>@slatestarscratchpad said: Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in Portland?

Well I guess I can make one. Imo, it comes down to “Portland is so white the Civil Rights Movement didn’t reorder culture and politics”

• Oregon was born out of the “free soil, free labor” tradition that hated slavery for taking our jerbs, as a white producerist utopia and was really exclusionary
• Perhaps more important, there wasn’t much industry or any direct train lines from the Deep South circa the Great Migration – to leave sharecropping for Portland, you’d have to pass through somewhere with better jobs
• So Portland’s biggest civil rights initiative was busing the small redlined black neighborhood’s kids all over town until they asked for their local Black Power school back and the white establishment said “sure”
• The city’s official narrative is “we ended residential segregation in the 1990s by asking realtors nicely”, the unofficial is “no, that’s just when the ghetto started to gentrify”
• So future “identity” claims didn’t have a confrontational model to go off of, and were welcomed in and co-opted by the establishment
• So politics never repolarized away from lunchbox labor vs. progressive owners, both of which fit in the current Dem party coalition
• So there wasn’t white flight and urban decay, and there’s still an inner-city white working class that identifies as working class, not white
• That’s sure under stress from rising prices now, and has no expectation a continuation of the existing trends would work for them
• That’s combatitive, there’s almost a European-style labor combatitiveness that, Euro style, overlaps with street politics and soccer fandom
• Portland’s been radical, there’s an anarchist axis going from Olympia to Oakland, it got called “Little Beirut” by H.W. Bush, the governor once threw a hippie festival to clear out town for a Nixon visit
• The surrounding suburbs aren’t, though, and the rural exurbs especially aren’t, they’re still free soil/free labor really
• Because of “Urban Growth Boundaries” (cause no white flight!), rural areas aren’t far out from the city
• So because they were never understood as black, an existential threat, “excesses of the 60s-70s” were never really seen as excesses and reigned in.
• Like, Oregon has the most extensive free expression protections in the country, which has been interpreted as protecting the right to give naked lapdances
• And many understand as protecting anything going as “protest”, meaning they see the government as having COMPLETELY delegitimized itself by making ANY effort to suppress crowds menacing government buildings at night
• When I arrived at the start of the 2010s, Portland was very inward-looking. There were around 10 local newspapers but I knew multiple people w/o computers and even TVs
• The elite gatekeepers followed national stuff, but they kept The Conversation Portlandy enough that everything in Portland, even the “opposition” was, definitionally, compatible with Portland
• And propped up a hippie-academic-gentry-downtown business-landlord power system that congealed in the 70s, even as the city’s center of gravity moved east across the river
• Let alone the immigrant, minority, and poor communities on the land east of 82nd
• The smartphone revolution fucked that right up, empowered and connected the lower orders and realigned the whole city with national narratives
• Welp