Eric K. Ward: Rejecting White Nationalism Must Be Part of The Oregon Way
For the common good, for the Oregon Way, for the sake of democracy – we need liberals & conservatives, business, religious, & local leaders, and, especially Republicans to reject white nationalism.
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Eric K. Ward, Executive Director of Western States Center, Senior Fellow of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Senior Advisor to Race Forward. @BulldogShadow
What happened last week in the U.S. Capitol was not the beginning of a second Civil War in America, despite what accelerationists might hope. It was the beginning of a civil war inside the Republican Party.
After more than four decades of dog whistle rhetoric and politics that dehumanized and endangered segments of American society and democracy itself, it’s understandable that those who aren’t Republicans might assert – from a moral perspective – that the GOP has made its bed and now needs to lie in it. Some might want to sit back, watch this tragedy play out, and even take pleasure from seeing Republicans tear each other apart.
I would like humbly to put forward another point of view.
We as a country can no longer afford to take a bystander role in the battle for control over and within the Republican Party.
The civil war raging inside the Republican Party will have all kinds of casualties outside their own ranks. We saw that last week. With the Trump machine already vowing primary retribution, this war will further drive whoever gets elected to take ever more extreme positions.
As we know from the assaults on Oregon’s Capitol and the federal authoritarian overreach in Portland last summer – both of which must now be understood as dress rehearsals for the attack in D.C. – this is a fight with implications at the state, county, and city levels. Need proof? Consider analysis from the Washington Post which found that counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
Make no mistake: I am not excusing the GOP for their culpability or diminishing in any way the necessity of accountability, reckoning, and repair for the damage done. What I’m saying is that we all have a stake in a Republican Party that rejects white nationalism. The Oregon Way depends on it.
It’s at the state and municipal levels that democratic practice should find its strongest protection. Inclusive democracy is facing twin threats: the legacy of white supremacy and the increasingly emboldened white nationalist movement and accompanying defiance of the rule of law by armed paramilitary members.
For the common good, for the Oregon Way, for the sake of democracy – we need liberals and conservatives, libertarians and democratic socialists; business, religious, and municipal leaders; and, especially Republicans to reject white nationalism.
How do we manage the white nationalist movement in our midst?
The City of Portland took one step last Fall by hosting a training on white nationalism attended by all current and incoming City Council members and bureau directors.
I want to share some of what I said to Portland’s governmental leaders that day, in the hopes that more of Oregon’s municipalities will take these words to heart.
Every municipal leader committed to inclusive democracy should consider as core competencies:
understanding the impact that white nationalist and alt-right movements have on democratic institutions, including municipal governments;
knowledge of the origins, strategies, and tactics used by racialized extremists groups; and,
commitment to policies, regulations, and community organizing that protects against social movements’ attempts to undermine their institutions and the rights and safety of the diverse communities that make up their municipality.
What does this look like in practice? Portland’s experience with being treated as a battleground by out-of-town white nationalists points to several key lessons.
First: when city and civic leadership aligns, the power to disrupt the lives of Portlanders is denied to extremists and paramilitaries coming into the city. When city and civic leadership don’t align, our communities suffer.
Second: any appearance of racial or ideological bias in policing or the disproportionate use of force against only one kind of protester undercuts any other hard-won successes achieved by municipal leadership.
Anti-democratic actors and organizations are desperate for attention and relevance. As the whole nation is now aware and the FBI has amply documented, the risk of violence remains high as we approach Inauguration Day. Even under the best conditions, our communities will continue to wrestle with the clear danger posed by paramilitaries, hate groups, and emboldened far-right vigilantes for years to come.
Rather than face this fact exclusively with alarm, we need to embrace the opportunity and possibilities the anti-democratic movements have presented us with. Each unwelcome and uninvited incursion by these vigilantes and other anti-democratic tendencies is a chance to provide leaderful governance to a town, city, county, or state in which all residents can live, love, worship, and work free from fear.
That is what it means to lead in this moment.
I am not here to assign simplistic blame. It is easy to point fingers, providing one never points at oneself. In truth, state and municipal leaders face a highly complex situation more than a decade in the making.
This rise of the white nationalist movement, the boldness of armed paramilitary formations and anti-democratic vigilantes – this is a national dilemma with devastating local impact.
Oregon has been used as a proving ground for the attacks on inclusion, equity, and democracy that the world watched in horror last week on the national stage. Much of what played out last year on the streets of our largest city was radically escalated by out-of-town forces making deliberate incursions into Portland, not to mention a sitting U.S. President recklessly fanning the flames of political violence.
But while we can blame out-of-state and national extremists, we have to accept that these external forces are only exploiting vulnerabilities that are ours to address.
No one is exempt from responsibility when it comes to making our democracy work for everyone. All of us in Oregon’s civil society – including the business and faith communities, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, and the media and social media personalities – would do well to look in the mirror and examine our own culpability.
Certainly, there are things we wish that all of us had done sooner. But for today, the more important issue is what to do NOW.
We need to call on all of the institutions that make up civil society in each of our municipalities and at the state level to work with our elected leaders to address the threat of anti-democratic movements and political violence. Each municipality and the state as a whole should empower a task force made up of community, business, faith, education, and government leaders whose mandate is to incubate and lift up the most creative solutions to countering hate and political violence.
We need a unified voice and alignment between government and community institutions that commits to de-escalation of physical violence and confrontation among all sectors.
All policies related to democratic practice and management of threats to democratic values should be assembled, reviewed, and assessed for relevance to this moment and opportunity.
City, county, and state elected leaders should develop and enact legislative responses to strengthen inclusive democratic practice. I’ll be back in a future post to share some ideas.
But at the end of the day, these strategies will only succeed if they are grounded in a clear understanding of what we are facing. We are facing a fundamental challenge to inclusive democracy and to everything we value about the Oregon Way.
Anti-democratic movements threaten the values we share as Oregonians. They undermine the rule of law. They endanger our residents and our public servants. And they distract us from addressing the core concerns that face us: a global pandemic, economic recession, unemployment, affordable housing and health care, quality education, and racial equity, to name but a few.
I come to this as someone who has been on both the receiving end and the giving end of political violence. I’ve been the target of hate crimes many times in my life. I understand the survival instinct of fear. There were years that I believed it was a good idea to get into direct, physical confrontations with Nazis and other white nationalists. That’s how I felt at the time.
Today I choose instead to feel for those on both the right and the left and everyone in between who feels marginalized, disenfranchised by a system, or perceives a system to be rigged against them.
I feel for our first responders who can’t afford to live in the cities they serve, who are worn out by multiple crises. I feel for the elected officials who are facing death threats, and get far more critique than real partnership and support. I feel for those physically brutalized on the streets of Portland by government forces and vigilantes for merely demanding an inclusive community free of racism.
I have come to believe that this isn’t about left or right or conservative or liberal. It’s about centering the needs and values of my entire community, over the desires of any imperfect ideology. I choose to learn to care more about the common good than who’s right or wrong.
That’s what I believe is true for the majority of Oregonians, regardless of party. My hope is that by offering this framework, the Republican Party in Oregon – and all of us – can create a path back to the Oregon Way.
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