Yesterday evening some ten people or so were arrested and half a dozen were injured in downtown Portland when two groups of people whom I equally disapprove of had protests and counterprotests that predictably turned ugly.  The conflict was a false dilemma between some white nationalist groups and the ironically named Antifa, where left-wing and right-wing fascists seek to make it appear as if everyone is either a leftist extremist or a rightist one, both committed to the use of violence and the threat of violence to further a particular political agenda that I personally want no part of.  This is not an isolated occurrence.  In situations where there is a great deal of violence between opposed sets of extremists it can be difficult to remember that the rhetoric of such violence commits crimes both against property as well as against logic in the fallacy of the excluded middle, or the problem of the false dilemma.  And it is the crimes of such protests against both property and logic that I find deeply offensive.

Yet it is not only in Portland where faith is being put in mobs in a way that is misguided and even destructive to the well-being of societies.  The riots in Hong Kong where protesters are concerned about Chinese tyranny are flying American flags is a case in point.  Now, it should not have been a surprise that China would be tyrannical in Hong Kong.  China is tyrannical in any of the areas it rules where there are different cultures present–their attempts to wipe out Uighur Muslim culture and their behavior in Tibet ought to have made that clear to everyone.  Likewise, we know how brutal China is in putting down riots and other acts of political disorder; some of my classmates went to National History Day competition with research on Tiananmen Square that demonstrated this pretty clearly more than two decades ago.  China isn’t a democratic country where it is necessary to pay lip service to the right of people to assemble together to protest what is going on.

Even apart from such prudential concerns, though, about the lack of efficacy of public protests in curbing the behavior of tyrannical states, there are often problems when it comes to supporting the behavior of urban mobs as a way of influencing politics.  Even the best case scenarios of such matters are not very good–for example, the action of the Sons of Liberty in Boston provoking Parliamentary overreach that led to greater unity on the part of restive colonies and that provoked the American Revolution.  And yes, America got its freedom, but at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths.  Even the best case scenario for Hong Kong gaining its liberty are going to require a lot more suffering than anyone seems to acknowledge.  Standing with Hong Kong, really standing with them, means committing to the destruction of China as we know it, given their insecurities.  Are people really committed to the fall of China’s government in order to give freedom to its oppressed peoples?  Is such a thing even possible without massive death and destruction?

Why do people put faith in mobs?  What is the purpose of the urban mob revival that we see in contemporary politics?  Do we think that such mobs intimidate those who are politically opposed to us or is it more likely to lead to efforts to band together and fight against existing mob groups?  Do we think that the destruction of property and the abandonment of efforts at honest communication are going to be an improvement over other means of dealing with political crises?  Again, even in the best case scenario the adoption of the urban mob as a means of influencing politics tends to have adverse consequences, and in the worst case scenarios such mobs provoke repressive behavior that only leads to increased cycles of violence.  And is that what we really want from our political speech?