George Packer writes:

Here is a prediction about the November election: If Donald Trump wins, in a trustworthy vote, what’s happening this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, will be one reason. Maybe the reason. And yet Joe Biden has it in his power to spare the country a second Trump term.

Events are unfolding with the inevitable logic of a nightmare. A white police officer shoots a Black man as he’s leaning into a car with his three sons inside—shoots him point-blank in the back, seven times, “as if he didn’t matter,” the victim’s father later says. If George Floyd was crushed to death by depraved indifference, Jacob Blake is the object of an attempted execution. Somehow, he survives—but his body is shattered, paralyzed from the waist down, maybe for life. Kenosha explodes in rage, the same rage that’s been igniting around the country all summer long, fading in Minneapolis only to flare up in Portland. In Kenosha, as elsewhere, what starts in peaceful protest soon leads to violence: cars burned, shops smashed, local businesses destroyed. Police and rioters incite one another to escalate; armed vigilantes take matters into their own hands; and a teenager from out of state kills two local men with an AR-15-style rifle. The authorities are overwhelmed and ineffectual, offering little in the way of information or protection. Within a couple of days, much of the small city is a ruined landscape.

The victim’s family demands justice. His mother, Julia Jackson, calls for something else, too. Two days after the shooting, with her son fighting for his life, she begins her public remarks softly, almost inaudibly, but her own words seem to give her growing strength, and finally a profound resonance. She says that her son would not be happy with the damage to his community. “As I have prayed for my son’s healing, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I also have been praying, even before this, for the healing of our country,” Jackson says, and she goes on: “We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what’s going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. To all of the police officers, I’m praying for you and your families. To all of the citizens, my Black and brown sisters and brothers, I’m praying for you. I believe that you are an intelligent being just like the rest of us. Everybody, let’s use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other. America is great when we behave greatly.”

Her words fall like a healing rain over the grief and the fires of this terrible year. She speaks to the whole country, to our shared humanity, and our desperation. Julia Jackson has given the essential speech of 2020, the one we most need to hear. And her last words—they seem to be directed at the president.

The day before, on Monday, the Republicans began their remote convention. The simultaneous mayhem in Kenosha seemed like part of the script, as it played into their main theme: that Biden is a tool of radical leftists who hate America, who want to bring the chaos of the cities they govern out to the suburbs where the real Americans live. The Republicans won’t let such an opportunity go to waste. “Law and order are on the ballot,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. Other speakers were harsher.

It’s no use dismissing their words as partisan talking points. They are effective ones, backed up by certain facts. Trump will bang this loud, ugly drum until Election Day. He knows that Kenosha has placed Democrats in a trap. They’ve embraced the protests and the causes that drive them. The third night of the Democratic convention was consumed with the language and imagery of protest—as if all Americans watching were activists.

On Monday, the day after Blake’s shooting, Biden and his vice-presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris, released statements expressing outrage. The next day, Biden’s spokesperson released a statement opposing “burning down communities and needless destruction.” And on Wednesday, Biden, after speaking with the Blake family, condemned both the initial incident and the subsequent destruction. “Burning down communities is not protest,” he pleaded in a video. “It’s needless violence.” He said the same after George Floyd’s killing.

How many Americans have heard him? In the crude terms of a presidential campaign, voters know that the Democrat means it when he denounces police brutality, but less so when he denounces riots. To reach the public and convince it otherwise, Biden has to go beyond boilerplate and make it personal, memorable. [Continue reading…]