Dispatches from the Empire


How Americans Justify Political Violence

If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.

The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.

I was surprised by how many people expressed the sentiment "too bad it missed" after the assassination attempt last weekend. People I know to be well-meaning.

But why am I surprised?

In my twenties, I was in a conflict resolution masters program, a program I was inspired to enroll in after I was the victim a physical assault (in which I was beaten because I was gay). In classes, each a deluge of nonviolent rhetoric, I was often the sole advocate for the effectiveness of violence. (I was not an advocate for violence itself, but for the fact that it is indeed effective at making change. To ignore that empirical fact is dangerous, as inconvenient as it might be.)

I don't regret that stance, and I largely still feel the same as I did then. Violence, often perpetrated by the state, is indeed effective, and it might very well be the only way we are able to resolve some of the intractable issues we face.

But the implications of it are terrifying. I'm shocked those aforementioned well-meaning people don't grasp is what would've happened had Trump been killed. This country would be on the brink of a civil war. We're already teetering a little too close to that edge, but Trump's murder would put us right over that cliff.

Violence (and the effectiveness of it) in theory and in study is one thing, but when faced with the reality, it's quite another.

After Trump Assassination Attempt, Voters Fear What Could Happen Next

In Wisconsin, Dan McNeil, 71, a Democratic school board member in the farming town of Barron, called the situation “scary.” “You walk into a place in town, and it is, like, ‘Whose side are you on? Are you a liberal Democrat or a Trumper?”

An hour away in St. Croix County, Scott Miller, 42, who said he is a member of the local Republican Party, wondered if it was already too late: “These corporations are putting out millions and trillions in profits, donating unlimited amounts to politicians,” he said. “How can the average person compete?”

“Americans in the middle have been acting like spectators at a train wreck, but we’re all on the same train,” he said. “And if the train goes over a cliff, we’ll all go with it.”

The Shooting of Trump

That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.

Slavoj with the clearest distillation of our current politic.

The Left’s obsession with Trump — something I’ve only recently recognized as such — is a strange phenomenon. I should first say (because I feel obligated to do so, lest I be cast out of polite society) that Trump is a grave threat to democracy. I’m in no way diminishing that opinion.

But the Left does indeed fetishize him. I’m guilty of this as well. During his first term, I was a ball of nerves much of the time. I hated Trump, and that hate began to spill over onto his supporters. I excised Trumpers from my life and felt no shame in doing so.

At least not for a while. In the first year of Biden’s presidency, something in me changed. Perhaps it was living in a small, rural, conservative town that helped me to realize most Trump supporters are not monsters. They’re not fascists, nor do they hate me or people like me. Many people support Trump for purely economic reasons, regardless if I think those reasons are sound. (Do I think many of those people are ignorant of the implications of his re-election on democracy? Yes, but you can't hate someone for their ignorance. Or so I'm told.) 

But I have so many friends that hate Trump, yet refuse to reckon with why he's so popular. They insist that his supporters must be racist, stupid, or Christian Nationalists. And while some are, they're not the majority. The Left has to reckon with the underlying causes of his popularity, and those causes are clear as day from where I sit: class issues. This is all about class.

Not race, class.

Economic inequality, wealth inequality, wage inequality, housing insecurity...

I'm astonished by how Liberals are so unwilling or unable to acknowledge this. It's been nearly a decade and they keep insisting that if we could just get rid of Trump, things'll get better. There is zero reckoning with their role in neoliberalism or with just how profoundly the Democratic Party is controlled by corporations and their money, just as the Republican Party is.

To add insult to injury, the populist Right is largely correct when they say "coastal elites" are calling the shots, looking down on the common people, etc. Highly educated people, myself part of this crowd, do judge the hell out of conservatives and of rural people. I see this all the time. The Left's hatred of Trump and their treatment of his “basket of deplorables” is proof.

The Assassination Attempt — and America’s Choice

That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So let’s allow each other the space to do that. Let’s take one another’s embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose aren’t about to confess all their past sins.