Frank Rich: America’s Eternal Battle With Itself

A protester takes a knee in front of San Jose Police officers on May 29. Photo: Dai Sugano/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, national unrest since the death of George Floyd.

The waves of pestilence that have swept over America leave one anxiously searching for historical analogies.

It was late in 1967, as the Kerner commission was reaching this conclusion, that the police chief of Miami, Walter Headley, responded to his city’s unrest by declaring “war” on criminals, vowing to go after them with shotguns and dogs, killing them if need be: “I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said.

No one should be surprised that the latest public lynching of a black American by the police – and almost literally a lynching, with a cop’s knee substituting for the rope – led to this conflagration. We’ve been there too many times before. Feckless liberals who did little or nothing as police abuses piled up on their watch, whether Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota or Bill de Blasio in New York, have zero excuse.

“The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history,” White writes, a “reign of terror” targeting black voters. In Florida, for instance, bands of white men armed with guns kept blacks from voting. It was “the last presidential contest to center on white supremacy,” wrote the historian Eric Foner in his definitive account of the period, Reconstruction. The Democrats’ incendiary campaign raised “the specter of a second Civil War.

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