Portland is just not on fireplace.
I do know as a result of I’m standing in it. Throat uncooked, eyes burning, not from riot flames, however from federally sanctioned tear fuel. A protester presses a water bottle into my hand and gestures towards the invisible demarcation line forward. A skinny strip divides the general public sidewalk from federal property, peaceable protest from violent arrests.
The president calls this a battle zone. He would have you ever imagine my metropolis is a battlefield smoldering in anarchy and swarming with “terrorists,” “insurrectionists” and “home enemies.” Proof, he says, that America’s enemies reside inside.
But when the subtext for why I’m standing right here weren’t so chilling, the scene may move for satire: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” drifts from a tinny speaker whereas a person in an inflatable frog swimsuit dances earlier than a grey constructing. Town’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, an in any other case unremarkable construction, is now consecrated because the symbolic entrance line of America’s ideological battle.
Thinker Man Debord known as it “The Society of the Spectacle”: efficiency turns into energy, and if a lie is staged vividly sufficient, the viewers begins to reside in it as if it have been true.
President Trump understands this. He’s constructing his actuality the way in which many autocrats have earlier than: by means of theater. Militarized optics, choreographed menace and the aesthetics of a riot. But the “battlefield” he describes is a single metropolis block the place some 30 protesters have gathered most nights for months — a cross-section of conscience — a nurse, the daughter of a veteran killed in battle, a scholar with a hand-crafted signal studying “Abolish ICE,” protesting the separation of households.
Nonetheless, the spectacle calls for troopers perched on rooftops subsequent to an American flag as Division of Homeland Safety helicopters circle with the hum of manufactured hazard. The purpose isn’t to revive order, it’s to carry out it, to show governance right into a live-action morality play the place the president stars as savior and his critics as insurgents.
As a former CNN journalist, I used to write down about tyranny as one thing distant, an affliction that occurs elsewhere, to different nations and different folks. Now I concern it has arrived on my doorstep.
Each regime that turned in opposition to its residents started with a justification of order. Each tyrant begins with a sermon. He doesn’t promise cruelty. He guarantees calm.
In Syria, Bashar Assad spoke of “nationwide safety” as he bombed his personal cities. In Russia, Vladimir Putin rose to energy by means of the poll field, then rewrote the structure to erase dissent. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as soon as hailed as a democrat, gutted the judiciary earlier than unleashing troops on protesters. Opposition is recast as treason. Every act is defended as momentary, every abuse wrapped within the language of necessity, till resistance itself turns into against the law.
Individuals consolation ourselves with the phantasm that our establishments are unbreakable, or at the very least stronger than the tides which have swept others away. However Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary’s checks and balances in lower than a decade, and Hugo Chávez re-scripted Venezuela’s in even much less time.
And now, in America, Trump resurrects the identical strongman script: safety, stability, regulation and order. His rebranded “Division of Conflict” and his vows to make use of U.S. cities as army “coaching grounds” preview a brand new pageantry of energy: Choose a blue metropolis, declare it fallen, flood it with uniforms and broadcast the response.
In Portland, a small group clustered in entrance of a single constructing, but the White Home moved to federalize troops till a choose intervened, noting that the protests have been neither widespread nor violent. In Washington, D.C., a so-called “crime emergency” introduced 800 Nationwide Guard troops into parks and vacationer hubs, remodeling the capital’s monuments into props of govt energy. In Los Angeles, 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines have been dispatched throughout protests over ICE raids — a deployment later struck down as illegal. Now, in Chicago, officers are racing to courtroom to dam the following wave of troops.
When Trump orders a army occupation in a liberal-leaning metropolis, he’s not sustaining order; he’s avenging his wounded delight and measuring obedience. The vocabulary shifts, however the staging stays the identical: The chief presents himself because the final wall in opposition to chaos — a chaos he himself contrives. A Portland protester I spoke with insists his arrest adopted authorities provocation — rubber bullets ricocheting at his toes earlier than he stepped simply over the strip dividing sidewalk from authorities property.
America’s founders feared the second when a president would flip the army’s equipment inward, utilizing troopers to not defend residents however to police them. That’s why later generations wrote the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 to attract a line between the gun overseas and the gavel at residence. It’s the skinny membrane of democracy itself, and this week, that doctrine was invoked to restrain our present sitting president. Authoritarianism doesn’t announce itself with a coup. It creeps in by means of the normalization of absurdities: troops patrolling playgrounds, judges labeled traitors, journalists branded as enemies.
I moved to Portland as a result of it felt like a refuge for what stays of the American democratic experiment: a spot of barefoot activists and of tree-lined streets the place individualism is just not a defect however a civic advantage. Tonight, watching unarmed residents peacefully face down camouflaged males with rifles, I see no battle right here — solely a query. When energy turns its weapons towards the ruled, whom will we defend: those that wield pressure, or those that nonetheless imagine in the correct to face earlier than it?
Amy La Porte is an Emmy-nominated author, producer and former tv reporter who now leads a nonprofit group and teaches journalism and communications concept.
