Last weekend, in response to some intemperate but (given how besieged police feel all over the country) perhaps understandable comments from Douglas County's sheriff about Black Lives Matter, a few people claiming affiliation with BLM announced they would come to the conservative rural Nevada county to protest.

Only about 30 people showed up, gathering in a pre-designated "free speech zone" cordoned off by the very police they were there to protest. (When the police help facilitate your protest against the government, you really have no idea what actual oppression or fascism looks like.)  But having heard about the coming protest, hundreds of Douglas County residents armed themselves and came ready for a confrontation.

The clashes that followed that day were ugly, but it was nothing like the violence I had feared would occur when the rumors were spreading about the imminent leftist invasion. Of course, the BLM protesters were quick to claim the status of victims by armed bullies, and certainly no one earned badges for civility that day (except, to his great credit, Assemblyman Jim Wheeler, who barked down some of his own fellow travelers in order to give space to his county's "visitors"). 

But the idea that this was just a small peaceful protest that was run out of town by later-day Bull Connors is terribly misleading, and ignores the stage-setting that came before. Truly – what did anyone expect would happen differently when BLM announced it was coming to town?

Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, racial tensions across the country flared (and have been deliberately stoked). Certainly, it was and is right to object – vehemently – to government agents, especially armed ones, abusing their power so thoroughly. But the BLM affiliated and led protests quickly turned to riots, which have now persisted in many cities for months. Destroying police stations or federal courthouses has nothing to do with justice, nor does driving cars into shops and looting their wares with U-Hauls. There is no excuse for trying to burn down Reno's City Hall, or assaulting reporters covering the destruction. At this point, these "protests" don't have a thing to do with justice, racial or otherwise, and are simply a deliberate attempt to destabilize and divide the nation for political purposes for the short term gain of the Democratic Party. 

(If you doubt me, witness the total lack of objection to the Biden/Harris presidential ticket from these same people. Mr. Biden is more responsible for the mass incarceration of black Americans than any other political figure alive and active today, and Ms. Harris was exactly the kind of unethical prosecutor that criminal justice reform advocates claim to want to root out.)

Nevertheless, too many politicians (foolishly believing the crocodiles would eat them last) excuse, ignore, tacitly support, or even out-and-out reward this type of violent political protest. Whatever policy gains you may agree with, if those policy gains come from the barrel of a gun or the flame of a Molotov cocktail, the price is far too high.

In Douglas County, the residents who came out to "counter-protest" BLM anticipated violence and destruction of property – and they had ample and reasonable reasons to so anticipate. When you expect violence to be used against you, it is reasonable to ensure you do not present an easy target. Bullies don't attack muscly kids, after all. Force will eventually be met by force, and in this case, the force "worked" – the BLM protesters were effectively run out of town and silenced.

All of this is understandable – justifiable, even, if you can't see further than the tip of your nose. But just like what began as righteous rage against a few bad cops turned into deadly anarchy zones and police walking away from their jobs, political violence almost never leaves a community better off. None of this will end well, if we allow it to continue.

***

People shoving each other in the streets or throwing bricks or blinding police with lasers (this is the 21^st century, after all) is the most direct form of political violence. But there are others, with far more pernicious long-term effects. A political organization, if it has enough votes, can jam through any legislation it wants, sidelining both community stakeholders and political opposition alike. This tactic, so well used over the last two special legislative sessions in Carson City, is just another type of raw force used to impose will on people.

When a strong enough political force resorts to such tactics, no good comes of it in the end. Such laws may be passed under cover of the trappings of republicanism or even democracy, but in the end they enjoy no more legitimacy than dictates of a Soviet politburo. 

Republics are different than democracies in that we understand the importance of protecting and including political minorities – even down to the individual – in both our laws and our lawmaking. Pure democracy is its own type of tyranny, as Americans of the wrong skin color in the Jim Crow South could have told you. And whatever your intent may be, one can never correct injustice with some other flavor of injustice. 

Governments which try to rule by arbitrary, endless, and capricious dictates (when schools and courts close and casinos open, your government is without a doubt being arbitrary and capricious) inevitably lose the trust of the people. Even people who like the policies ram-jammed in the middle of the night have to know that those politicians can't be trusted. A vote for such people is a prayer that they will stay in power forever, which, of course, they won't. And even if they do, consider places in America where one party has held total dominance for decades – the very inner cities now burning to the ground because things have gotten so terrible, because one-party rule means totally unaccountable government.

Eventually, the people who are or who feel shut out will resort to violence of their own, either when the political pendulum swings or in the more literal sense. Gun sales are up all over the nation, and ammunition production can't keep up with demand. Far too many Americans these days don't actually wish to live free any more (if you're OK with a governor of any political persuasion having unlimited emergency powers, you're one of those sad numbers), but for those of us who still do, there are lines beyond which we cannot be pushed. 

The economic and institutional toll of the COVID shutdowns has already far exceeded any gain they provided to us, but there is an even worse cumulative effect. Cooping people up, taking away their jobs, and being unable to deliver relief funds has effectively filled the room with gas, and the willingness by primarily leftist groups to engage in violence to advance their political agendas are so many lit matches. I don't endorse what happened in Minden on either side, but it was inevitable. And if we don't stop this trajectory now, the clash in Douglas County will look like a polite game of Tiddlywinks.

I said "we" and to some extent, we all have a responsibility in bringing the temperature down. But when, as now, a single political party is so dominant in our state government, they are the only ones who can take effective and lasting action. Democrats must start reaching out to and treating their political adversaries in good faith. They must condemn – and take real action to stop – violent rioters, regardless of the rioter's claimed political affiliation or grievances. There can be no more last-minute lawmaking reveals leaving every Nevadan guessing at what the rules are from day-to-day, or 2 a.m. votes for nakedly political gain, or bombshell "announcements" by unelected public officials leaving parents of students in the dark as to whether their kids will go to school next week. 

The United States is, historically speaking, the most politically stable and economically prosperous nation that has ever existed. That has been true because our founding generation baked in a culture of political restraint, rule of law, and peaceful transition of power into our national DNA. But that culture is unraveling – no, it is being deliberately unraveled by divide-and-conquer politics. The stability we have taken for granted for so long is at far greater risk than is currently appreciated. If we don't get back onto saner and more stable ground, dark(er) days are indeed ahead.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a criminal defense attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].