The Childlike Innocence of the American Protester

The more extreme American protesters seem to have very little humor and very little respect. In their anger toward ICE, Trump, or Israel, and their calls for the destruction of capitalism and the American Constitution, they sometimes scream and spit; strike out; roll on the ground; and carry on like sinners in hell. Yet these same protesters are typically careful and conservative in one regard: they demand that anyone who disagrees with them respect their personal space. “Don’t touch me,” a protester declared at a recent No Kings protest when conservative podcaster Kaitlin Bennett moved in close to interview her. At such moments, protesters tend to drop the revolutionary style and adopt the icy, rigid decorum of an offended aristocrat. In turn, Kaitlin Bennett warned a protester not to touch her. Such exchanges are common at American protests, and the reflex is not confined to one side.

The pairing of seemingly lawless behavior with an expectation of firm legal restraint has a long tradition in the United States—hence Friedrich Engels’s observation that America had bourgeois radicals, bourgeois conservatives, and bourgeois bourgeoisie. In nineteenth-century St. Louis people went to court twice as often then as they do now (on a per capita basis), and four times as often in a seventeenth-century Virginia county. All this fastidiousness about rights during a period in American life we associate with freedom so great that it borders on anarchy.

European novelists caught the contrast with humor. In The American Senator, the English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–82) sends a visiting US Senator, Elias Gotobed, into the English countryside, where the local hunt rides over a small farmer’s land whether the farmer likes it or not. “Without compensation?” the senator wonders aloud. Only what compensation the lord himself chooses to give, comes the answer, leaving the senator confused and Trollope’s English reader chuckling. For here is a man from a country that boasts of being free and easy, fussing over a day’s sport in the language of a lawsuit. It’s funny the way it’s funny when a wild party-goer pauses mid-dance to straighten a picture frame. (Funnier, still, because the senator is not wrong.)