Omar Wasow writes:

I study the political consequences of protest and state violence. So when federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this month, I was reminded of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

On the night of Feb. 18, 1965, police officers and state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators in Marion, Ala. Jackson, a 26-year-old woodcutter, fled with his mother and grandfather into a cafe. Troopers followed them inside and began beating his mother; Jackson tried to protect her. The state trooper James Bonard Fowler shot him in the stomach. Eight days later, Jackson died. His killing incited the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and his death helped pass the Voting Rights Act.

Sixty years later in Minneapolis, we had two civilians (one, like Jackson in 1965, trying to protect someone else) killed in the same month and a militarized occupation of an American city.

What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy.

The Trump administration believed that deploying thousands of federal agents would make for winning visuals. As an NPR report observed, in President Trump’s second term, “content is governing and governing is content.”

But spectacle cuts both ways. The same cameras that broadcast enforcement operations also capture repression. Winning a physical fight isn’t the same as winning an argument.

Consider Birmingham, Ala. In the early 1960s, Bull Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs were meant to restore order during civil rights demonstrations. Instead, they revealed the brutality of segregation to an international audience. Movement leaders chose Birmingham strategically, thinking Connor would overreact — and he obliged. John Lewis called it dramatizing injustice. Connor thought he was defending a way of life, but he was digging its grave. [Continue reading…]