One point about the deployment of federal agents to Portland that has not gotten much attention is that Portland is the whitest of American mid-size cities (though The New York Times has just published an article centered on this fact). This detail intersects suggestively with the long-standing offensive by right-wing politicians (including the president) and media against antifa and “violent anarchists,” who are generally characterized as white, and who stand as a distinct enemy in parallel to the African-American-led Black Lives Matter movement. While I can buy that some of this demonization of antifa is meant to paint them as outside agitators who are secretly leading the BLM movement from behind (just as in earlier decades outside agitators, e.g. communists and Jews, were said to be behind black resistance movements and urban uprisings), the idea that the Trump administration would choose to advance its toxic mixture of authoritarianism and white supremacism in Portland of all places confirms that there’s more to be unpacked here.
The spectacle of anonymous, armed and armored federal agents tear gassing the majority white crowds who have shown up in support of African-American rights and against police violence, and the seeming indifference of Trump and his allies to thinking this imagery might backfire on them, suggests that the right wing has begun to fully internalize the idea that there are now two types of whiteness in America: the whiteness of racists, and the whiteness of those who are not racists. If you are white and are not a racist, you are no longer to be considered part of the community of privilege and immunity from state violence to which your whiteness previously entitled you. I think the right-wing obsession with antifa is ultimately an obsession with this unfathomable enemy in their midst, a projection of fears about an insidious force that hates America and wants to burn it all down. After all, antifa represents an explicitly antifascist attitude, not the violent and revolutionary one that the right describes; yet it is the imaginary revolutionary fantasy that the right has seized on.
When you make something up so vigorously, there’s a lot of information to be gleaned from such a pure play of fear and anger. At one level, such projections of immense power onto an imaginary enemy reflects an unconscious recognition that it is in the realm of ideas that white supremacism is most threatened, as it will ultimately be undone by a change in attitude by enough white people. It also projects outwards the very real violence that is required to maintain a system of white supremacism — it’s not the police who are committing violence, it’s those antifa terrorists! One fun angle is that while the projections are insane, the racist right’s fears of doom are actually justified. In fact, such justification is now found in Portland, where, in an upsetting inversion of the stories they tell, federal agents are opposed not by antifa but by anti-racist white people who we might accurately term “ordinary American citizens who are white.”
Of course, the only solution for President Trump is to keep insisting that these protestors are actually hardcore antifa terrorists, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And so federal agents have proceeded to tear gas and beat white moms and white veterans, icons of the military-suburban-American-way-of-life complex, as they protested in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. To keep the fantasy alive, in other words, white supremacists like Donald Trump must now make war on white people — which has the perverse effect of attacking white supremacism itself. After all, if being white alone isn’t enough to get you into the club of protection, then this means (among other things) that white supremacism is clearly not based on tacit notions of white genetic or cultural superiority, but professions of allegiance and militant enforcement of a racial order. And if white people realize they are no longer immune from arbitrary police and state violence even if they’re white, well, good luck selling that shit.
Tellingly, the idea that the privileges of being white increasingly come with the condition of being the right sort of white person is paralleled by the increasingly authoritarian bent of the GOP, most glaringly under Donald Trump. In somewhat caricatured form, the bargain is that the president expresses the will of his white supporters; in return, they offer unquestioning support, treating his every pronouncement as wise and good (see: Trump’s insane opposition to masks and the widespread GOP embrace of his deadly position).