After Walmart announced its decision this week to close its two remaining stores in Portland, Oregon, we all received a reminder of how tightly wound and bound together the right-wing media ecosystem is with the contemporary GOP. Rather than simply treat it as an economic story, some on the right have used this opportunity to revisit tired ideas that the city of Portland is a lawless wasteland mostly burned to the ground during the civil rights protests of 2020. Among those moved to speak out is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who tweeted, “All Portland Walmart stores to permanently close in late March. This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over. Businesses can't operate in that environment, and people can't live in it.”
The context for these remarks is Abbott’s apparent intention to run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination; with them, he’s doubling down on his right-wing bona fides — and the specifics of how he’s doing so are worth noting. It’s not simply that Abbott’s embracing a right-wing trope about Portland. More specifically, he’s repeating and reviving a story line that the main importance of the 2020 social justice protests was not that millions of Americans were furious about unforgivable police abuses against African-Americans and other minorities, but rather that the protests were a nihilistic, violent explosion of leftist radicals with no motivation save for a communistic love of mayhem. The point is to erase all context, all substance from this recent history. Lies about protestor violence are used to cover up the reality of racist police violence. Propagating lies about Portland, Abbott is aligning himself with white supremacy and the police who enforce its order.
Abbott and others are also demonstrating another major tactic of American’s insurrectionary right wing — identifying blue parts of America as lawless, and their residents as lying outside the true American citizenry. Integral to this is an attempt to turn Americans against each other — in this case, to incite conservative rage and contempt against Americans living in urban areas. To Abbott and his fellow traveling politicians, the point of politics is not to rally the country to a common purpose, but to divide and conquer, to denigrate and dehumanize. As I’ve noted before, this should not really be considered democratic politics, but a form of authoritarianism.
In this case, the effort feels borderline absurd. Walmart itself has closed stores in Arkansas, Washington, D.C., Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, and Wisconsin this year; yet Abbott has nothing to say about the business-hating depredations of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Arkansas Governor Sara Huckabee (in Walmart’s home state, no less!).
But most ridiculous to me is the glaring role that Walmart has played in devastating small town main streets from coast to coast, as its big box empire put out of business thousands of small local competitors. These towns are home to much of the GOP base, yet politicians like Abbott not only seem indifferent to the destruction that Walmart has wrought, but are openly encouraging Republican rank and file to see Walmart as a victim of out-of-control liberalism. Save your tears for the Walton family, not yourselves! In this sense, Abbott is going for a two-fer with his comments — erasing the reality of police violence against Blacks and the reality of economic violence against white working class people in one cynical gambit.