The Midwesterner: Can British-style rioting happen in America?

By Richard C. Longworth

In this tumultuous year, the whole world seems to have taken to the streets, most recently in the seemingly mindless rioting that seized London and other British cities this month. This outpouring of wrath raises the obvious question: can it happen here, in America, or more specifically, in the stricken cities of the Midwest?

We would seem to be ripe for violence, or at least protest. The connecting key to the British demonstrations seems to be a feeling of hopelessness or despair among young people, badly educated and unemployed, who see no future at all in post-industrial cities like London. All older Midwestern cities, even relatively successful ones like Chicago, contain ghettoes of people, both black and white, for whom globalisation and its glitter are rumours at best, obscene jokes at worst.

So the tinder is there. Whether it ignites is less certain. It may be worth our time to compare rioting in England and the conditions that sparked it with the economic and social conditions here.

The similarities are obvious. England, more than any other European country, resembles the United States. Both are former industrial powers where traditional industries, such as manufacturing and mining, once provided a middle-class standard of living and a promise, generation after generation, of steady work. In both, these traditional industries have either gone away or no longer provide the jobs they once did.

In both countries, great wealth exists side by side with poverty and hopelessness. Both have high youth unemployment. Both are plugged into the global economy, with great global opportunities for the well-educated and well-connected, and little opportunity for the rest.

In both countries, race is a factor, but probably not a key one. In both, resentment against immigrants — Mexicans in America, Pakistanis in England — outshouts the old black-white divide.

In both countries, governments faced with deficits and weakened economies are cutting back on spending on social programs that mostly help the poor. In England, the Conservative government wants to undo much of the welfare state, including the previously sacrosanct National Health System. In America, states are leading the attack on programs ranging from health care to senior services to early childhood education.

In England, many people are blaming the riots on the fact that, for most of the participants, the future simply holds no hope. It's not the recession, which will end. It's that, when it ends, the hopelessness won't. For young people with no stake in society, there's nothing to stop them from lashing out.

Anyone who has spent time in the blighted old industrial cities of the Midwest knows the same pathology exists in the US. Can the same kind of rioting erupt here? Sure it can.

Which is not to say that it will. The differences are nearly as striking as the similarities.

For starters, we still don't know why the British cities exploded. Sure, they are plenty of experts to say it's the hopelessness, or the spending cuts, or anti-immigrant anger. But the odd thing is that we haven't heard anything from the rioters yet about why they were rioting. In almost every outbreak of mass protest — from the springtime revolutions in the Middle East back through the riots following the murder of Martin Luther King — there has been an articulated reason, clear if not always persuasive.

The British riots began after the shooting by police of a young black man, but this was the spark, not the reason. I'm sure the reasons are there, but until the participants can tell us what they wanted, perhaps we shouldn't automatically take the word of pundits or sociologists.

In addition, British society is different from American society. Since World War II, the British have had a much more developed welfare state, with services designed to succour the poor and provide social mobility. What this means is that the impoverished in Britain have more to lose when these services are cut and feel the cuts more deeply. Perhaps Americans should be marching against cuts in early childhood education, but we won't.

Some of the protests in Britain seem aimed at the police and, here again, differences are important. Not that relations between the police and public in cities like Chicago are models of social and racial harmony, or that many Chicagoans don't fear the police more than they respect them. But for sheer brutality and racism, most American urban police forces are paragons compared to the legendary Bobbies of Britain. American police have absorbed lessons since the riots of the '60s that the British police, for all their undeserved reputation abroad, have yet to learn. Again, American police forces have their bad apples, but the recent Murdoch scandals there highlighted a top-to-bottom corruption of Scotland Yard that is simply unmatched here.

Another thing: the US has always been more class-ridden than most Americans like to think, but it has never been as defined by class as Britain is. I first lived there in the era when the class system still ruled, and it was ugly. Status was entirely defined by birth. Those born at the bottom stayed at the bottom. My wife taught school on a public housing project in Croydon, a suburb of London that was badly hit by the recent riots. Some of her little students, aged 4 or 5, could read. Others couldn't. Senior teachers took her aside and told her to ignore the slower students "because they're just going to be dustmen [garbage collectors], dear, and they don't need to read."

And then came Margaret Thatcher, who left her permanent imprint on Britain, including the dismantling of the class system. In its place came... well, what? A meritocracy? Social Darwinism? A fairer society? Nothing was more unfair than the class system. But you can't say Britain is a fair society now, not with the poverty, inequality and hopelessness that exist there.

The old class system, for all its cruelty, at least was a structure, a social framework. It promoted noblesse oblige above, obedience and responsibility below. As such, it had some value. As the novelist Robert Ruark once wrote, never destroy something of value unless you have something of equal or greater value to put in its place.

Thatcher herself said, "There is no such thing as society." Perhaps she was right. There might not be rioting in the streets there this summer if there had been something of value to put in the place of the class system.

Does this apply here? Not directly. But the old industrial society that formed the urban Midwest implied a class structure, of owners and managers and workers, an ordering of society, a system of expectations and a promise of stability that it delivered, most of the time. As with the British class system, it's possible to imagine a better society than this old industrial structure — a cleaner and healthier society, more egalitarian and mobile.

When the industrial era passed, if this society had replaced by a better one, we wouldn't have to worry about violence in the streets, because everyone would have a stake in that society. But that hasn't happened. At the top, men and women live better than ever. Below the top, life is worse, more precarious, more unfair.

This is true, if somewhat hidden, in places like Chicago, and all too obvious in other cities — Detroit and Cleveland, certainly, but also in Rockford and South Bend and Mansfield and Buffalo. These cities hold hundreds of thousands of forgotten people — forgotten because they haven't done anything yet, like take to the streets, that would make the rest of us pay attention.

This post was originally published at The Midwesterner.

19 August 2011