Trump's Peterloo

 Trump has always been drawn to the idea of deploying the military against protesters. In his first term, some of his own military advisers managed to restrain him from doing so. But now that these people have been forced out of his circle, and he has surrounded himself entirely with sycophants, he is free to put these powers to the test. So, one had a sense he was just waiting for an excuse. 

The Los Angeles protests this weekend appear to have offered him the pretext he was looking for. They were largely nonviolent demonstrations. But, after Trump mobilized the National Guard (without the consent of California officials), the violence has foreseeably escalated. Now, it appears that people on both sides of the riot shields have been injured. The situation could still get worse from here. 

The sequence of events bears an eerie similarity to the Peterloo Massacre in nineteenth century England. Government troops are sent in to quell protests from people demanding social justice. Local militiamen clash with protesters. But the violence is exacerbated by the presence of the national army. After innocent people are killed or injured, the government praises the butchery. 

In his great poetic response to the massacre, "The Mask of Anarchy" (or "Masque," depending on the edition)—which he wrote after news of the attack reached him while he was living abroad in Italy—Percy Bysshe Shelley fiercely condemned the government for its complicity in the violence. His portrayal of contemporary political characters like Castlereagh and Sidmouth is indelible. 

What most repulsed Shelley was the insipid hypocrisy with which figures like Sidmouth waxed poetic about the iniquities of the protesters—without sparing one word for the defenseless people whom the militia had ridden down. One can only feel the same way about this administration. Trump, Noem, and Vance: better called Anarchy, Murder, and Hypocrisy—the characters in Shelley's poem. 

As the protests have unfolded, the Trump administration has condemned the demonstrators for wearing masks—without mentioning that their own federal troops are showing up with their faces obscured to prevent identification. (The "mask" of anarchy indeed!)

They condemn the violence of protesters—but what about the violence of the administration's own orders to abduct innocent people off the streets and illegally render them to secret prisons? (Here are Murder and Hypocrisy, our other key personages—the one bearing a mask like the ICE agents; the other riding on a crocodile while spitting Bible verses, in Shelley's image.)

Individual ICE agents aren't always the worst offenders. The cruelty and outright lawlessness they have inflicted on people in recent months are the result of orders from above. The administration is to blame, far more than them. But that was Shelley's point too. His poem spends far less time condemning the Yeomanry than it does the government that sent them into the fray. 

Anarchy, Murder, and Hypocrisy: thy name is Trump, Noem, and Vance. Castlereagh and Sidmouth redivivus.