There’s a good piece in the Post today by Philip Bump making an important corrective point which is that, no, we shouldn’t assume that millions of people going out and protesting against Donald Trump is actually great news for Donald Trump. The issue is sort of over-learning the fairly questionable lesson of the George Floyd protests, thinking that they somehow redounded to Trump’s benefit. As Bump notes, there’s pretty little evidence that this is true. At least in the short- to medium-term most evidence suggests the opposite.
There’s a secondary point Bump makes, which is very important, which is that so many things were happening in 2020 that it’s actually quite difficult to draw confident lessons about what had what effects even generally. One feature of that year which I’ve never seen closely enough examined is my strong belief that the Floyd protests themselves were heavily driven by the COVID lockdowns. Of course they were about anti-Black racism and police violence generally and especially against Black people just as they claimed to be. But those weren’t new issues. Indeed, there had been growing public activism around these issues for several years before 2020. But what straw finally breaks the camel’s back often is unclear. Here, I think you had not only the issue itself but the fact that most of the country had been locked down in their homes for a couple months. We had very literally never had anything like that in our history. That provided a mix of energy and focus that created a transformational and genuinely historic public moment.
The question of what fueled the George Floyd protests isn’t directly relevant to the question of whether protests against Donald Trump help Donald Trump (a deeply Trumpian premise). I raise it here though because there was so much about that year that was sui generis — a series of public crises that all built upon and compounded each other. We not only can’t draw firm conclusions about what caused what. We probably think we know more than we do about what even happened and why.
2020 remains the ur-text of our political lives. It’s the event against which Trump’s anti-DEI crusade pivots. It’s the core event that brought us RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary and the more general right-wing rebellion against core medical science. Whatever we think of Biden fiscal policy, the pandemic itself and the emergence from it was unquestionably the primary driver of inflation during Biden’s presidency. More broadly, it’s the pandemic that crystalized so much about platform governance, misinformation and whether there is such a thing, the sort of cheap free speechism that was a big part of the Tech Bro/MAGA alliance. It all goes back to that year.
