Vox reports:

Late on Wednesday evening, Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) was tear-gassed in his own city.

Wheeler was visiting the main site of the city’s ongoing protests, which have devolved into violent clashes with the police for weeks, to try to understand their grievances. Seemingly out of nowhere, as-yet-unidentified law enforcement personnel unleashed gas on the crowd — while the mayor was still in it.

“I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler told a New York Times journalist on the scene.

According to the Times, the officers who launched the gas were not local police. Instead, they were part of the Homeland Security Department’s contingent in Portland, which the Trump administration has deployed over the explicit objections of both Wheeler and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D). The DHS officers operate in military-style gear without obvious identification. They have been extremely violent, using heavy-handed tactics that have escalated the conflict in downtown Portland. They have been filmed grabbing suspected protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans.

And now President Trump wants to send these detachments to other parts of the country — announcing, on Wednesday, “a surge of federal law enforcement” to Chicago and Albuquerque, language that likens the federal deployments to those cities to troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion? How could he get one of the country’s two major parties to acquiesce to this, especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states’ rights? How could any of this be happening?

What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.

There is no legitimate justification for deploying these federal troops over local objections. The protests in Portland are limited to a small area and are primarily peaceful protests rather than riots. The violence that does grow out of those protests, like the recent rise in gun violence in Chicago, is a quintessentially local issue; the federal government has no business getting involved absent local request.

But Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.

“Accepting this type of ‘occupation’ of American cities by unidentified federal agents requires such an extreme level of dehumanization of the citizens — which is probably why Trump repeatedly labels these cities as being run by ‘liberal Democrats,’” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland.

“At this point in our political circumstances, that label alone is enough to allow law-abiding Americans in those cities to be viewed as less worthy of basic democratic protections — and to permit harm to come to them at the hands of the state.” [Continue reading…]