is serious about criminal justice reform. But there is little evidence that description applies to President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly slammed Biden as “the chief architect of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs“ while presenting himself as an opponent of excessively punitive policies—a major theme of this week’s Republican National Convention.

Trump’s bona fides as a reformer consist of two accomplishments. First, he supported the FIRST STEP Act, a 2018 law that included some modest but significant drug sentence reductions. Second, he has issued 25 pardons and 11 commutations, some of which seem to reflect a sincere belief in rehabilitation and a genuine concern about unjust penalties. Most famously, Trump freed Alice Marie Johnson, a nonviolent, first-time offender who received a life sentence for her role in a Memphis-based cocaine distribution ring. Johnson, whom the president introduced during his State of the Union speech last year, was featured in a Trump campaign ad during this year’s Super Bowl and is scheduled to speak at the Republican convention on Thursday night.

Although it did not go as far as many reformers would have liked, the FIRST STEP Act, which passed with overwhelming support in the House and Senate, was a clear improvement that freed thousands of drug war prisoners, and Trump deserves credit for backing it. The fact that he has used his clemency powers not only to help his cronies but to ameliorate some real injustices is also laudable. Barack Obama, who eventually commuted a record 1,715 sentences, approved just one petition during his first term. But when it comes to his plans for a second term, Trump has said little about criminal justice, and what he has said is inconsistent with the image he is trying to project.

The second-term agenda that Trump unveiled this week, like the “Law and Justice” section of his campaign website, does not mention criminal justice reform. But it does list five points under the heading “Defend the Police,” a rejoinder to the “Defund the Police” movement. Trump’s wish list does not inspire confidence in his commitment to reversing Biden’s mistakes.

Trump wants to “fully fund and hire more police and law enforcement officers,” which sounds an awful lot like a central element of the “1994 Biden Crime Bill” (as the former vice president proudly calls it). Yet Trump says that law epitomizes the Democratic nominees’s role in promoting mass incarceration and should make African Americans think twice about voting for Biden. “Anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected,” Trump tweeted last year. “In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you. I, on the other hand, was responsible for Criminal Justice Reform, which had tremendous support, & helped fix the bad 1994 Bill!”

Trump wants to “increase criminal penalties for assaults on law enforcement officers.” He does not explain why current penalties are inadequate or how he would change the state laws that prescribe them. Perhaps Trump has in mind laws that treat assaults on police as hate crimes, which result in arbitrary sentence enhancements that are predictably deployed against members of the same minority group that Trump says has disproportionately suffered from the policies Biden championed. Here, too, Trump sounds like the Biden of the 1980s and ’90s, who was keen to show that Democrats could be just as mindlessly “tough on crime” as Republicans.

Trump wants to “prosecute drive-by shootings as acts of domestic terrorism.” That would be inconsistent with the current federal definition of terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” It does not make much sense to put violence between urban gangs in the same category as the ideologically motivated 9/11 attacks or 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. But again, the point is emotional rather than logical, reflecting the same mentality that gave us the ever-escalating criminal penalties Trump faults Biden for supporting.

Trump wants to “bring violent extremist groups like ANTIFA to justice,” which seems unobjectionable until you contemplate how members of that ad hoc, decentralized, and vaguely defined movement are to be identified. Punishing people for their alleged membership in a group rather than their individual actions is a recipe for indiscriminate penalties of the sort that Trump intermittently condemns.

Trump wants to “end cashless bail and keep dangerous criminals locked up until trial.” That proposal is a direct swipe at a reform widely supported by critics of the criminal justice system, who say people should not be imprisoned prior to trial simply because they cannot afford bail, which punishes them without a conviction, impairs their ability to mount a defense, and pressures them into plea deals that otherwise would be less appealing. By describing defendants as “dangerous criminals,” Trump erases the presumption of innocence and ignores all the defendants, including alleged drug offenders, who are “locked up until trial” even though they do not plausibly pose a threat to the general public.

Unlike Trump, whose campaign website does not address criminal justice reform in any substantive way, Biden has a lot to say on the subject. He has repudiated the mandatory minimums and death penalties he once supported, saying they should be abolished. He also wants to eliminate the irrational sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine, which was created by a 1986 law that Biden wrote and resulted in strikingly unequal treatment of black defendants. That gap was reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, a law signed by Obama and supported by Biden that casts doubt on Trump’s claim that only he can deliver “real criminal justice reform.”

While continuing to resist the repeal of federal marijuana prohibition, Biden now calls for decriminalizing cannabis consumption and automatically expunging “all prior cannabis use convictions” (neither of which would have much of an impact at the federal level, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level marijuana cases). He also says states should be free to legalize marijuana, which is similar to the position Trump has implied he supports and has taken in practice.

One need not believe that Biden’s conversion is completely sincere to recognize that the current climate of opinion within the Democratic Party would make reverting to his old drug-warrior instincts politically difficult. Trump, by contrast, is trying to have it both ways, assuring unreconstructed conservatives that he will be tougher on crime than Biden while telling moderates he understands that criminal penalties are frequently arbitrary and disproportionate. Reconciling those seemingly contradictory messages may not be possible, and it surely would require more thoughtfulness than Trump has demonstrated so far.

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The mother of Jacob Blake, the man who was shot in the back by Kenosha police on Sunday, has called for an end to the rioting that broke out in the aftermath her son’s shooting, which has since left two people dead.

“My family and I are very hurt. And quite frankly disgusted,” Julia Jackson, Blake’s mother, said in an interview with CNN Tuesday. “And as his mother, please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it.”

Jacob Blake’s mom on violence in Kenosha: "My family and I are very hurt. And quite frankly disgusted. And as his mother, please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it. … it’s just not acceptable.” pic.twitter.com/T00Fg5MOvj

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 26, 2020

Blake is, according to his father, paralyzed from the waist down.

The video of his shooting prompted riots in the 100,000-person city of Kenosha, where businesses and vehicles have been torched. The city has declared an 8 p.m. curfew and 100 members of the Wisconsin National Guard have been deployed to the city.

Two people were fatally shot Tuesday night, according to a statement from the Kenosha Police Department.

Before the shooting incident, police, using tear gas, had pushed demonstrators out of a park in front of the Kenosha Courthouse.

Some of the crowd had reassembled at a nearby gas station where they got into repeated verbal arguments with armed men who said they were there to protect businesses from vandalism, reports The New York Times. A video of the incident shows a person with a rifle being chased down a street by a crowd of people.

One man can be seen taking a swing at the back of the gunman’s head. He later falls to the ground and is set upon by several members of the crowd, and can be seen shooting at least two of them. The shooter is then seen walking toward armored police vehicles.

Several bystanders in video of the incident say that the gunman was being chased after already shooting someone, reports NPR. The alleged shooter, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Antioch, Illinois, was arrested in Illinois and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.

The Daily Beast reports that Rittenhouse was an active supporter of Blue Lives Matter and pro-police causes on Facebook. An interview posted to Twitter by Daily Caller videographer Richard McGinnis shows Rittenhouse stating that he was there to protect businesses and that he was carrying a rifle and medical kit.

I interviewed the alleged shooter before the violence started.

Full video coming soon: pic.twitter.com/G3dVOJozN7

— Richie????McG???? (@RichieMcGinniss) August 26, 2020

Fellow vigilantes claimed not to know Rittenhouse when confronted by demonstrators after the shooting, saying they only referred to him as “medic.”

"Tell us who he is, God damn man!" exclaimed one community member confronting the group.

"I don't know who the fuck he is!" says a militia guy.

"We know him as 'the medic'" said another militia guy as the argument continued. pic.twitter.com/ReGiLdRuMr

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) August 26, 2020

Many of the details surrounding last night’s shooting incident remain murky. Wisconsin state police are in charge of the investigation, reports The New York Times. 

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