Leaderless Crowds
Britain has seen horrifying riots in recent weeks in which thousands of white nationalists in dozens of cities have attacked mosques and asylum centers. The riots apparently began after a false rumor that a migrant had stabbed three young girls. One should attend to these riots because they show how quickly extremist political opinions can flame into dangerous collective violence. There are two general theories about why riots start. “One theory,” writes Simon Kuper, “is that rioters are mindless “riffraff” who must be punished. The other is that they are rational actors with grievances that must be addressed.” Kuper argues that those who are sympathetic to the rioters always try to argue that the riots express meaningful underlying rational interests, even if they do so in unacceptable and illegal ways. There are, of course, reasons why working class white people in England are angry. But Kuper argues, instead, that the real source of riots is deeper and more emotional. Riots are not political acts of civil disobedience, as much as people who want to legitimate may believe they are.
As Hannah Arendt understood, while civil disobedients do break laws, they do so within the constraints of civility including non-violence. Civil disobedience is for Arendt a political activity of collective dissent. But as I’ve written in a new edition of Arendt’s essay On Civil Disobedience, when civil disobedients resorts to violence, they disqualify themselves as civil disobedience and justify the label ‘rebels,’ diminishing the potential political impact of their actions and undermining civil disobedience as an institution. For Kuper, the moving force of riots is not political interest, but rather an emotional feeling of belonging. He argues that the rioters today are like English football hooligans who express collective power through violence, first against property and then against people. Kuper writes:
"Ryan Sheers, 28, had no previous convictions when he walked up to a line of police in the northern English town of Hartlepool carrying a beer can. He pushed and shouted, “I pay your wages!” A policeman stepped forward, leading a dog. “Get your dog a drink,” advised Sheers. The dog bit him in the backside. During his hearing at Teesside Magistrates’ Court, Sheers, formerly a McDonald’s worker, wept after admitting to violent disorder.
What makes somebody riot? Why do people throw bricks at police while being filmed by dozens of phones, knowing it could get them a jail sentence that ruins their lives? Their decision may be political. The current British riots — the country’s worst disorder since 2011 — clearly express anti-immigrant feeling. They were prompted by the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport and the false rumour that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker.
But in fact, riots are not purely political events. They are more emotional than that. To understand them as a simple matter of rational actors calling for specific policies is to miss out a lot about why riots start, how they spread, and how authorities should respond.
Riots follow a centuries-old pattern, albeit with contemporary updates. They are commonly fuelled by misinformation. Today’s riots were sparked by the misidentification of the suspected killer (he was born in Wales, of Rwandan Christian origin). Another ancient constant is the belief that rioters are manipulated by political leaders — in this case, Nigel Farage. He questioned whether the police were withholding information about the killer’s identity, and called the riots “a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease that is out there shared by tens of millions of people”. He has been widely criticised, with a Labour MP saying the parliamentary standards commissioner should examine his “dangerous comments”.
Yet since the French gilets jaunes movement began attacking police and luxury stores in 2018, we have been in an era of leaderless crowds. Just as the internet cut out high-street travel agents, it is cutting politicians out of riots. Donald Trump did incite supporters to attack the Capitol in Washington on January 6 2021, “but he wasn’t the driving force behind the riots,” says Julia Ebner, counter-extremism researcher at Oxford university."