Well the world changed again. After being cooped up for what seemed to be an eternity, we all exploded in rage, anger and well justified fury after George Floyd's murder by Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. The entire world watched that excruciating 8 minute 46 seconds video in which Chauvin kills George Floyd (while keeping one hand in his pocket for most of the time). There is nothing ambiguous or post-modern about the video: it's a clear and present reminder of what Black people face on a daily basis in the streets of America (for example I have a friend who gets pulled over every time he enters SC with FL license plates since apparently a Black person driving a car with FL license plates into SC signifies that he is a drug dealer). Please watch Dave Chappelle's special - 8:46 - on Netflix for what this all means.
What's especially significant about the aftermath of George Floyd's murder is the level of social responsibility shown by Black Lives Matter (BLM) in making sure that the protests didn't get out of hand. There are numerous stories of Black community organizers stopping street violence and opportunistic store looting. Equally strange is the often disproportionate response by the police - using tear gas and unnecessary violence against peaceful protesters. Watching all this, it has become clear that something has shifted in America. BLM is now spearheading the rainbow coalition and any attempts at false equivalence between BLM and the alt-right movement are now laughable. And finally, the non-response of Trump to the covid-19 pandemic coupled with his total inadequacy in understanding and communicating what this moment means to race relations (and much much more) in the US strongly suggests that he is toast. Things could change of course but it really feels like he had his chance and blew it. Of course, one could argue that Trump's fundamental character flaws would never have allowed him to adapt to these changed circumstances and his niece Mary Trump's book does make that claim based on first hand knowledge.
One framework that can be used to perfectly encapsulate what just happened is Spiral Dynamics (SD). Very simplistically, SD draws a three way distinction between blue (traditional/order), orange (modern/prosperous) and green (postmodern/communitarian). There are higher stages like yellow (integrated/inter-dependent) and turquoise (holistic/harmonic) but we don't need them for the purposes of this discussion. For the past 40 years, the US has had a culture war wherein traditional law and order (blue) and modernist business and free enterprise (orange) formed a nexus which ended up marginalizing non-whites, feminists, communitarians and LGBTQ+ people (green). (This is a strong claim but I think it holds up since suburban America is in the main still segregated.) While green values flourished in cities and urban centers, rural America remained staunchly blue/orange. This has resulted in the Republican party regressing to a mainly white and rural party and finally succumbing to a reality TV show grifter who exemplifies the worst of orange (no consequence individualism). Assuming Trump goes down in defeat this year (which is still not a given), we may see something that has never happened before: the rise of a green consensus at the policy level in the US driven by millennials and Gen-Z youth who would have taken the radicalism of the boomers and mainstreamed it. If this happens, we'll witness the emergence of a socially responsible rainbow coalition which handles climate change and healthcare for all going forward. The only fly in the ointment remains the poor white working class which may end up getting marooned on a traditionalist blue/orange island, but provided these folks are capable of dropping their worst instincts (racism, sexism, homo-transphobia and hatred of education), they too will have a seat at the table in the new egalitarian times to come.
Update (2020/07/20): A very interesting development in the past few days is the presence of camouflaged federal agents on the streets of Portland, OR who are "pulling up next to protesters on street corners, then snatching and arresting them with no explanation." Acting DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) Secretary Chad Wolf has put out a statement condemning "violent anarchists" in Portland who have allegedly held the city "under siege for 47 straight days." This has the look of a trial run which will then be executed in major cities across the US in the next couple of months. Since the vast majority of protests are peaceful, it looks like DHS (under the behest of Trump) will try to gaslight Americans into believing that local law and order has failed and that "federal police" of some unspecified kind is needed to take over the policing of cities. This maneuver is unlikely to work and is in fact more likely to convince a majority of Americans that the Trump administration has completely jumped the shark. These are amazing times.
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