Generational cycles in ethnic conflict

In the last post, we saw that blacks act out against police as a form of anti-white resentment, instead of anti-authoritarianism as some naive civil libertarian types may believe. The take-home message was that to get to a more pacified police force, there needs to be a minimum of strife between demographic groups -- particularly different ethnic groups.

Shutting off immigration and repatriating illegals would go a long way to preventing future ethnic conflict, so restricting immigration ought to be a top priority for anyone who wants to eventually de-militarize the police.

But what about ethnic conflict involving those who will be staying here, like blacks? As in the 1960s, they are in the process of escalating collective violence against white people as a monolithic group, where the police are targeted for being the armed guards of the real group of interest (white people).

Unlike Mexican illegals, we're not going to be able to ship blacks out of the country in order to prevent the growth of ethnic conflicts in the future.

I think the only thing that's going to change the minds of blacks is to witness and experience a massive crackdown on their criminals. Race relations were generally amicable during the Great Compression because there were widespread race riots targeting blacks circa 1920, and neither side wanted to go through that ever again.

Sadly, once the next generation had not experienced the nadir of race relations, they were naive about how bad things could get by pushing black vs. white resentment. They would grow up to be the Civil Rights generation, which would plunge the nation back into a lawless and therefore heavy-handed police state circa 1970.

The people who experienced that most recent nadir during their formative years -- the Boomers -- are generally wary of stoking black vs. white tensions. Even if they're liberals, and even if they're black, they don't want another Watts Riot, or another assassination campaign against today's MLK, Malcolm X, and so on. They feel that chaos to be an embarrassing stain on the liberal banner, and they want to avoid promoting liberalism in a way that would only further stain it with an association of widespread ethnic conflict.

However, Gen X-ers and Millennials are too young to remember the ethnic explosions of the late '60s and early '70s, so they don't apply the brakes when they sense race relations moving in a more hostile direction. Especially the Millennials, who are too young to even remember the L.A. Riots of 1992, which was a relatively minor and isolated case compared to the conflagration of the 1960s.

Peter Turchin has found that outbursts of collective political violence appear in cycles of roughly 50 years. If the last peak was 1970, then we're due for another one in the near future -- caused by naive and reckless Millennial blacks who have no idea what they're about to bring down upon themselves in response.

Only after that will race relations improve, and the police force will moderate more in the Mayberry direction. Until that happens, though, it will be counter-productive to push hard for the de-militarization of police on "citizens first" grounds. Right now the zeitgeist is not about citizens vs. the state, but one ethnic group vs. another.

This is a cyclical solution whose dynamics largely play out on their own, not a permanent solution that can be carried out willfully like a repatriation of illegal immigrants. Although there will be recurring waves of collective black vs. white conflict, at least there are 50 years in between peaks, and at least the de-escalation happens more or less "on its own" at the grassroots level and does not require social engineering.

A more permanent solution would take the form of segregating blacks and whites at the regional level within the country, so that they had their own contiguous region and we had ours. For example, they could take the lowland Deep South where the highest concentration of blacks has existed since they first were brought there as slaves.

I'm not convinced that this regional separation would actually prevent ethnic conflict like sending the Mexicans back to Mexico. Blacks vs. white conflict would just take the form of a region vs. region conflict, like Northerners vs. Southerners. It may be that we're going to have widespread black vs. white conflict once every 50 years, and that what we need to work on is not preventing it but preparing for and dampening its effects when we know stormy weather is looming on the horizon.