Portland just isn’t 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 gasoline. 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 stay inside.
But when the subtext for why I’m standing right here weren’t so chilling, the scene may cross 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 referred to as it “The Society of the Spectacle”: efficiency turns into energy, and if a lie is staged vividly sufficient, the viewers begins to stay in it as if it have been true.
President Trump understands this. He’s constructing his actuality the best way many autocrats have earlier than: by theater. Militarized optics, choreographed menace and the aesthetics of a rebel. 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 pupil with a home made 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 put in writing about tyranny as one thing distant, an affliction that occurs elsewhere, to different nations and different individuals. Now I worry it has arrived on my doorstep.
Each regime that turned towards 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 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 non permanent, 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 no less than 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, legislation and order. His rebranded “Division of Struggle” and his vows to make use of U.S. cities as navy “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 government 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 court docket to dam the subsequent wave of troops.
When Trump orders a navy occupation in a liberal-leaning metropolis, he’s not sustaining order; he’s avenging his wounded pleasure and measuring obedience. The vocabulary shifts, however the staging stays the identical: The chief presents himself because the final wall towards 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 navy’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 house. 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 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 just isn’t 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 shield: those that wield pressure, or those that nonetheless imagine in the best 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.
