The first is the militarization of American police forces and the rise of what Radley Balko has called the “warrior cop,” especially after Sept. 11 — a period in which, it is important to remember, the United States has gotten vastly safer, but during which law enforcement has nevertheless gotten far more martial, in their weaponry and gear, their tactics and training, and indeed their outward-facing “thin blue line” rhetoric, as well.
The second is the recent turn against all forms of protest, by law enforcement and the public, in the aftermath of the mass climate change marches of 2019 and the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Over the last five years, significant legal restrictions on protest have been turned into law globally. Nearly half of American states have also imposed limits; several states have even passed bills granting immunity to drivers who run over protesters, and New York Democrats have proposed a law that would define road-blocking protests as “domestic terrorism.”
But we also hear more and more from critics who believe that any protest that simply inconveniences others has crossed a line to become counterproductive or offensive. Last week, President Biden scolded college students for pitching tents on their quads, warning that “dissent must never lead to disorder” and asserting that “order must prevail.” The House had just passed a bill that could restrict criticism of the state of Israel by labeling it as antisemitic, Nancy Pelosi previously called on the F.B.I. to investigate protesters, and there are some hints that such investigations are ongoing.
And the third is the breaking apart of the ideological alliance, which held relatively firm for about a decade and a half, between the liberal-establishment values of the country’s institutional elite and the progressive values of the country’s social-justice voices. This strange and unstable coalition of left-of-center groups and institutions held for more than a decade and a half, first under Barack Obama — who seemed to many to embody a new kind of “radical establishment” — and then under Donald Trump — who inspired a desperate alliance of big-tent resistance liberalism. The alliance always seemed a bit hypocritical to some skeptics on the left and many critics on the right, but it also represented the basic grammar of liberal power through the long 2010s. If, in 2013 or 2019, you were in charge of, say, Harvard, or Facebook, or the Creative Artists Agency, even Pershing Square Capital Management or The New York Times, it was tempting to believe that you were not just acting as a force for self-advancement and elite reproduction but also delivering social justice in your work and affirming, even advancing, the progressive arc of history.
After Covid, and Biden’s election, and the arrival of an “anti-woke” backlash among a certain class of American elites, that ideological coalition began to splinter, and it is now much harder to pretend that those two sets of values are natural complements, or even two halves of a liberal cultural hegemony. This challenge was confronted by the country’s elite universities late last year, when criticism about how campus administrators had handled anti-Israel protests grew into a larger debate about diversity, equity and inclusion and the structure of the self-styled meritocracy: Would the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard and M.I.T. choose to conduct themselves as avowedly elite institutions, concerned primarily with elevating their own status and the privileged standing of their students, or instead as a democratic force, devoted to reshaping the American leadership class toward criteria other than who performed best on the S.A.T.?