How 'law and order' politics could dominate the 2020 election | Geoffrey Kabaservice

For months, many Americans had feared that clashes between demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, and police eventually would end in tragedy. Now it has. Three Black Lives Matter protesters were shot and two were killed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, followed by the shooting death of a right-wing counter-protester in Portland, Oregon.

The rise of street battles between armed political factions irresistibly calls to mind similar conflicts that led to the demise of the Weimar Republic. The comparison is overdrawn, but the street brawling has coincided with a spike in violent crime as well as outbreaks of looting and arson that have overlapped with nonviolent demonstrations against police brutality. The voters’ interpretation of why this apparent breakdown in public order has occurred, and who is to blame for it, may well determine the outcome of this year’s elections.

The present rise in violence has to be seen” politics inevitably had a racial dimension, since African Americans were both victims and arrested for violent crime, and the massive riots of the 1960s in nearly all cases were sparked by minorities reacting against police abuses.