Why America Is Moving Left

Over roughly the past 18 months, the following events have transfixed the nation.

In July 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man reportedly selling loose cigarettes illegally, was choked to death by a New York City policeman.

That August, a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. For close to two weeks, protesters battled police clad in military gear. Missouri’s governor said the city looked like a war zone.

In December, an African American man with a criminal record avenged Garner’s and Brown’s deaths by murdering two New York City police officers. At the officers’ funerals, hundreds of police turned their backs on New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio.

In April 2015 another young African American man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody, in Baltimore. In the chaos that followed, 200 businesses were destroyed, 113 police officers were injured, and 486 people were arrested. To avoid further violence, a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox was postponed twice, then played in an empty stadium with police sirens audible in the distance.
Then, in July, activists with Black Lives Matter, a movement that had gained national attention after Brown’s death, disrupted speeches by two Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix, Arizona. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley fidgeted onstage, protesters chanted, “If I die in police custody, avenge my death! By any means necessary!” and “If I die in police custody, burn everything down!” When O’Malley responded, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter,” the crowd booed loudly. Later that day, O’Malley apologized. Donald Trump, who had ascended to first place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination while promising to represent the “silent majority,” called O’Malley “a disgusting little weak, pathetic baby.”

Anyone familiar with American history can hear the echoes. The phrase by any means necessary was popularized by Malcolm X in a June 1964 speech in Upper Manhattan. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, Baltimore burned, as many cities did amid the racial violence that broke out every spring and summer from 1964 to 1969. In November 1969, in a speech from the Oval Office, Richard Nixon uttered the phrase silent majority. It soon became shorthand for those white Americans who, shaken by crime and appalled by radicalism, turned against the Democratic Party in the ’60s and ’70s. For Americans with an ear for historical parallels, the return of that era’s phrases and images suggests that a powerful conservative backlash is headed our way.

At least, that was my thesis when I set out to write this essay. I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, when the backlash against ’60s liberalism still struck terro...