Another Democratic Convention in Chicago – with Protesters

And the problem of respectable callousness

Delila Paz did this cover of Malvina Reynold’s “It Isn’t Nice” a few years ago¹:

Here's Malvina’s own version²:

Remembering the police riot at the 1968 convention³, and countless numbers of police abuses in the decades since – as long as we’re doing 1960s nostalgia it’s worth remembering the Ohio National Guard summarily executing four young people at Kent State in 1970⁴ – it is a reminder of how badly Joe Biden handled the issue of responsible policing.

Not that “responsible policing” was his term for it. His term was, “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police is to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them …”⁵

After the Black Lives Matter movement, which constituted the largest African-American protest movement since the 1960s civil right movement, the Democrats and the incoming Biden Administration in 2021 had an excellent opportunity to pursue a sensible and constructive approach to police reform, whether they framed it as Responsible Policing or something else.

Minnesota Attorney General (and former Congressman) Keith Ellison has been providing constructive examples of how center-left Democrats actually can pursue such a policy successfully.⁶

But Biden, who in some matters like ignoring abusive policing was locked into decades-old positions, made no such attempt. His dogmatic position of fully arming Israel no matter what crimes their military is committing, with its catastrophic consequences that have been shocking the world since last October, is an even uglier example of that. And his obvious health challenges now certainly raise the question of how clearly he was thinking through some of these positions.

The German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer has researched rightwing extremism for decades. He has made the concept of “rohe Bürgerlichkeit” or “gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit“ (group-focused enmity) well known among journalists and researchers on far-right movements and authoritarian political tendencies. Wikipedia translates “rohe Bürgerlichkeit” rather clumsily as “raw middle class.”⁷ But the German term doesn’t have an obvious brief translation. It’s more like “callousness among the affluent toward those they consider inferior.” “Respectable callousness” is closer to its meaning than “raw middle class.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently provided a good example of an American version of rohe Bürgerlichkeit. Newsom has a reputation as a liberal, even a “San Francisco Democrat” in the Republicans’ favorite insult phrase. But his record as Lieutenant Governor and Governor gives a lot of reasons to think that he’s basically a Republican. It’s just that in California it’s hard to be elected Governor as a Republicans and there is a strong Democratic majority in the legislature. Joshua Hill recently wrote:

I just saw another video of Gavin Newsom personally stealing the possessions of homeless people and throwing them out. In addition to a reflexive horror at seeing a Democratic Governor personally hurt and dehumanize people who are already suffering so much, there’s the fact that getting rid of people’s belongings so often makes it much, much harder for people to get help. Without ID, without a wallet, without a cellphone accessing both government services and the day-to-day necessities of life becomes much, much harder. Getting a job becomes much harder, getting housing, getting further paperwork – life itself becomes massively more difficult. And these are people already bearing the full brunt of a society that makes life increasingly unlivable for anyone in poverty, anyone poor, anyone within striking distance of financial struggles.⁸ [my emphasis]

That’s rohe Bürgerlichkeit.

This is not an exotic phenomenon and not a new one. The entire post-Reconstruction segregation/Jim Crow system in the American South was just that.

And as one kind of it becomes more common, other types become more palatable to more people. We see that in the EU during the last decade in the demonization of refugees, a decline in respect for the rule of law in how refugees and immigrants are treated weakens the rule of law in other areas as well: toleration of elite corruption; validation of far-right political violence; reduction and even nullification of judicial independence; nationalistic discrimination against other EU nations;  suppression of dissent on issues of war and peace; more tolerance for neoliberal economic policies that drastically benefit oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.

So seeing active democratic protests against US support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Israel’s brutal war against Gazans will be a welcome sight!

Let’s just hope that by next week it will not have expanded to a full-on war with Iran and Lebanon and who knows who else in the neighborhood.

1. "The Last Internationale -- It Isn't Nice" -- BJ & Migs 09/17/14. BJandMIGS YouTube channel 09/17/2014. (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

2. It Isn't Nice. Malvina Reynolds-Topic YouTube channel 05/18/2024. (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

3. Ratner, Terry (2024): I saw violence at the 1968 Democratic convention. Why, in 2024, I'm headed back again. AZ Central 08/15/2024. <https://eu.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2024/08/15/democratic-convention-chicago-protest-war-division/74799035007/> (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

4. Stone, I.F. (1970): Fabricated Evidence in the Kent State Killings. New York Review of Books 12/03/1970.

Hayden, Tom (2013): Closure at Kent State? The Nation 05/15/2013. <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/closure-kent-state/> (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

5. WATCH: ‘Fund the police,’ Biden says at State of the Union. PBS News 05/01/2022. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-fund-the-police-biden-says-at-state-of-the-union> (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

6. How policing, police reform became defining issues in Keith Ellison’s reelection campaign. MinnPost 10/28/2022. <https://www.minnpost.com/elections/2022/10/how-policing-police-reform-became-defining-issues-in-keith-ellisons-reelection-campaign/> (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

7. Wilhelm Heitmeyer. Wikipedia 01/12/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wilhelm_Heitmeyer&oldid=1133082373> (Accessed: 2024-16-08).

8. Hill, Joshua P. (2024): The Homeless are not Alone. New Means 08/15/2024. (Accessed: 2024-16-08).