No, it's not about the public demonstrations that are now sweeping the country. That grand movement to build a society free from racism is anything but anarchic. The destruction and looting that have sometimes attended it are fits of chaotic lawlessness, but not anarchy.
Anarchy in America today is slothful, cynical. Muttering, chuckling, sullenly settling like a doomed old house that mocks its inmates. Its embodiment is a political party that has come to resemble an antebellum mansion waiting for decay to run its course. On the shuttered upper floors, grandees guard their treasure and conspire to salt the earth for miles around before they sleep. In the cellar, wayfarers who once stumbled in delirious now pass the time in tapping casks of forgetfulness.
The authorities flouted by this kind of anarchy are fundamental ones: not only principles of democratic government that one discards at one's own future peril, but also sources of accurate, comprehensive information; learning; science; reason itself; even common sense, that rough but serviceable guide that generally kept our ancestors from swallowing arrant nonsense or trusting obvious phonies. The usual anarchist's gamble on improvement through demolition has given way to something more akin to nihilism. Partisans of slothful anarchy are not looking for a way forward, but for a way down and out that will let them casually scar the world as they go. Since they can't prevail, they'll try to leave behind a disabled government, a poisoned society, an intellectual wasteland, and a planet deprived of its last hope.
In America, anarchy has become the province of those who can't abide any change but rot.
