Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August to protect property during a Black Lives Matter protest after widespread arson and vandalism the night before. He ended up shooting three men that night, killing two, in what he claimed were acts of self-defence. All of the shootings were captured on video, some from multiple angles. He tried to retreat from everyone he shot that night, resorting to deadly force only when he was cornered, physically attacked, or threatened with a gun. At no point did he continue shooting after ending the immediate threat.

Although prosecutors attempted to argue that, merely by being present with a gun, Rittenhouse, now 18, had “provoked” the protesters, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence that Rittenhouse had done anything to threaten anyone or initiate conflict in any way. The defence, by contrast, was able to show that Rittenhouse, far from picking fights, attempted throughout the night to avoid or defuse conflicts with protesters.

The trial confirmed that the real villain of the night was the first man Rittenhouse shot, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum. This was the most important shooting, because it set in motion the events that led a crowd to assault a fleeing Rittenhouse, allegedly in the belief that he was an “active shooter”, and which led to Rittenhouse shooting and killing Anthony Huber, who was attacking him with a skateboard, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who advanced on Rittenhouse with a drawn pistol.

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Rosenbaum, a convicted child-rapist and domestic abuser, had no connection to the protesters. He was a disturbed man who had been released from a psychiatric ward earlier in the day and who, according to video evidence and multiple eyewitness testimony, had been belligerent and threatening all night.

According to both Rittenhouse and one of his companions, the Army veteran Ryan Balch, Rosenbaum told members of their group: “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I’m going to fucking kill you.” Later in the evening, he found Rittenhouse alone and began chasing him across a parking lot. After first attempting to run away, Rittenhouse wheeled around and shot the advancing Rosenbaum. The closest eyewitness to the shooting testified that as Rosenbaum approached the defendant, he yelled “fuck you!” and lunged for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun. The other main clarification at trial came from Grosskreutz, who admitted that Rittenhouse only shot him after he pointed his own gun at the teenager.

Many of the initial media reports that painted Rittenhouse in a sinister light turned out to be false — for instance, Grosskreutz’s claim, which he repeated in multiple interviews, that he had been shot with his hands up in a position of surrender. Rittenhouse did, as was reported early on, “cross state lines” to get to the protest, but only from Antioch, Illinois, a border town that is a suburb of Kenosha, which is where Rittenhouse worked and where many of his family live. He did not transport the gun across the border, and although it is legally murky whether he was allowed to be carrying it — he was 17 at the time — the judge threw out the charge because of ambiguities in the law.

Yes, he was a supporter of Trump and Blue Lives Matter, but there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as alleged by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, or a “domestic terrorist,” as alleged by Pressley and Ilhan Omar. He was not a member of any militia group, despite the misguided representations of his initial defence team. He was not out “hunting” anyone.

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The most damning evidence against him, which was not admitted at trial, was a video from a few weeks prior in which he joked about shooting looters. But again, there was no credible evidence that he initiated or escalated conflict with anyone that night. He lied about being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), when in fact he had only received CPR training, but this was hardly relevant to the shootings. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been there, but the same was true of nearly everyone there that night. They were all defying a curfew. Many of the protesters were also from out of town. Some, like Grosskreutz, were also carrying illegal guns.

From the beginning, the case against Rittenhouse relied on obfuscating the actual events of the night in favour of mythmaking: easily debunked misinformation, moral and emotional appeals to the justice of the protester’s cause, the racial identity and political sympathies of Rittenhouse, the far-Right politics of some of his most vocal supporters, rhetorical flights against “white male tears” or “fascism”, and arguments about the United States’s gun laws or the biases of its criminal justice system. One index of the confusion surrounding the case is the number of Twitter users who appear to have only recently learned that Rittenhouse’s assailants were white.

Indeed, even on the Left, those reporting on the case or following it closely have tended to conclude that Rittenhouse was not the monster he was initially painted as. Long pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, while drawing attention to the extremism of some of the militia members who showed up to protests, to the general atmosphere of chaos, violence, and racial tension that summer, and to the role of Right-wing media in stoking outrage over rioting and property destruction, concluded that Rittenhouse himself was more or less a foolish kid with conventional politics who got in over his head. Last week, Ryan Grim of The Intercept tweeted: “People should be prepared for Rittenhouse to be acquitted on all the major charges”.

Emotional reactions, not to say irresponsible tantrums, are to be expected after a divisive trial such as this one. Commentators on both sides will say stupid things, and there will be no shortage of people on Twitter making triumphant racist memes about Rittenhouse or declaring that the verdict gives licence to MAGA wingnuts to hunt down liberals and shoot them for sport. Today, nearly every national issue in the United States is what the blogger Scott Alexander has called a “scissor” issue — one that is not merely divisive but in which the opposing sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality. The Rittenhouse verdict is no different, even if in this case, unlike in the Brett Kavanaugh or Covington Catholic controversies, we can know with reasonable certainty what actually happened.

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What happens next will be a litmus test for the country. Despite the uncertainties inherent in jury trials, the two main trials to come out of last summer’s unrest, this one and the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reached the correct verdict, though this is cold comfort in a country where the two main factions are defined by their mutual mistrust and loathing. Already, Republicans have begun pouring salt into the wound, and it looks as if the verdict will cement Rittenhouse’s reputation as a conservative folk hero — an innocent man smeared by corrupt politicians, a partisan media, and biased Big Tech companies.

Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced against all evidence that a cold-blooded murderer has been set free due to the colour of his skin, with leading politicians declaring the verdict a “miscarriage of justice” and asking the Justice Department to pursue what could only be described as a political prosecution of the Wisconsin teen. These are signs that the scars opened over the past few years will not be quick to heal.

Yet some on the Left have already begun to signal that things got out of hand last summer. They are admitting, for instance, that “defund the police” was a stupid and politically toxic idea, that riots and arson lead predictably to violent chaos and should therefore be discouraged rather than cheered, and that some of the police shootings that initially sparked outrage — including the one that set off the riots in Kenosha — were based on initial reporting that, had it come from Fox News or the Right-wing Twittersphere, would have been clearly labelled as disinformation.

Many of these things were obvious at the time, and it can be frustrating now to observe those who only found the courage to say the obvious after Joe Biden won the presidency. But it is better than the alternative, which is to continue denying the reality in front of their faces. In this case, the reality is that Rittenhouse was found innocent of murder, and correctly so. Biden, to his credit, has already stated that “the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. One hopes that his allies will listen. To refuse to do so is only to court more tragedies.

While Americans everywhere are eager to pretend that the virus is under control, the situation in Wisconsin is getting precarious. According to the state’s Department of Health Services, a total of 920 people in Brown County — where Green Bay is located — have tested positive for Covid-19, up 603 from a week ago. The infection rate in the county is 3.54 cases per 1,000 residents — the highest in the state. By point of comparison, in Dane County, where the capital city of Madison is located, the rate is just .79 per 1,000.

The explanation for that disparity is simple: Dane County is, for the most part, a middle-class region.  Residents work predominantly for the state government, its legal apparatus, the huge University of Wisconsin and the technology sector. Brown County, in contrast, is working class, with the meat packing industry a big employer. As we’ve already seen (if we’ve been paying attention) this virus is particularly cruel to the working class.

Americans are huge consumers of meat. They eat 124 kilos per person per year, which puts them near the top of the league table of carnivores. Among major countries, only Denmark and New Zealand consume more.  Americans aren’t about to let a pandemic get in the way of their meat consumption — especially not with the barbecue season heating up. That demand for meat has placed a great strain on the processing industry — and particularly its workers.

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Earlier this month, one of the largest pork-producing plants in the US — Tyson Foods of Sioux Falls, South Dakota — closed indefinitely because nearly 300 of its employees had tested positive for Coronavirus. That was the first real hint of worrisome trend. Last week Smithfields, a huge pork processor, temporarily closed two plants because of the virus. At one plant, which employs nearly 4,000 largely Hispanic workers, almost 900 people were infected.

The spike in Brown County has been linked to JBS Packerland, a meat industry plant in Green Bay. Infectious disease experts have found that meat processing plants have become hot spots because employees have to work in close quarters, making social distancing impossible. Wet animal carcasses are passed from person to person along the production line, acting as conduits for the disease. The workforce at these plants is made up largely of recently arrived Hispanic immigrants who live in crowded housing. Throw in the language barrier, and it’s easy to see why controlling the spread of the virus within the packing industry is extremely difficult.

So far, 22 packing plants in the US have closed. Some 3,300 workers have been diagnosed with the virus, and 20 have died, but those figures are rising with every passing day. Plant closures were motivated by the need to protect the lives of workers, a noble principle. But the consequence has been a severe drop in the supply of meat — up to one quarter in the case of pork. There’s talk of having to euthanise millions of animals because of the lack of processing capacity in the industry at the moment.

Last Sunday, John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, took out full-page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times warning that “as pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close … millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain”. In an intentionally apocalyptic tone, Tyson warned: “the nation’s food supply is breaking”. That’s not strictly true, since, for the moment, it’s mainly the meat industry that’s in peril, not the entire food supply. But, given the American fondness for meat, Tyson’s scaremongering hit home.

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Tyson is a long-time friend of Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary. Both made their fortunes in the chicken industry. Tyson and Perdue appear to have had a word in Donald Trump’s ear. On Tuesday, the President invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) mandating that meat is a vital commodity and ruling that packing plants must remain open.

According to the executive order, closures “threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency”. The order designates that meatpacking plants are part of the critical infrastructure of the nation. Cynics might notice how quickly Trump invoked the DPA with respect to the meat supply, compared with his much slower response in the case of test kits, PPE and ventilators.

Along with that executive order came a “hold harmless” decree which stipulates that the plants cannot be held liable for the spread of the illness among employees. Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines designed to protect the worker in these factories have been temporarily relaxed in order to address the threat of meat shortages. Nowhere has there been mention, by the President or his assistants, that now might be a good time to cut back on consumption.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), the largest US meatpacking union, has demanded that the Trump administration compel meat companies to provide proper protective equipment and frequent coronavirus testing for slaughterhouse workers. That demand, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears. The unions, already weak in the US, are powerless against a determined President who loves his hamburgers, and who seems to take delight in using this crisis to assert his power. It’s easy for him to argue that desperate times require desperate measures.

The workers in those packing plants are the innocent lambs led helplessly to slaughter. They’re faced with a stark choice: they can go back to work and risk their health, or they can protect their health and lose their jobs. With unemployment approaching 20%, the employers hold all the cards. Finding replacement workers at the slaughterhouses shouldn’t prove too difficult, even if the job has suddenly become deadly.

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By Justin Webb

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his novel about the harsh conditions of immigrant workers in America’s meatpacking industry. Ironically, most middle-class readers of the book ended up more concerned about the insanitary processing of meat than about the welfare of those workers. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” wrote Sinclair, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Things haven’t really changed much since that book was published. Americans have always been more concerned about the meat they consume than about the unfortunate people who process it. No one really wants to think about what goes on in a slaughterhouse.

America has been hit in the stomach again. What we’re seeing is a particularly stark example of a phenomenon that will become painfully apparent in the weeks to come. And let us not pretend that this is an exclusively American story. Powerful people desperately want a return to normal. Normality, however, will be restored by the underclass – the low-paid, powerless workers who face the choice of protecting their health or protecting their livelihood.

In truth, it’s not a choice at all; those workers have no alternative but to become martyrs in this battle for meat. Middle-class habits will always trump working-class well-being.

What, in other words, if the coronavirus is the icing on the voter suppression cake?

We tend to think of presidential elections as battles fought over character and policy, or, in the Trump era, bombast and insults and drama. It’s a performance and the campaign, however horribly unserious it might be, matters. But 2020 might not be about any of this. It might hinge, to an extent that few fully grasp, on a turnout reduced — suppressed — to a level unseen in recent decades.

The commentator Jonathan Chait is among those Left-wing Americans who have noticed and are sounding the alarm:

“It’s not clear,” he says, “If Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations …… Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system [intended to offset the effects of the virus on voting habits] and allow nature to run its course.”

Voter suppression down the ages has pretty much been a deniable misdemeanour — “we just want to secure the integrity of the ballot for everyone”. Even in the bad old days down the racist south there was some nonsense mouthed about literacy being necessary in order for voters to understand the ballot.  It was about the sacred ballot – they pretended – not about the suppression. But this president has broken with such delicate dissimulation.

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The strategy is blunter in the age of the Donald. The President even outlined it live on Fox News, following the Democrats’ series of suggestions to Congress about postal voting during this time of plague: “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Whoops.

The game has been given away. He wants, clearly and openly, to stop groups who vote Democratic from voting.

Mr Trump isn’t entirely opposed to postal voting: he likes it for the military and for older Americans. Two groups who – surprise surprise — back him. But for everyone else he insists that people should show up at the polls. Or not.

Even before the Coronavirus hit, the stage was set in many states for November 3^rd — election day — to be a time to washing the car, tend the garden, gaze at the sky; anything other than voting. That’s because across all those states controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the suppression efforts have come thick and fast in recent years.

Not all the initiatives to ‘reform’ voting law are deemed many Americans to be particularly offensive. To take a sample: in Oklahoma they are removing people who haven’t voted for eight years from the registers, which feels to many in that state like reasonable tidying. In Florida, they’re stopping convicted felons from voting until they’ve paid money they owe to victims of crime, which, if you are a victim of crime in Florida, probably seems fair enough. In other states you need proper ID, provided by a government agency.

But these measures mount up: in Mississippi the Democrats think fully 8% of the adult population is currently banned from the polls for one reason or other. Most of them will be Democratic party supporters: poorer people who go to jail more; black people living hand to mouth lives, without proper ID linked to a firm address; youngsters caught out by some special rule about registration.

And even if some of the rules are defensible, plenty struggle to pass any kind of honest electoral smell-test. Among the stinkiest is an effort going on at the moment in Texas to stop ‘straight ticket’ voting.  In all recent elections in the state, with one pull of the lever, you have been able to  back the Democrats, all of them, or the Republicans, all of them. Remember the ballots are long in many states so it’s convenient that you can, with one pull, elect your party choice of judges, school district bosses, rat catchers.

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But, oh dear, mightn’t this lead to a lack of proper thought among electors about the people on the ballot? Well that’s what backers of the change claim, all innocent-faced, as they press for everyone to spend much longer actually voting for each individual candidate.

And the inevitable effect of banning the ‘straight ticket’? Queues. Queues which are already often long, would get longer still. Folk with pressing things to do, poorer people with two jobs, parents due to cook supper, would go home. And they’re generally Democrats. Texas is the biggest state the Republicans can count on in a presidential election: it’s their California, with 38 electoral votes and 7% of the electoral college in 2016. The Republican on the ticket has won every presidential contest since 1976.  But as Hispanic voting grows there are reasons to think Texas might be in play in 2020.

Not if the queues are long, though. Suppression works.

The story so far is a familiar one. It fits into a tradition that dates back to Jim Crow. Civil rights were granted grudgingly and slowly and plenty of black Americans think the battle for proper democratic freedom is still to be properly won. It’s reach is wider than the presidential race, too: comfortable America is none too keen on low-life America getting real power.

It is part of American life. As is the grisly fact that turnout in American presidential elections is low in any case – around 45% of voters don’t make it to the polling station. Lots of Americans don’t need to be suppressed: they’re just lazy or, more often, busy and tired and disillusioned. And Coronavirus will keep even more from the polls — won’t it?

Well in recent days, rather gloriously, the story has changed and changed in a way that cheers those who are confident in the ability of the USA to rise to challenges. You don’t have to be a Democratic party supporter (though it probably helps) to notice and salute what has just happened in still-chilly Wisconsin.

The Democrats tried to get their primary election – and the other polls due at the same time – postponed because of the Coronavirus. Republicans refused. The result was some measure of chaos.

As The New York Times put it, people were forced to choose between their health and their civic duty:

“In Milwaukee, just five of 180 planned polling places are open, leading to hours-long lines of masked and socially distanced voters. This comes as Milwaukee voters — an electorate that includes nearly all of the state’s black population — have lagged well behind suburban counterparts in returning absentee ballots.”

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee  Tom Perez called it “voter suppression on steroids, because it was putting people’s lives in danger”.

But here is the thing.  Americans can be meretricious and fickle and frankly barmy. They can be unthinking about bigger pictures. They can be ignorant about the world. But they are also deeply serious. America has a spine of purpose. People who misunderstand the place concentrate on the froth and the nonsense, the eating competitions and the trashy TV.

But in Wisconsin, faced with what many people saw as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their rights, they queued, in masks, to protect those rights. More than a million votes were cast in person or in postal ballots. Not as many as usual but still a decent number. And enough to make a difference. A judge Mr Trump backed on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was thrown out. It felt to many like a victory for democracy in a state that will be a key battleground in 2020.

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Of course, it may well be the case that Donald Trump wins in November because in Wisconsin and other crucial swing states more voters are enthusiastic about him than about the challenger Joe Biden. He managed, in 2016, to bring people to the polls who had not voted often before, if at all. He is not just about suppression; he has given voice to people who felt themselves to be voiceless.

And Mr Biden, while he is regarded with affection by many Democrats, makes few spines tingle.  When the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asks of Mr Biden, “could he find his car in a three tiered parking garage?” many Democrats shift uneasily in their seats.

So there is still a chance it could be a conventional election. But if the Coronavirus calamity carries on, 2020 could turn out to be an election about what American democracy really is. Will people do their duty in spite of the dangers, as large numbers did in Wisconsin?

In their revolution, in their civil war, in their travails of the 20th century, plenty of Americans died for the ideal of America.

Will they do so again this November?