Tip-Off #218 - Block by Block, City by City

Justice will take root where the world seems abandoned. That is how revolt takes place now. —after Isaiah 32 [*]

Protests against police brutality over the death of George Floyd - Getty Images

Coverage of civic unrest is often overshadowed—sometimes rightly—by urgent crises: war, flooding, political violence. But it’s also drowned out by moral exhaustion and partisan bickering, now even among Republicans. I hope this post helps make better sense of the clamor. The reading at the end adds context—how protests catch fire, why cities matter, and where real change begins.

In The Revolutionary City, Princeton’s Mark Beissinger argues that revolution today takes a different form. Uprisings are no longer driven by ideology but by urban density, digital coordination, and the rapid spread of visible events. This shift—from ideas to immediacy—reveals both the power and the limits of protest.

Where 20th-century revolutions often began in rural areas through organized movements, 21st-century revolts erupt in cities through spontaneous, decentralized action. Urban density, visibility, and digital tools don’t just enable protest—they reshape it. The city becomes the stage where legitimacy cracks open.

In 2025, combustible moments gather where democratic erosion, economic pressure, and cultural provocation converge. A police killing, a voter suppression campaign, a viral deepfake, the criminalization of abortion pills in a swing state—or the administration’s gutting of Medicare and Medicaid—each ignites in full view. The protests spreading across cities this year aren’t anomalies; they’re symptoms. Denial fuels the fire.

Too much energy is spent debating how Democrats should reframe their message or mobilize the base. But partisan loyalty is beside the point when institutions appear rigged. Messaging can’t mend a legitimacy crisis. Adjusting tactics inside a failing structure is evasion—tuning the pitch while the house burns.

Meanwhile, the New Right—and its postliberal cousins—don’t just misread the moment; they deepen the crisis. Their appeals to tradition, morality, and national renewal amount to control dressed as nostalgia. They fan the very flames they claim to contain, ignoring that legitimacy can’t be imposed, nor integrity legislated—it must be earned through civic action.

What matters now isn’t growing the economy but building a healthier society. That means rethinking how we live and gather—creating spaces that draw us out of isolation, even on a weeknight. Culture, more than policy, shapes how people behave—and what can be built or sustained. As Aristotle put it: “Anyone who cannot form a community with others… is either a beast or a god.” (Politics)

Beissinger’s framework clarifies not only how regimes lose control but also how people begin to act. Revolt doesn’t start with a platform but with a rupture—a collapse of trust that forces action before leadership emerges. But rupture alone isn’t enough. Protest that doesn’t move toward policy risks collapse—or becoming what it resists. The work begins when outrage becomes demands, and demands become structural change.

Thanks to urban density, digital tools, and growing discontent, it’s never been more possible to form temporary alliances rooted not in shared identity but in shared refusal—and that refusal is where the work begins.

One example: tenants’ unions—many newly formed—are organizing to stop evictions, cap rent, and demand housing guarantees, often building by building. These efforts challenge the privatization of necessity and reassert democratic control over life’s essentials.

Another, more familiar: when the Supreme Court defers to executive authority and undermines due process, local legal networks step in. In cities like New York and Chicago, public defenders, civil liberties groups, and grassroots organizers work together to protect rights—and lives—most vulnerable to federal overreach.

These alliances testify to the inviolability of due process. What may seem like technical legal shifts often becomes a matter of survival. Defenders hold the line where law risks being hollowed out.

Few of us escape the moral climate of our time. As the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it, “The barbarians… have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

If Beissinger is right, we may be waking up to that—and discovering, in the face of barbarity, a reason to cooperate in ways we long resisted. Protest isn’t a policy. Like the prophets of old, it’s a cry of judgment—and of hope. Not a blueprint, but a reckoning that clears ground for something new.

When people organize not only to protest injustice but to claim power over housing, law, labor, and public space, they do more than resist. They govern.

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Notes and reading

[*] This is a paraphrase, not a translation. Isaiah 32 envisions a renewal of justice following the collapse of corrupt rule in ancient Judah. I draw on its imagery here not to reinterpret the prophet’s intent, but to reflect a pattern recognizable in contemporary civic life: the breakdown of legitimacy followed by the fragile work of restoration.

The Meaning of the City - lay theologian and former deputy mayor of Bordeaux, Jacques Ellul (1970). – Cities concentrate not just technology, power, and conflict, but also hope, revolt, and meaning. While Ellul is critical of the modern city as a site of alienation and idolatry, it is also the arena where grace must enter history. (For Ellul, talk of the “Benedict Option” would amount to withdrawal and surrender: purity sacrifices citizenship and faith for righteous retreat and reduces public responsibility to private virtue. - The Political Illusion, esp. ch. 8; cf. The Presence of the Kingdom.)

The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion - Mark Beissinger (2022). Shows how 21st-century revolutions have shifted from rural, ideologically driven movements to urban, decentralized uprisings shaped by density, visibility, and digital communication—overcoming insularity and passivity.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power - Niall Ferguson (2018). Parts I/2, IV/27, IX “Facing Cyberia.” - The digital and urban networks Beissinger sees enabling decentralized uprisings resemble the flexible, non-hierarchical systems Ferguson identifies as ascendant. The “city as stage” becomes, in Ferguson’s terms, the “square” where networks bypass institutional inertia.

Fearless Cities - ed. Barcelona en Comú (2019), and Bertie Russell, “Municipalism: Democracy Beyond the State” (ROAR Magazine, Issue #6). These offer a practical entry point and conceptual overview of the municipalist turn in politics—the idea that cities are now central to democratic renewal—with global examples.

Tip-Off #217 - Can we still speak for ourselves?

Trying to Get Out

About 2 + 2 = 5