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...
This is the old "would you kill Hitler if you had a time machine if doing so meant everyone would revile you because no one would believe that Hitler was going to do what he ended up doing" conundrum. Stephen King's The Dead Zone is a remarkably good exploration of the question. The more boring thought a lot of historians would bring to the question is about whether Hitler was either a necessary or sufficient condition for World War II and the Holocaust, e.g., would the National Socialists have achieved electoral success and then seized power without his leadership, and if they had, would it have led where it led? In a contemporary context, this is where the resurgence of ethnonationalist reactionary parties in so many countries suggests there's a strong 'structural' condition underlying that turn, which in turn might mean that no specific leader is required as an explanation. But then again, there are personal differences between figures like Modi, Putin, LePen, Orban, Trump or Boris Johnson that seem to make differences in outcomes...
I tend to think in this case (but perhaps not all cases) the personality matters. There have been plenty of Republicans who have tried to bottle the angry energy Trump has, and they haven’t gotten far. Ron DeSantis flamed out. JD Vance ran a full 20 or so percent behind Ohio’s far more normal Republican governor two years ago.
The angry white man stuff matters, but I think a good 60% of Trumpism (to put an arbitrary number on it) is purely a personality cult.
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...
This is the old "would you kill Hitler if you had a time machine if doing so meant everyone would revile you because no one would believe that Hitler was going to do what he ended up doing" conundrum. Stephen King's The Dead Zone is a remarkably good exploration of the question. The more boring thought a lot of historians would bring to the question is about whether Hitler was either a necessary or sufficient condition for World War II and the Holocaust, e.g., would the National Socialists have achieved electoral success and then seized power without his leadership, and if they had, would it have led where it led? In a contemporary context, this is where the resurgence of ethnonationalist reactionary parties in so many countries suggests there's a strong 'structural' condition underlying that turn, which in turn might mean that no specific leader is required as an explanation. But then again, there are personal differences between figures like Modi, Putin, LePen, Orban, Trump or Boris Johnson that seem to make differences in outcomes...
I tend to think in this case (but perhaps not all cases) the personality matters. There have been plenty of Republicans who have tried to bottle the angry energy Trump has, and they haven’t gotten far. Ron DeSantis flamed out. JD Vance ran a full 20 or so percent behind Ohio’s far more normal Republican governor two years ago.
The angry white man stuff matters, but I think a good 60% of Trumpism (to put an arbitrary number on it) is purely a personality cult.