The fire this time

What seemed like a relic of the ’60s and ’70s is back

In the past two weeks, the “war on police” has gone from a metaphor to a reality, with eight officers killed in targeted attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

The country hasn’t seen anything like it since the early 1970s, when a lunatic fringe of the left undertook a violent campaign against law enforcement.

Today’s spate of anti-police violence isn’t remotely as organizationally or ideologically coherent, but it is more lethal. The Black Liberation Army, a homicidal splinter group of the Black Panthers, never killed more than two cops in one operation, and its body count over the course of about two years was only slightly higher than what we’ve seen just this month.

Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough recounts the history in his exceptional book “Days of Rage.” He dismisses as a myth the popular idea that the left’s violent underground was motivated primarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. “Every single underground group of the 1970s,” Burrough writes (excepting the Puerto Rican FALN), “was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism and government repression.”

Black militancy had the most allure, or as a radical lawyer told Burrough, “Everything started with the Black Panthers. The whole thrill of being with them.”

Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee gave black militancy a jump-start with his famous speech in Mississippi in 1966 declaring, “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”

Carmichael’s activities in Mississippi spawned various Black Panther groups, the most important in Oakland, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. They became a sensation with their gun-toting antics and bristling confrontations with police, although they would be outflanked by their “information minister,” Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted rapist, who called for “A black liberation army! An army of angry niggas!”

Killing cops quickly moved from a rhetorical pose — the Black Panther newspaper gave us the phrase “Off the Pig” — to an actual imperative. The Weather Underground targeted police in a series of — thankfully — relatively ineffectual bombings. It was the Black Liberation Army, an underground force spawned in the poisonous split between Newton and Cleaver, that took up the mission with a deadly seriousness.

From 1971 to 1973, the BLA attacked police in San Francisco, North Carolina, Atlanta and New York. In the space of a couple of days in May 1971, it shot four cops in New York, killing two. It carried out a particularly gruesome murder in the East Village in January 1972, ambushing two officers from behind and shooting them to bits when they fell to the ground.

All told, the group killed roughly 10 police officers before it was hunted down and broken up.

Obviously, nothing like the BLA exists today. There isn’t an antipolice underground with safe houses, mandatory readings in Mao and a funding apparatus built on armed robbery. The cop killers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were, to borrow a phrase from international terrorism, “lone wolves.” But the logic of the Baton Rouge shooter as he explained it on YouTube — the police are a predatory, occupying force that must be resisted violently — is exactly the same as the BLA’s.

The United States has experienced an extraordinary period of social peace dating from the Rodney King riot in 1992 — more than 50 dead and $1 billion in damages — to today. The recent unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore can’t be compared with that fiveday conflagration, or the urban riots of the 1960s. But order is always a fragile thing, dependent on the sense of the legitimacy of our institutions.

With the police under a withering moral and intellectual assault, politicized assassinations of cops, which a few weeks ago would have seemed a relic of the 1970s, are back.

If there were a contest for the most stupid idea in politics, my choice would be the assumption that people would be evenly or randomly distributed in incomes, institutions, occupations or awards, in the absence of somebody doing somebody wrong.

Political crusades, bureaucratic empires and lucrative personal careers as grievance mongers have been built on the foundation of that assumption, which is almost never tested against any facts.

A recent article in The New York Times saw as a problem the fact that females are greatly underrepresented among the highest rated chess players. Innumerable articles, TV stories and political outcries have been based on an “under-representation” of women in Silicon Valley, seen as a problem that needs to be solved.

Are there girls out there dying to play chess, who find the doors slammed shut in their faces? Are there women with Ph.D.s in computer science from M.I.T. and Cal Tech who get turned away when they apply for jobs in Silicon Valley?

Are girls and boys not allowed to have different interests? If girls had the same interest in chess as boys had, but were banned from chess clubs, that would be something very different from their not choosing to play chess as often as boys do. As for chess ratings, that is not subjective. It is based on which players, with which ratings, you have beaten and lost to.

Are women and men not to be allowed to make different decisions as to how they choose to spend their time and live their lives?

Applying the same unsubstantiated assumption to differences in “representation” between different racial and ethnic groups likewise produces many loudly expressed grievances, political crusades and lawsuits — all without a speck of evidence beyond numbers that do not match the prevailing assumptions.

People who base their conclusions on hard facts often reach very different conclusions than those who base their conclusions on the preconception that outcomes would be even or random in the absence of discrimination.

Something as simple as age differences among groups can doom any assumption of even or random outcomes.

If every 20-year-old Puerto Rican in the United States had an income identical with the income of every 20-year-old Japanese American — and identical incomes at every other age — Japanese Americans as a group would still have a higher average income than Puerto Ricans. That is because the median age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older.

People with 20 years more work experience usually make higher incomes. And age is just one of many differences between groups.

You can study innumerable groups in countries around the world today, or over centuries of recorded history, without finding a single example of the even or random outcomes that are used as a benchmark for determining discrimination.

Nevertheless, courts of law — including the U.S. Supreme Court — use something that has never been found anywhere as a norm with which to compare current realities.

Life is undoubtedly unfair. But the origins of this unfairness often go back to different childhood environments for individuals or different geographic or cultural settings for groups and nations.

These differences between nations, as well as differences between individuals and groups, reflect the fact that the world “has never been a level playing field,” as economic historian David S. Landes put it. Renowned historian Fernand Braudel said, “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.”

How long will we continue to take something that has never happened, and never had much chance of happening, as a norm?