During the middle of the Stop the Steal riot on Wednesday, some commentators on social media argued that this showed how those who defended Black Lives Matter riots in the summer were wrong. At first glance it seems like the height of hypocrisy to defend rioting by protestors for a cause you support, while condemning rioting by your political opponents. It is far more prudential to simply do what President-elect Joe Biden has done, and condemn all forms of political violence. But this approach is misguided because it neglects a crucial difference between the two sets of riots—the Black Lives Matter riots were democracy preserving, whereas the pro-Trump riots were a direct attack on democracy.
While politicians are quick to dismiss violence by protestors, they often authorize the use of violence in other spheres. Consider President-elect Joe Biden. He has been swift to condemn all the political riots in the U.S. over the last year. Yet Biden championed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supported the U.S. strike that led to Osama bin Laden’s extra-judicial killing. So, he is certainly no pacifist. Why is it permissible to support acts of violence that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, while condemning violence that at worst leads to the death of a handful of people?
Political theorists such as myself, recognize that the distinction between violence and non-violence becomes blurry when it confronts the messy world of politics. That is why we have developed conceptual tools such as just war theory that identify criteria by which we can assess the permissibility of violence in scenarios ranging from warfare, to terrorism, to political resistance. Riots are no different.
My research asks how can we differentiate between just and unjust riots? Most riots are fundamentally unjust. These include cases of sports fans engaging in hooliganism, crowds using a breakdown in social order to loot and vandalize, and pogroms where a mob inflicts racially motivated violence on a marginalized community. All of these riots are unjust, because the reasons that motivated them are unjust.
But some riots are motivated by political grievances. The Boston Tea Party that triggered the American revolution is one such example. The riots in response to the police murder of George Floyd last summer is another. And the pro-Trump riots in DC on Wednesday is a third example. In these cases, there might be justifiable reasons for rioting, but we need to examine the specifics of the riot more closely.
I have identified eleven different criteria for a just riot. We can think of these as a series of questions we should ask about a riot in order to judge its legitimacy. With respect to the Black Live Matter riots and the pro-Trump riots, two criteria in particular are relevant. The first is what I call the freedom preserving criteria. This criterion simply asks—are the rioters trying to preserve their freedom from an attack by the state or other institution? The Black Lives Matter protestors clearly are. The whole motive for the movement is to stop the systemic killing of Black Americans by the police. The pro-Trump rioters clearly were not. They timed their riot to stop the certification of the Presidential election. The riot was an attempted coup intending to deprive Americans of their right to vote.
The second criterion that is relevant here is the Parliamentary redress criterion. One reason people are quick to condemn rioters in liberal democracies is because our system of government is supposed to provide numerous avenues through which citizens can have their voice heard. But what happens if the government systematically ignores the grievances of an oppressed minority? Martin Luther King famously called the riot “the language of the unheard”. The redress criterion asks us to consider if the government has systematically ignored or blocked a group from receiving redress for their grievance through existing parliamentary procedures?
In the case of the Black Live Matter riots, the U.S. government had ignored decades of non-violent political protests. Prior to the uprising this summer the Black Lives Matter movement had been mobilizing for over seven years using a large array of non-violent and violent tactics, yet the state has done little to stop the police killing of Black people. Conversely the pro-Trump rioters timed the storming of the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral college vote to coincide with the precise moment that their objection was being heard. At every turn of the election process Trump and his supporters have been able to pursue legal means to contest the outcome of the election. But the Trump rioters, despite their claims, are not interested in counting the votes. They stopped the counting of the votes precisely because they are anti-democratic.
When comparing riots, it is too simplistic to simply condemn them because they are violent. Rioters’ intentions matter. Black Lives Matter protestors riot because the U.S. government fails to live up to the ideal of equal protection under the law. Pro-Trump rioters are trying to stop a legitimate election. One group is trying to make a democracy live up to its ideals. The other group is trying to destroy democracy.