Just a couple of loose thoughts this week, considering that last week was about the most news-packed week of my entire life and most everything that can be said has been said about it.
First, in terms of how I concluded my “Fall of the House of U.S.” series, this NYT story about an intense local battlefield in the culture war in Newfane, New York, north of Buffalo and just south of Lake Ontario offers a pretty good window into how people with a liberal-progressive outlook need to learn to be local and situated in new ways. A retired state trooper decided to raise a few cows as a side gig and it so happened that he was living near to a woman who’d also decided to retire from her white-collar job and start an animal sanctuary. Two of the man’s cows got out of their enclosure and wandered over to the sanctuary. Long story short, the woman running the sanctuary aggressively refused to return the cows when the owner came to claim them and went on to social media to drum up support for her position, which led to the original owner receiving threatening messages directed at him and his family. That in turn kicked off a much more massive burst of support for the original owner with even more threats and aggression directed at the sanctuary owner, with both signs quickly aligning with left and right partisanship.
You could just see this as a simple case of the sanctuary owner making a serious strategic blunder and not recognizing that her position would be highly antagonizing to almost all of her neighbors, and that she struck the first blow without any incitement. But I think it’s more than just not understanding where you live—it’s a kind of assertion of a property-rights individualism that at odds with the propositional logic of other liberal-progressive values, in particular the drive to empathy that the sanctuary owner describes as the reason why she was drawn from her previous life into wanting to operate her sanctuary and support veganism. When you have empathy for farm animals but no empathy at all for neighboring humans, when you are asserting that you are free to make choices but you have no respect for a neighbor’s freedom, you’re demonstrated that there’s something badly fractured down there in the way your overall worldview is composed.
A separate thought on the near-assassination of Donald Trump. In the initial rush of condemnation, it was understandable that many politicians and commenters underlined two basic themes: that violence in politics is never legitimate, and that the violent rhetoric of the last two decades might have played a contributing role in provoking the attempt on Trump.
I completely endorse the intent of a lot of those statements, which was to try and lower the temperature overall going forward. But that took some degree of naive both-sides-are-at-fault (e.g., to call for lowering the temperature, a pundit has to model what they think a lowered temperature looks like).
In comparative terms, however, violence and modern politics go together like milk and cookies, even in countries that aren’t necessarily thought of as “violent”. Politics always has the possibility of mobilizing conflict beyond voting, and that is not purely about whether or not a particular community, region or nation has a cultural proclivity towards collective or individual violence. It’s not really caused by tone or rhetoric either, though as my readers know, I do think that language shapes action, is action in many cases. Politics shades most easily into violent action when it is closest to being violence by other means, meaning, when the consequences of elections and political processes are perceived, justly or otherwise, to be directly or imminently existential for some part of the society governed by those political processes. When politics is about maintaining a relatively stable and well-understood system for dividing up the spoils or managing distribution of support and resources, there’s not much call to resort to violence. Even when it’s about maintaining a system of exclusion and domination over small or isolated groups and communities, only the excluded have some consideration of bringing violent pressure to bear, and that’s only if their exclusion is desperately total or if they see some possibility of it easing. But when people think, rightly or wrongly, than an election may fundamentally change how power, wealth, rights or access are distributed, then a lot can happen.
Which also bends back to assassination. Conceived more broadly as political murder (attempted and achieved), it’s incredibly common not just in American history but in the modern world. Societies that are frequently thought of as high-consensus and peaceful nevertheless have experienced shocking episodes of political murder—Prime Minister Olof Palme and Foreign Minister Anna Lindh of Sweden in 1986 and 2003 respectively, for example. Political murder is sometimes only barely motivated by politics, in cases where a politician is merely another kind of public figure or celebrity. But in quite a few cases, it has been an act of ideological or political calculation, and unfortunately sometimes the assassin gets exactly what they want by stopping a leader whose agenda or outlook they found threatening. In other cases, the assassin perversely enables the dead leader’s supporters and accelerates the agenda that they hoped to stop.
Security has perhaps made it more difficult to get at political leaders since the first half of the twentieth century, but I think very few democracies have thought through the deeper problem of assassination (or political violence more generally) in the last fifty years because most of them are disinclined to think of their governance as posing an existential threat to some group of their citizens or residents. To think really clearly about when political violence is not just likely but in the eyes of some people justified or necessary requires thinking clearly about exactly those kind of junctures. Clear thinking, however, means you either acknowledge that some of the decisions to come will in fact dramatically degrade the present status of some group of people or that you will back up and look for something that almost always is a false hope: a decision that will benefit everyone equally, a rising tide, a chicken in every pot. There might be nothing more likely to push some group of people into desperation than the perception that they are at enormous risk from a near-future course of action and no one seems to know it—where the people making decisions are so wedded to presenting themselves as disinterestedly benevolent that they can neither acknowledge nor justify that they are heading towards a momentous shift in power, access or support.
I've been thinking quite a bit about the assassination attempt and how violent rhetoric and political violence should be treated in that context. We can safely dismiss Republicans' bad faith call that we "tone down the temperature," which amounted to a demand that Democrats stop criticizing Trump's past efforts to stage a coup and his promises to do it again, while Trump repeats his calls for violence, but slightly more sleepily for one speech.
But the question, really, is when calls for political violence and promises to engage in it can properly be responded to with actions that go beyond normal politics, including violent resistance. Because today's Republican party is on a dual track to both trample individual civil rights and dismantle the institutions that are supposed to enforce the rule of law. While the text of the Trump v. United States immunity decision is justifiable based purely on the text, it's farcical to imagine that this Supreme Court and many of the wild hacks Trump (and not just him!) have appointed to the judiciary would apply the ruling reasonable. So if and when those institutions break down, if Trump actually succeeds in staging a coup, there's a pretty strong case to be made that full on mass protest is entirely appropriate.
But what about before that? The first Trump term, after all, was a completely incompetent mess, but it didn't succeed in dismantling the system (at least in part because Trump and his worst goons are possibly even more incompetent than they are malicious). Shooting someone for being a demagogue and not much more is certainly out of bounds. On the other hand, once someone is actually able to carry out those promises, it may be too late. After all, there was plenty of insistence in early 1930s Germany that Hitler wouldn't actually DO the things he said he would do to his country's Jews. And by the time he did them, no one really had the capacity to stop the Holocaust.
It may sound uncouth to frame it in those terms, but, purely based on the rhetoric, there are a lot of parallels between early1930s Nazis and 2020s Republicans. So in my mind, a question worth asking...