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Commentary: The tempting of Neil Gorsuch

It might surprise contemporary Americans that for most of our history, what we call culture war debates arguments about rights, social justice, the moral organization of society were often settled through democratic deliberation, rather than the kind of ruling the Supreme Court just delivered on gay and transgender civil rights. Congress debated and passed laws. State legislatures did the same. Constitutional amendments were proposed, passed, ratified and when necessary, repealed.

This was true even when the debates in question led to the Civil War. In 1864, while Ulysses Grant and William Sherman prepared their offensives, Abraham Lincoln didnt demand that the Supreme Court declare slavery unconstitutional. Instead, he pushed the Senate to amend the Constitution to abolish it.

Subsequent battles over Catholicism and public education, womens suffrage and temperance all had similar legislative goals. The long struggle for civil rights was aided by Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia, but the crucial action was in Congress, where the major civil rights laws ultimately passed. The following decade, feminists naturally sought their own constitutional amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment, and its defeat was seen as a milestone in conservatisms rise.

All of those battles belong to a lost world. Today, constitutional amendments have become unimaginable, Congress barely legislates, and the Supreme Court manages our social and cultural debates. Our affirmative action system was designed by Lewis Powell and amended by Sandra Day OConnor. The boundaries of voting rights and free expression are policed by John Roberts. Our abortion laws reflect the preferences of Anthony Kennedy. And now anti-discrimination law and religious liberty protections will reflect what Neil Gorsuch, author of the new decision, thinks is right and good.

Occasionally, a conservative ruling or Republican appointment threatens to inspire a left-wing revolt against the juristocracy. But the courts have not yet claimed as much power over economic policy as over social policy, and the willingness of Republican appointees to swim leftward on social issues has reassured liberals that judicial power is just a natural extension of meritocracy.

This means its been left to religious conservatives the losers in many of the courts culture-war decisions, going back to the school prayer rulings after World War II to make the consistent case against the judicial usurpation of politics.

In making that case, conservatives have championed constrained schools of legal interpretation, originalism and textualism, against a values-driven jurisprudence. A living constitutionalism naturally usurps democratic powers, the argument goes, in a way that a jurisprudence bound to textual language or original intent does not.

There was power and plausibility in this view, especially as embodied in the brilliance of the late Antonin Scalia. But it always reflected a slightly naive view of how power works and grows.

For one thing, the laws ambiguities provide ample space for even a mind that imagines itself constrained even Scalias mind, in some cases to argue its way into ruling on behalf of its ideological objectives. Meanwhile, politics abhors a power vacuum, and our juristocracy has claimed new powers in part because Congress doesnt want them, a tendency that originalism is powerless to change.

And the public seems to have accepted this abdication. The main question in American social life, blogger Tanner Greer recently observed, is not, How do we make that happen? but, How do we get management to take our side? The Supreme Court, clothed in meritocratic authority, seems more like management than Congress.

All of these tendencies converged in Gorsuchs decision. The goal of his ruling, civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans, is widely shared; the problem is that Congress has no desire to negotiate over the uncertain implications for religious liberty, single-sex institutions, transgender athletes and more. So Gorsuch (with Roberts support) took the burden on himself, discovering the desired protections in the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (an act of sophistry, not interpretation) and then suggesting that all the uncertainties would be worked out in future cases in other words, by Gorsuch, arbiter of sexual and religious liberties alike.

That a textualist philosophy and a Federalist Society pedigree didnt restrain him from this self-aggrandizement suggests the conservative legal movement needs either a new theory of its purpose, a new personnel strategy or both.

But outside the right, the welcome afforded Gorsuchs ruling which reached the popular outcome and relieved our legislators of a responsibility they didnt want is a telling indication of how our system is understood to work. We may officially have three branches of government, but Americans seem to accept that its more like 2.25: A presidency that acts unilaterally whenever possible, a high court that checks the White House and settles culture wars, and a Congress that occasionally bestirs itself to pass a budget.

What sort of Republic this is, and whether we will keep it, is for a higher court than Gorsuchs to decide.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Commentary: The tempting of Neil Gorsuch - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

For the most part, the protesters are from the upwardly mobile classes most strikingly illustrated by the young Ivy League-educated lawyers who threw Molotov cocktails in the New York protests at the end of May.

This global cohort and the global movement they have attached themselves to under that ultimate corporate asset, a global brand, has now turned its rage on statues. Ironically, the statues that they are defacing and tearing down commemorate the Anywheres of their times: these are the men who explored the world, sought to evangelise or to enslave indigenous populations, did global business, and brought the world closer together by connecting continents with one another.

Now the culture wars are back as a battle over whether to preserve the pomp of history or to erase it.

These are the men whose ideas of social justice, for better and for worse, formed the ideas of the populations they reported their adventures to on returning home. Davos Man before there was Davos. And many of them were wrong, cruel, bigoted, misguided or simply imperfect, but they thought they were doing the world a favour, much as do theirdescendants, who are now ripping down their likenesses in the name of modern social justice.

So now the culture wars are back as a battle over whether to preserve the pomp of history or to erase it. In the intervening years, the statues have become the property of the Somewheres, part of the fabric of the culture they identify with and which they seek to retain in the face of the homogenising force of internationalisation.

They are right to resist historical revisionism, which wilfully twists history into unrecognisable narratives suitable to the progressive aesthetic. But we must re-examine history to learn from it. Whatever we are getting wrong now, the clues to understanding it lie in the mistakes we have made before.

Whatever we have built of value, by way of institution or morality, is also distilled by revisiting the past armed with the improved perception of hindsight. Those who would preserve culture kill it when they put a stake in the ground and say: history can go this far but no further. History ends here.

In the same way, the Anywheres are trying to draw a line under the past once the past is cleansed or erased, the old nuances can be forgotten. The shadow of a new wrong in todays revolutions is denied. History can start here.

Both these attitudes are fundamentally nihilistic. For the Somewheres, Gurri points out, utopia is in the past, and for the Anywheres utopia is in the future the present sucks, no matter what.

Which is why fighting the culture wars is so reassuring in unstable times. The present sucks, observably. The culture wars allow us to slip into identities that make sense of the world, in which it is enough to oppose and shift the onus of proposing onto delegates: corporations and our elected officials. Never mind that we have collectively lost faith in their integrity and in the efficacy of the institutions they represent.

It is easier to grumble about corporate cowards and demand politicians abide by the moral codes we are too lazy to uphold; to outsource speech to the media and action to the activists.

And this is why the culture wars are both dangerous and futile: they are the howls of frustration of deeply nihilistic counterparties. Nothing positive emerges from them.

Culture is important, but culture is what we build, the lives we lead, our contribution to society, and the improvement of humanity when it understands itself. Culture isnt a war, its an edifice we each contribute to. The personal, in our fractured digital world, is deeply political.

Go here to read the rest:
Nihilists fighting the past and the future - The Australian Financial Review

Have you ever considered what lies beneath the vitriolic fury within the parents screaming at the school board meetings in favor of banning childrens and YA books? The entitlement and the unquestioning authority these parents believe is theirs is always an ugly public spectacle in unchecked ignorance.

What makes these parents determined to ban booksbooks that they have never read, nor do they intend to readand demand that their narrow and intolerant views must always be publicly acquiesced to when making school policy?

There is no logic or reason motivating these book-banning parents. Their quest for inappropriate books to censor stems from the fears shared by parents everywhere: the fear of losing control over ones children. Not being able to supervise their childrens reading translates to the parents realization that their children may read something the parent never wants their child exposed to. The fear and anxiety of some parents are clear: they never want their child to adopt any alternative lifestyle or stray from the strict societal norms.

Sexual content, especially gay sexual content, is often the reason given for censorship. The YA novel by EmilyDanforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post,was taken off the state of Delawares Summer Reading List a few years ago. One parent had complained that the book was a roadmap to teenage sexuality.

Other given reasons for book censorship include objections to a books content that may be a possible challenge to authority and religious irreverence. Tim OBriens The Things They Carried, a recognized modern classic studied at high schools everywhere across the country, is a book that conveys the horrors and the beauty of the Vietnam War. It is also a book consistently scrutinized for its possible challenge to authority.

Despite the best intentions of the parent book patrol to shield their children from lifes unpleasant situations, they are actually marginalizing their offspring and making them ill-equipped to manage todays realities. There are many, many families experiencing addiction and the brutal blowback of racist policies.

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Category ID: 471

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The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is a frequently challenged book with characters regarded as teen rebels and has been a book often cited for making middle schoolers into lifelong readers. The reasoning behind such longevity for this title are the relatable characters who journey through various aspects of grief, bullying, and class and race issues.

Kate Messner wrote a YA novel, The Seventh Wish,whose protagonist has a sibling with an addiction problem. Messner received enormous hostility from some people regarding her topic, with one school librarian telling her in an email: For now, I just need the 10- and 11-year-olds biggest worry to be about friendships, summer camps, and maybe their first pimple or two.

Messner responded to her critics that her book had a necessary and neglected story to tella story reflective of the realities innumerable families face with addiction. There is a broader obligation that parents, teachers, writers and publishers all share, Messner wrote on her blog. We dont serve only our children, we serve children in the real world.

Childrens Book Scholar Leonard S. Marcus has spoken at length regarding censorship and childrens and YA books. Marcus has concluded that the calls for censorship are frequently attempts to quell the tide of social change and can be traced to ideologies on the right.

However, the personal discomfort and fears that drive some parents to challenge books equates to the erasure of entire groups of people and their stories. Book banning has become a force among publishers and librarians; too often, publishers and writers self-censor themselves since their topic may motivate an outcry among the censoring parent patrol. Book banning has, unfortunately, become a featured sport of the culture wars: 52 percent of the books challenged within the last decade have featured so-called diverse content.

(The term diverse content entails book content that explore issues such as race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and disability.)

For anyone who respects the First Amendment and the free exchange of ideas, book banning is an exercise in repression and ignorance. Removing controversial content does nothing but have the young reader want to read the book that has been banned from them. Too often, these banned book titles are the exact books young people need to read: banned books are effective in helping children develop their own values and moral convictions.

Read more from the original source:
Parental Fear and Cultural Erasure: The Logic Behind Banning Books - Book Riot

Many pundits and politicians seem to blame UK prime minister Boris Johnson for provoking the latest installment of the culture wars that now dominate Anglo-American public life. Sections of the media, from the New York Times to the Guardian, have claimed that Johnson wants to argue over statues to distract from his poor handling of the Covid pandemic. Others, such as Labours David Lammy, reckon Johnsons defence of the statue of Winston Churchill, against those who would deface or dismantle it, was a deliberate attempt to stoke the culture wars, and deflect attention from the Tories lack of progress on racial injustice.

These are massively disingenuous claims. After all, is it really surprising that a British prime minister would defend a memorial devoted to arguably the nations greatest modern figure? Moreover, Johnson was not initiating anything. He was responding to a movement that has been directing its energy towards the destruction of the symbols of Britains national history and culture. It takes tremendous bad faith to characterise Johnsons defensive response to an attack on British culture as an attempt to launch a culture war.

But those on Johnsons side, defending the Churchill statue, indulge in the same finger-pointing. They claim that it is their opponents, from Black Lives Matter to the identitarian left, who started the culture wars.

What is striking is that neither side seems to have anything positive to say about the culture wars. Their characterisation as poisonous, by veteran conservative commentator Charles Moore, is a sentiment shared by virtually all sides of the political argument. They disagree merely on the questions of who is to blame for them, and what they mean.

The origins of the culture war

One reason why so many observers are confused by the dynamics of the culture war is because it rarely assumes an explicit conflict-like character. It is often a silent conflict over what seem to be disparate issues gay marriage, national identity, euthanasia rather than a war between two clearly defined sides. In this sense, the modern culture war is very different to the German Kulturkampf of the 19th century, when there was an overt cultural struggle between Chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic Church.

Back then, in the late 19th century, it was evident to all observers that cultural conflict in Germany was a very real phenomenon. Matters are different today. Until recently, most commentators would insist that talk of the polarisation of culture is exaggerated; some went so far as to deny the very existence of a culture war. Those who denounced the cultural politics of Sixties radicals were often simply dismissed as backward-looking traditionalists social conservatives trying to justify their prejudices by attacking new ways of thinking and speaking.

But the culture war is real. Historically, it was set in motion in Western societies by a powerful impulse to detach the present from the past, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century. This project of liberating the present from the cultural values of the past was most clearly formulated by the Progressive movement in the US, and by the New Liberals in Britain. But it was the experience of the First World War that gave this sentiment real momentum. For the war fundamentally undermined the cultural continuity of the West.

Disconnected from the past, post-war Western societies found it difficult to develop a compelling narrative through which to transmit their cultural legacy to young people. One outcome of this development was the phenomenon known today as the generation gap. It emerged in the aftermath of the First World War precisely because it was not simply a generational gap, but also a cultural one a gap, that is, between the pre- and post-war eras. In the decades that followed, these generational tensions would come to be experienced as the problem of identity.

Some contemporary observers were indeed aware of the cultural war against the past then being waged. Writing in the 1930s, Churchill himself observed:

I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was impossible has happened.

However, many commentators at the time, and in the decades to come, were blind to this cultural conflict. They focused on the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism, and the rise of fascism, rather than the loss of cultural authority of Western values.

One reason why Western ruling elites failed to address the loss of their moral authority was because of the difficulty they had in acknowledging that their own way of life was being unravelled by powerful corrosive influences internal to it. During the 1940s and 50s, even conservative commentators failed to appreciate the scale of the problem confronting their tradition. This became clear during what was the first significant, explicit conflict in the culture war: Senator Joseph McCarthys battle with communism and its supposed threat to American values.

The rise of McCarthyism in the US is often seen as an attempt to deploy anti-communist hysteria to silence political dissent. Yet it was also an attempt to roll back the cultural influences threatening traditional norms and values. McCarthyism in the 1950s, observed the political sociologist Daniel Bell, represented an effort by some traditionalist forces to impose a uniform political morality on the society through conformity to one ideology of Americanism and a virulent form of anti-communism. (1)

At the time, McCarthyism was influential and it did intimidate many liberal and left-wing individuals. But it failed to establish cultural hegemony. In particular, McCarthy never made serious headway among intellectuals or gained any cultural credibility. McCarthyisms failure to gain and retain moral authority is demonstrated by its almost entirely negative legacy. As one critic recalled in 1997, McCarthy soon became a symbol of the moral exhaustion of the right so much so, in fact, that he is generally held in cultural contempt (2).

McCarthys anti-communist crusade can be seen as one of the earliest attempts (and failures) after the Second World War to revitalise traditional values in the face of their rapid demise. One of the most astute analyses of the McCarthy episode was provided by the conservative commentator, Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick understood that McCarthyism was not so much about communism as it was a struggle for jurisdiction over the symbolic environment (3). What was at issue was who would serve as the arbiter of culture and whose narrative would prevail.

Senator Joseph McCarthy stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States, 9 June 1954.

The failure of McCarthy to hold the line and the rapid decline of his reputation had important implications. These things indicated that, although a potent political resource, anti-communist ideology on its own could not contain the corrosive outcomes of the moral depletion of Western culture. Kirkpatrick asserted that McCarthys demise and the victory of his critics was a precondition of the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s (4). Whereas during the McCarthy era, the term loyalty was rarely openly contested, by the 1960s it had lost some of its cultural value. Anti-war demonstrators, draft-dodgers and ordinary members of the public rejected loyalty as an unwelcome imposition on their ability to be themselves. As Kirkpatrick recalled, the peace marchers were far more aggressive in their defiance of traditional taboos than the timid victims of Joe McCarthy. This, Kirkpatrick concluded, reflected the distance that the cultural revolution had proceeded (5).

The moral depletion of the West

The casual manner with which traditional taboos were derided in the 1960s showed that those who upheld traditional values could no longer assume that they occupied the moral high-ground. In this, the cultural assault on the values of capitalist consumer society played a significant role. However, this assault should be seen as a catalyst for, rather than a cause of, the unravelling of the Cold War consensus on Western values. The inner corrosion of the ethos of capitalism had been at work for many decades, and the lack of self-belief among the ruling elites contributed to its diminishing influence.

Since the interwar era, capitalism as a social system has found it increasingly difficult to justify itself against its critics. Matters were made worse by the reluctance of conservative and liberal thinkers to confront this problem directly.

The absence of an intellectually compelling, normative foundation for capitalism meant that even at the height of the postwar boom, capitalism was exposed to a cultural critique of its values. Consequently, even in these very favourable circumstances, capitalism acquired only a limited influence over intellectual and cultural life. This estrangement of capitalism from its own culture emerged with full force in the late 1960s, when many of its values were explicitly challenged in what would turn out to be an interminable culture war.

Writing in 1973, Irving Kristol, a leading conservative commentator, drew attention to the moral depletion of Western culture:

For well over 150 years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever-more questionable. (6)

The depletion of moral capital became evident with the emergence of the counterculture, or what its opponents called adversarial culture.

Samuel Brittan, a British economist and journalist, offered a sobering analysis on the difficulty that capitalism faced in offering a compelling and authoritative account of its values. He wrote:

For a long time capitalist civilisation was able to live on this feudal legacy, and the aura of legitimacy was transferred from the feudal lord to the employer, from the mediaeval hierarchy of position to that derived from the luck of the marketplace. But this feudal legacy was bound to be extinguished by the torchlight of secular and rationalistic inquiry, which was itself so closely associated with the rise of capitalism. (7)

Brittan believed that modern politicians and middle-class leaders lacked the glamour and the heroic qualities of the leaders of the past. And therefore their authority over the masses was limited. At most they are tolerated on the strict condition that they bring results, he wrote. Brittan asserted that the personal qualities of middle-class leaders did not help to kindle that affection for the social order which is probably necessary if it is not to be blamed for the inevitable tribulations and disappointments of most peoples lives (8).

By the 1970s, it became clear that supporters of adversarial culture had gained the upper hand. As a memo from Daniel Moynihan to Nixon in 1970 stated:

No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near to silencing the representatives of traditional America.

Since the 1970s, the representatives of traditional America have been constantly on the defensive. Instead of initiating debates and attempting to set the agenda, they have been continually forced to react to the latest blow directed at their way of life. This cycle of defensive responsiveness can be seen on many issues, from gay marriage or trans rights to claims about white privilege.

The paralysis of traditionalists

The pessimistic diagnosis offered by Moynihan and Brittan was widespread among conservative thinkers. Periodic attempts to promote back to basics campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s proved to be singularly ineffective. At this point in time, the mainstream conservative and right-wing parties attempted to evade the consequences of their cultural isolation by emphasising their ability to achieve economic success. The high point of this strategy arrived during the Thatcher-Reagan years, when their brand of economic liberalism gained hegemony over public life. However, what the supporters of Thatcher and Reagan failed to notice, or acknowledge, was that despite the electoral success of their parties, their opponents were winning the culture war. Paradoxically, it was during the Thatcher and Reagan years that what came to be known as political correctness gained ascendancy and identity politics became institutionalised, first on campuses and later in the public and private sectors.

Today, when the reality of a culture war is widely recognised, it is worth noting that until recently almost all sides of the political divide were reluctant to draw attention to it. That is why supporters of political correctness went out of their way to deny there was such a thing as PC. Similarly, until recently, advocates of identity politics insisted that identity politics was a dishonest invention of their opponents.

Patrick Buchanan delivers his 'culture-war speech' at the Republican Party conference, August, 1992 (YouTube).

The culture war was not a suitable topic for discussion in polite elite circles. When Patrick Buchanan made his famous culture-war speech at the 1992 Republican Party conference, he faced a tirade of hostile criticism for what was described as his extreme rhetoric. Buchanans call to arms went against the grain of the prevailing narrative. Buchanan insisted that differences over values were far more significant than who gets what arguments over economic resources:

It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself

His denunciation of what he perceived as a threat to the American way of life showed that this was now being conceived of as a war, rather than as party-political rivalry within a shared moral universe. Buchanan later expanded on this point by contrasting the conflict faced by 1990s America with that of the interwar depression. Citing Roosevelt, who said that our common difficulties concern thank God, only material things, Buchanan noted that, in contrast, our national quarrel goes much deeper.

What was noteworthy about this speech was not simply its content but that Buchanan articulated it in public, at a major party conference and in front of television cameras. Hitherto, the conflict that Buchanan drew attention to had essentially been a silent one.

One reason why Buchanans speech caused such a stir was because, by 1992, the old traditional elites had more or less been entirely sidelined by their adversaries. The countercultural movement had been institutionalised, and its representatives dominated institutions of culture, higher education and the public sector. And, since then, businesses and the private sector have also come under its sway.

Having gained hegemony, members of this countercultural establishment are now less and less afraid to impose their own values on the rest of society. From their standpoint, Boris Johnson is an elite outlier, and his defence of Churchill offers them a reminder that there are still obstacles to the realisation of the project of detaching society from the legacy of its past. They now constitute the cultural establishment, and people who wish to defend the statues of Churchill or Abraham Lincoln are their countercultural adversaries.

At present, the culture war is a one-sided conflict that is directed at a defensive traditionalist target. Why this is so, and what are the issues at stake, will be discussed in part two of this essay, next Friday.

Frank Furedis How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century is published by Bloomsbury Press.

All pictures, unless otherwise stated, by: Getty.

(1) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell, Heinemann, 1976, p77

(2) Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, by A Kramer, Oxford University Press, 2007

(3) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p42

(4) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p43

(5) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p44

(6) Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism, by Irving Kristol, Public Interest, issue 31, 1973, p12

(7) The Economic Contradictions of Democracy, by S Brittan, British Journal of Political Science, Vol 5, No 2, 1975, p149

(8) The Economic Contradictions of Democracy, by S Brittan, British Journal of Political Science, Vol 5, No 2, 1975, p149

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The birth of the culture wars - Spiked

With no police officers, CHAZ was established. Over the weekend, Black Lives Matter activists renamed the area Capitol Hill Organized Protest, arguing that the area was not actually aspiring to autonomy or secession. But by then, the demands of the CHAZ had ballooned far beyond addressing systemic racism in policing: In an open letter published on June 10, the activists listed several reforms they hoped the city would undertake, including degentrification initiatives, free college programs and investment in community mental health services.

Conservative reaction to Seattles autonomous zone has a particularly Trump-era undertone to it, Ross said.

Rather than letting local and state officials deal with the protesters, Trump doubled down on vilifying a group that had nothing to do with the organization of the protests not just dog whistling, but calling out his protesters or Second Amendment people to basically get out into the streets and get into the vigilante mode.

The broad support for the racial justice protests indicates the issue will not recede anytime soon, putting pressure on lawmakers of both parties to enact police reform. But while Trump has made some concessions to the movements demands, signing an executive order on Tuesday offering incentives for police departments to adopt some reforms, activists say his offerings have fallen woefully short of what is needed.

Trump has also found political utility in ranting about certain proposals from Black Lives Matter activists, including defunding or abolishing the police, and constantly reiterating his ever-present claim that antifa terrorists are floating among the protesters. And though CHAZ itself has not been a base camp for a leftist insurrection, its existence is based on rejecting existing governing and policing structures. Trump has reacted to that with calls for LAW & ORDER.

They've already walked away from the founding consensus, McCabe said. They're already at the point where they can have an autonomous Seattle zone.

The MAGA sphere has also latched onto the fact that visibly armed members of progressive gun groups are patrolling CHAZ, confirming their belief that the zone is, purposefully or not, incepting an anti-government plot. Far-right groups, Ross said, have used the presence of armed individuals as a pretext to travel to the area under the auspices of protecting civil society, not to protest against CHAZ.

The whole working purpose of the militia in the far right, is they kind of form this sort of porous membrane through which people travel in and out of the extreme right based on whether or not they're open racists, he noted. If you're going somewhere to stop the looting and to protect protesters from antifa outsiders, then you've got a narrative. You've got something clear that you can explain to people that doesn't make you sound like you're just there because you hate anti-racists.

Ultimately, CHAZ may amount to a weekslong encampment in the middle of Seattle, maintained by rather enthusiastic activists, that eventually fades.

To the extent they've avoided violence, that's admirable. But even just trying to take it over is silly, said Scott Walter, president of the conservative-libertarian think tank Capital Research Center, pointing out that the zone still relied on city services such as trash pickup.

Read more:
How 6 blocks in Seattle became a microcosm of the culture wars - POLITICO