The twilight of America's flower wars

We’re beginning the fourth night of riots in LA.

In response to ICE raids against a clothing manufacturer, angry citizens spontaneously gathered in the thousands with glossy signs, radios, personal protective equipment, pallets of water bottles, etc.

Tonight, tens of thousands of dollars worth of bionic face masks are being distributed to counter police tear gas. The mayor of Los Angeles is boasting a “rapid response network” to disrupt ICE activity anywhere in the city.

The rioters have ambushed police under overpasses, pelting them with rocks and tear gas from elevated positions. When they meet overwhelming force, they perform disciplined tactical retreats, keeping law enforcement engaged continually with fireworks and brickbats while they redeploy.

They’re building light barricades between flash-mob targets to delay police response and reroute civilian vehicles, keeping the barricades covered by “fire” so that they require more police resources to remove.

In other words, the protestors are fighting, moving, and communicating like what they are: a professional and well-supplied irregular military.

They’re deploying organized lethal force in pursuit of political objectives (a 35-lb cinder block thrown from 15 feet is more than enough to catch an attempted murder charge).

Enormous sums of money have gone into this deployment, largely from taxpayer-funded NGOs and labor unions like SEIU.

The objective of all this is to deploy a level of violence and disruption that can’t be suppressed without a military response, while maintaining the media optics of a civilian/police encounter.

Trump is meant to face a choice: either back down, or order people in scary black uniforms to shoot scary black guns at “innocent” “protestors” in civilian clothes.

The “color revolutionary” is the apex predator in an exotic ecological niche — hyper-adaptive to a rarified set of conditions to the point of being unbeatable within them.

But I’m going to argue that those ecological conditions are delicate and ephemeral, and the color revolution playbook is due for a defeat, either by Trump or his successor.

Color revolutions depend on control of mass media.

Rioters disrupt economic activity, destroy property, and engage in ritualized combat with police so that their allies in the mass media can manufacture consent for their policy objectives.

The ritualized combat tells a story in which The People wrestle The State to the ground and extract their demands: an ant-farm simulacrum of revolution that reaffirms and reifies the founding story of democracy — it tells the people at home that The People are in charge.

In a certain sense, this is actually true. Riot police in major American metros can actually contain a rioting crowd indefinitely, or disperse them at will. Rocks and bottles cannot actually overpower a riot-police phalanx supported by armored vehicles.

All these sophisticated street tactics only matter if the rioters and police are, ultimately, reporting to the same leadership at the top.

So the success of a riot is an honest display that The People are still in control — if you take “The People” to mean the same thing as “Our Democracy”.

The blocking of roads, looting, and arson tell the same story, but in a more direct and menacing way. Ordinary people need to understand in an intimate and personal sense that The People are in charge: if The People decide that their political objectives supersede your getting to work, the security of your property, or even your physical safety, the police can’t protect you.

(January 6 failed because it was a cargo cult. The J6ers sincerely believed in the ritual narrative of riot — that a leaderless mob of protestors could actually overpower the State in a way that matters.)

Like the Aztec Flower Wars or the Spartans’ annual Krypteia massacre of the helots, an American riot is the opposite of a revolution.

An American riot is a demonstration of the stability and integrity of the mass democratic state, flexing the costly coordination of all its critical systems: NGOs, media, police, politicians.

But the integrity and harmony of these systems is an artifact of the broadcast era, in which mass media technology afforded the American state an uncontested monopoly in narrative generation, just as carrier strike groups afforded an uncontested monopoly on force projection.

Social media and ubiquitous amateur video has fragmented the media environment and abolished the returns to scale that create monopoly. It is no longer possible to maintain the unified public perception that professional violent activist cadres are ordinary civilians, that their actions are noncoercive and victimless, or that they act on behalf of ordinary people.

In fact, in this new media environment, the professionalism and organization of the rioters is a liability, because the whole operation depends heavily on the illusion that the protests are a spontaneous groundswell of popular outrage.

When rioters demonstrate state-level intelligence and logistics capabilities as they burn down American cities, it’s much harder to argue that they shouldn’t be confronted as hostile state actors — “enemies of the people”.

The fragmentation of the mass media monopoly has also yielded a President who is locked in existential war with Our Democracy, and unwilling to participate in the kabuki show.

Just as drones have democratized force projection, driving a return to trench warfare and heavy artillery in Ukraine, the democratization of mass media is replacing a monopoly narrative with a multipolar environment of hardened narrative fortifications.

The NGO-rioter-media axis is still functional within captured deep-blue jurisdictions (the rioters and the LAPD have the same paymasters and operate within the same narrative/consent structure), but federal authorities obedient to the President operate within a very different narrative environment. As Scott Adams says, “we are watching different movies”.

Narrative fragmentation also means that the falcon cannot hear the falconer: rioters are no longer in contact with any institutions capable of enforcing narrative discipline (“optics”), so their presentation is ostentatiously tribal, foreign, and criminal. They have so far avoided presenting themselves as military, but they’ve done everything else possible to mark themselves as enemy.

As the Chinese demonstrated during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, it is perfectly feasible to protect civilian property, absorb protestor violence to the point of exhaustion, identify criminals, and then conduct quiet arrests after they’ve returned to their homes.

Federal authorities taking this task seriously would expose the “dramatic scenes” of protest violence (as far back as the 1950s) as fundamentally contrived, ritual, and theatrical. It would expose the truth, that these riots have always been a policy decision: an act of bloodletting by the state against innocent citizens, for no other reason than to demonstrate the state’s capacity.

That’s why Trump needs to suppress these riots — and why the administrative state can’t afford to let him.

However this game plays out, narrative fragmentation is going to give way to political fragmentation.

The global empire depends on technological returns to scale in military and propaganda technology that have been eliminated. Smaller actors are now competitive, both in the application of violence, and the generation of narratives that justify the violence.

In the 20th century, big, complex systems that depend on cooperative equilibria were defined by their strengths: their network effects, their insurmountable technological and industrial advantages. In this century, those systems will be defined by their vulnerabilities: their slow reaction times, their broadness and blandness, their sprawling attack surface.

We need to build for what comes after.

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