DC Residents Are Fretting About Possible, Post-Election Fallout. So Am I.

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Plenty of folks are concerned about this upcoming election, especially the presidential elections – and one of the things people find troubling is the possibility of unrest, no matter who wins. Candidly, I’d be much more inclined to be concerned about unrest following a Trump victory, as most of the political unrest in the United States in the last decade or so has come from the left, not the right.

We’re concerned enough about it to have made some plans. My in-laws are elderly, both visually impaired, both not in the best of health, and they live in a suburb of a major city in a blue state. We’re flying them to Alaska just before the election, and they’ll spend a couple of weeks here until we’re satisfied that things won’t explode, because no matter what happens in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, the Susitna Valley will remain pretty peaceful.

Turns out residents of the nation’s capital are likewise concerned, and some of them are, to put it bluntly, bailing. Politico columnist Michael Schaffer has some thoughts, and not surprisingly, so do I.

Kate Brown moved to Washington for politics. But on election week, she’s leaving town for the same reason.

“I just want to get the eff out of Dodge,” Brown told me recently. “I don’t feel like dealing with it.”

“It,” in this case, doesn’t mean the tension of working an election. Brown does marketing and communications for mostly libertarian policy wonks, and election week isn’t exactly a busy time for book talks and white papers. Instead, she’s worried about safety — though she can’t quite picture exactly what the threat looks like.

I have a pretty good idea of what the threat will look like: Hordes of angry leftists, as we saw in 2020’s “Summer of Love,” as we saw in last summer’s antisemitic protests and riots over Israel’s response to the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. The left likes to hyperventilate about January 6th, 2021, which was, at best, hooliganism, while ignoring 2020 and 2024; they should not be worrying about any motes in Republican eyes but rather the beams in their own.

However, this concern shouldn’t be limited to the District. I would be concerned about any of our major cities.

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The flashpoints are likely to be the city centers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it spreads. If things get involved, the suburbs may get pulled in. The outlying areas, though? The small towns and rural communities? Well, I can speak with great assurance that neither the Susitna Valley nor the small Iowa town where two of our kids live are anticipating any trouble. And if you feel the need to relocate for a while, you could do a lot worse than to go stay with a (conservative) friend in a small town.

Schaffer concludes:

If you ask me, people who study extremism sound like they’re on solid ground when they say Washington is unlikely to be the scene of a post-election riot. And people responsible for public safety sound like they’ve done their homework when it comes to incorporating 2020’s lessons in order to keep residents safe. But I have a hard time blaming folks who are gripped by worry about the long-odds alternative scenarios. Politics has changed, and a capital whose culture is built on process and credential isn’t really built to deal with it.

He’s right about that last point. American politics has changed. In many ways we’re returning, as it were, to an earlier save point, when politics was more… aggressive. We may not be back to knives in the Roman Senate and cries of “Et tu, Brute” yet, but we may be approaching the level of Charles Sumner getting the daylights beat out of him by Preston Brooks – and that tenor is likely to overflow into the streets.

Take appropriate precautions, folks. Not just for Election Day, but for Inauguration Day, too. If anything bad happens, that’s when it will happen, more than likely.