From NYT's "The Morning"
Might be worth discussing...
If you’re an intense reader of the news, you may already know the story of David Shor’s firing.
Shor is a progressive data analyst who has spent his career trying “to help elect Democrats while moving the party leftward,” as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine put it. In May, Shor tweeted a summary of a new academic paper about the 1968 election by Omar Wasow of Princeton. The paper found that nonviolent protests tended to increase the Democratic vote share in surrounding areas that year, while riots tended to decrease it.
Some other progressives accused Shor of insensitively focusing on the wrong problem: the political reaction to riots, rather than the underlying racism and socioeconomic problems that helped cause those riots. His employer — Civis Analytics, a liberal research firm — quickly fired him. (For a longer summary, see The Times’s Michelle Goldberg or Vox’s Matthew Yglesias.)
The episode was essentially a struggle over whether progressives should worry about political strategy or almost always side with the victims of injustice, regardless of tactics. Shor’s detractors thought he was blaming the victims — and “concern trolling,” by undermining the more important debate, as the podcast host Benjamin Dixon wrote. Shor’s defenders thought his detractors cared more about looking virtuous than defeating racism.
It is a debate with obvious relevance to the 2020 campaign.
No one can know for sure, but there is evidence suggesting that violent protests — like the ones this week in Kenosha, Wis., in response to the police shooting of a Black man in the back — help the politician whom many protesters most despise: President Trump
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FWiW, i don't think Shor is concern trolling. I think he's saying we have to focus on political strategy, and protest optics, no matter how impure that seems. Anger is justified, but no matter how righteous it may be, when it is acted out as violence on a public stage, it is risking handing a Wisconsin or another swing state to Trump.
I've stood in a peaceful protest, and I know how powerful that can be. If you're not strong enough to do peaceful protest no matter what provocation is thrown your way, you may do better to sit it out this year. Please don't give ammunition to Faux News and the demagogues. Yes, people should see through their propaganda. But I don't think we can cure naivete and stupidity in the next ten weeks.
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