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Presidential elections following ’68 riots
Nixon
Carter
Reagan
Reagan
Bush
American realpolitik is brutal and the reality of the protests (and the related anarchic chaos from co-morbid white nationalists) is that unless protestors make a dent in the political machine(s) themselves, the protests are likely to be unfortunately counterproductive in the long run. In the other words, they need to be the beginning of something — not the endpoint. We tend to be satisfied by the spectacle: by the event as it appears on social media — by the optics of change rather than by change at the level on which we all live.
The problem with rationalist faith in universalized first order solutions (lockdowns) is that you become completely blind and vulnerable to indirect second and third order outcomes (like riots).
If you ask police (and the military) to start performing certain kinds of intrusive roles in peoples’ lives while mandating that citizens severely curtail their convivial routines, you change the delicate, and already tenuous balance between cop and pedestrian. We should not be surprised, that, in the wake of lockdowns, that tenuous balance was badly upset.
