When we put barbed-wire fences around our places of democracy, we surrender

Minneapolis City Hall was similarly fenced in, as was the Hennepin County Jail. Police precinct headquarters buildings were also protected by razor wire and concrete barricades. The city reports that it spent some $650,000 on the fences and other obstacles, all to fend off violence during the Chauvin trial. Some sources put the bill at $1 million.

A high chain-link fence had already been erected around the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul, at least for a time, following Floyd’s death last May. Minnesota’s capital city was thus an antecedent to Washington, D.C., which The Post recently described as an “increasingly fortified federal city” following protests at the U.S. Capitol. The New York Times headlined an article on Washington’s fencing: “By the People, for the People, but Not Necessarily Open to the People.”

In Minneapolis and in Washington, such fences may keep some people away from buildings, but they themselves become magnets for protesters. Some of these are peaceful, such as those who chained themselves to the Hennepin County Courthouse fence. Some are violent, such as those who have hurled projectiles at police huddling behind hastily erected fences in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb in which 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a local officer. Brooklyn Center has an FBI office, surrounded by a fence, which protesters scaled on Tuesday.

And even though fences may reduce damage to government buildings, they do nothing to quell violence and looting elsewhere in the community.

Many of us shake our heads in sorrow and accept these fences and walls as a regrettable trade-off. But it is a far worse bargain than that. A trade-off exchanges one thing of value for another. In building walls around democracy, we trade away our founding values. We validate the substance of the protests we fear by converting the shrines of democracy into symbols of its surrender.

Worse, perhaps, is that the walls we build obscure our vision of what is at the root of the protests. When police officers take on the roles of judge, jury and executioner, especially where people of color are involved, the healing response — indeed, the just and democratic response — is not for Americans to build walls to thwart protesters but to stand up, in the open, and address the systemic racism and implicit bias that infects law enforcement and other aspects of our society.

We say we build walls to defend government buildings against violent protest. In truth, we build them in a vain attempt to block out the sight of our fellow citizens’ anguish and outrage. We build walls rather than behold truth. We build walls to avoid dirtying our hands to pull out the roots of our society’s afflictions.

This is a strategy that cannot work forever. Ask the people of the former East Berlin and the former Soviet Union about the futility of walls and fences in the face of political movements.

America’s courthouses, capitols and other government buildings are the temples of democracy. By walling them in and isolating them from the people, we have effectively proclaimed the failure of democracy. Whether such walls keep people out or keep people in, they deny the most basic principle of democracy: an open society.

To sustain and nurture our democracy, we must not rely on chain-link, razor wire and concrete. We need greater visibility, not less. We need more openness, not self-imprisonment. We need to talk and listen to one another. We need to embrace our brothers and sisters.

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