Commenter “Bauxite” wonders:
Understanding that this is being driven by the leftmost flank of the American left, I still can’t see how it makes sense. Trump is at his strongest on law and order and illegal immigration. They’ve changed the subject from tariffs and the the so-called big beautiful bill to illegal immigration and leftist rioting.
Trump’s enemies ride to the rescue again. Credit to Trump for sending in the national guard right away this time.
It would indeed seem to play into Trump’s hands, and Bauxite is hardly the only person making such an observation. For example, there’s this from Democrat strategist Chuck Rocha, saying very much the same thing (I can’t embed the video, but that’s the link; it’s about a minute long).
So why does the left do this? I think there are many reasons. First of all, their base loves it. Secondly, it sows chaos and might actually impede some of the deportations, which stymies Trump and causes more chaos. But I believe the deeper desire is to provoke a strong reaction from Trump that can then be labeled in all the ways they love to label Trump: he’s a fascist and a power-mad brutal dictator. Today it’s the illegal criminal aliens, tomorrow it will be you!
It’s a classic leftist move. Their playbook – in US history, anyway – is the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I wrote a piece back in 2006 about this leftist strategy. Most of the remainder of the present post will be quotes from that 2006 article, and I believe the relevance is obvious (the Horowitz link no longer works, however).
This contemporaneous article from Time magazine (hardly a right-wing fringe publication) discusses the intent of the leaders of the 1968 Chicago Convention demonstrations:
“[The protestors] left Chicago more as victors than as victims. Long before the Democratic Convention assembled, the protest leaders who organized last week’s marches and melees realized that they stood no chance of influencing the political outcome or reforming “the system.” Thus their strategy became one of calculated provocation. The aim was to irritate the police and the party bosses so intensely that their reactions would look like those of mindless brutes and skull-busters. After all the blood, sweat and tear gas, the dissidents had pretty well succeeded in doing just that.”
Some demonstrators came prepared; defensively:
“…many were equipped with motorcycle crash helmets, gas masks (purchasable at $4.98 in North Side army-navy surplus stores), bail money and anti-Mace unguents.”
And a few, offensively:
“A handful of hard-liners in the “violence bag” also carried golf balls studded with spikes, javelins made of snow-fence slats, aerosol cans full of caustic oven-cleaning fluids, ice picks, bricks, bottles, and clay tiles sharpened to points that would have satisfied a Cro-Magnon bear hunter.”
The leaders were also prepared:
“Most of the protest leaders stayed in the background. Mobilization Chairman David Tyre Dellinger, 53, the shy editor-publisher of Liberation, who led last fall’s Pentagon March, studiously avoided the main confrontation before the Hilton. His chief aide, Tom Hayden, 28, a New Left author who visited Hanoi three years ago, was so closely tailed by plainclothesmen that he finally donned a yippie-style wig to escape their attentions. Nonetheless, he was arrested. Rennie Davis, 28, the clean-cut son of a Truman Administration economic adviser, took a more active part as one of the Chicago organizers: his aim, he said, was ‘to force the police state to become more and more visible, yet somehow survive in it.’ At Grant Park on Wednesday afternoon, he both succeeded and failed….”
And here’s David Horowitz’s insider-turned-apostate version:
“In fact, the famous epigram from ’68 ‘Demand the Impossible’ which Talbot elsewhere cites, explains far more accurately why it was Hayden, not Daley, who set the agenda for Chicago, and why it was Hayden who was ultimately responsible for the riot that ensued. The police behaved badly, it is true and they have been justly and roundly condemned for their reactions. But those reactions were entirely predictable. After all, it was Daley who, only months before, had ordered his police to ‘shoot looters on sight’ during the rioting after King’s murder. In fact the predictable reaction of the Chicago police was an essential part of Hayden’s calculation in choosing Chicago as the site of the demonstration in the first place.”
… The organizers of the demonstrations in Chicago in 1968 … [had this intent]: to act from a weakened position to provoke, by their actions, a repressive response from authorities (in this case, the police) that would then further inflame public opinion against those authorities, and engender more sympathy for the cause of the planners.
In that endeavor, they were wildly successful in Chicago, but that success required an overreaction on the part of the Chicago police, who kindly obliged and played their predicted part in the drama.
And what of other intents of the demonstration leaders, and other consequences? Horowitz again:
“In a year when any national ‘action’ would attract 100,000 protestors, only about 10,000 (and probably closer to 3,000) actually showed up for the Chicago blood-fest. That was because most of us realized there was going to be bloodshed and didn’t see the point. Our ideology argued otherwise as well. The two-party system was a sham; the revolution was in the streets. Why demonstrate at a political convention? In retrospect, Hayden was more cynical and shrewder than we were. By destroying the presidential aspirations of Hubert Humphrey, he dealt a fatal blow to the anti-Communist liberals in the Democratic Party and paved the way for a takeover of its apparatus by the forces of the political left, a trauma from which the party has yet to recover.
One reason the left has obscured these historical facts is that the nostalgists don’t really want to take credit for electing Richard Nixon, which they surely did.”
That’s the end of my excerpts from my own 2006 post. And yes, many of the excesses of the left during the Biden administration helped re-elect Donald Trump. At this point, however, the left is well aware (despite their rhetoric) that this is Trump’s final term as president. They seem to be playing a longer game. Will they succeed? It depends on the American public. The way in which we get information, and the attitudes with which we digest that information, are quite different these days than in 1968. But although I don’t think the left is so stupid as to not understand how bad the current riots look to a lot of people, and that there is indeed a danger of playing into Trump’s hands, I suspect they think there may be some distinct advantages for the left in the long run.
I certainly hope they are very very wrong about that. But I believe that is their calculation.
