As of now, it seems clear that what happened to Trayvon Martin was not ”self defense,” but people should know why not.

Self defense is a complicated and little understood area of the law. (We tend to devote a lot of attention to any situation in which someone dies — as we should — and the analysis can be a bit dense.) Basically, the law recognizes two types of situations in which one person is hurt by the deliberate act of another. One is an “assault,” where a person is going about his or her business and is set upon by someone looking to do harm. The other is what the law calls an “affray,” legalese for a “fight,” where two people have an argument that escalates into violence. (From this point it get complicated, but those are the two broad categories.) The law of “self defense” says that where you are the victim of an assault, you have the right to use proportionate violence to defend yourself; where you reasonably believe that someone is using “deadly force” — a degree of violence that might kill or seriously injure — you may respond with deadly force. An affray, on the other hand is different: where two guys are just fighting, neither one of them can claim self defense if the other gets hurt. We don’t care who actually threw the first punch; you’re expected either to dial it back or to walk away.

When there is an assault, unlike an affray, there may not be a “duty to retreat.” In most states — a lot of cops and even prosecutors are unclear on this point — a person who has been assaulted does not have to try to get out of the situation before resorting to defensive force. This is based on the idea that an innocent person’s right to go about his or her business freely — to walk down any street — should be given precedence over the right of a criminal assailant not to be hurt or killed; if we must choose between the freedom of the innocent citizen and the life of the criminal, we choose the former. This leads to weird situations that we read about in law school where someone just stands there watching an assailant coming, sometimes at a walk, and then kills the person when he gets close enough to do harm. (That’s an extreme case, of course, and most situations are a lot more ambiguous.) The so-called “stand your ground” laws, which have people up in arms right now, are basically just statutes that declare that the courts are not to impose a “duty to retreat,” which most states traditionally do not.

But remember that this has nothing to do with an affray, a plain fight. There you do have a duty to walk away before someone gets hurt.

This may be important, because some of the media reports indicate that George Zimmerman came away with a bloody nose. It is entirely possible that Trayvon punched him or hit him with an elbow. You probably believe — as I do, with as much as we know now — that Trayvon was himself under assault and trying to get away. But we don’t know what Zimmerman will say under oath in front of a jury, or what the jury will choose to believe.

There are only two scenarios in which Zimmerman would have a legitimate claim of self defense. First, he would have to have been minding his own business, or at least behaving in a peaceable fashion, when Trayvon for some reason chose to attack him with what he reasonably believed to be deadly force. From all the evidence that has come out so far — and there seems to be a bit more every day — this did not happen. Second, the two would have to have been fighting — an affray — when Trayvon suddenly escalated it to deadly force. (If you and I are in a shoving match, and you suddenly pull out a knife, then it’s an actual assault, and I have right to defend myself.) Again, this did not happen. The boy was smaller and completely unarmed.

So no. It was not legally self defense. Now you know why not.

As I’ve said before, the Republican political strategy of playing to the backlash to shift wealth to the super-rich was going to run out eventually. Is this it?

This must be a real shock to the other side, but they really have only themselves to blame. They have been running around saying that the survival of the capitalist system is at stake, and now they find people talking about whether that system really ought to survive. For a generation, politics has been about the social issues and the “culture war” — all the while the super-rich have been grabbing everything they can — but now the issues are the role of the capitalists (a.k.a. “job-creators”) and just how much they ought to get and keep.

Now they actually have to defend their system — not just promise to stop abortion and gay marriage, promises which were somehow never actually kept. Their arguments range from the relatively sophisticated (faith in individual opportunity is what keeps the system running) through the fallacious (the Supply-Side Lie) to the downright demented (protestors smell bad). The point is that people are finally talking about this.

There are quite a few steps between here and making serious change — and it will take longer than we can really expect people to be camping out in the cold. In the next few months, everything will start to coalesce into an election campaign. (Obama has disappointed all of us, but we can’t just let him go down — but that’s another, much longer post.) A start has been made.

Maybe the Mayans were right after all, and 2012 will be the year the world changes.

A few thoughts:

1. The phenomenon which some are calling “white nationalism” is more about culture than about crude skin-color prejudice. (There is still a bunch of the latter about, of course.) Large numbers of (white) Americans have their identity tightly bound up with a vision of America as the only advanced country with the moral fortitude to reject national health care. What we most condemn about modern America is precisely what they are most proud of — and the possible loss of which most outrages them. There are assumptions about the proper relation between the individual and the community, and the proper role of the state, which have to change if we are to have a decent future. And I submit that our main task is not so much to persuade the other side, as to mobilize as many people as we can against them — and to cow as many half-hearted opponents as possible into silence.

2. It also would help for everyone to take the proverbial deep breath. Given the force of the other side’s resistance, it would be easy to lose sight of how deep in enemy territory we are playing. The political mainstream is arguing over the role of the rich in society and how much they should be expected to pay in taxes. Even if it looks like the other side is winning at the moment, it is significant that we are talking about it. Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, had an column in one of the Detroit papers recently, in which he argued that America should try to be a country where we have a broad middle class; someone wrote a long letter in response that America should instead strive to be a country where deserving people get rich. I’m ecstatic that people are having those sorts of arguments in the mainstream media.

3. People should also cool it with assumptions that the Republicans WILL hold the House, WILL take the Senate, and WILL elect a President. Maybe yes, maybe no — but it doesn’t help to lose heart nearly a year and a half before the elections. The GOP is in disarray at this point, and there may be (metaphorical) blood on the floor at their next convention; the teabaggers hate the establishment, and vice versa. (1964, anyone?) For the moment, I still expect Obama to be re-elected, and if it’s not quite the exciting prospect it was in 2008, it will be psychologically devastating to the Right. They’ve convinced themselves that “the American people” reject Obama and all his “socialist” works, and a clear demonstration that this is no so will positively break their hearts.

I can hardly wait.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence … labor is the superior — greatly the superior — of capital.”

–Abraham Lincoln, Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 30, 1859