Creating Courageous & Robust Strategies, Part II: Confronting Acts of Political Violence & Domestic Terrorism

Article also available here in Medium.com.

Author’s note: This is Part Two of a two-part article on how the Democratic Party and its liberal and progressive allies should anticipate and counter rightwing political intimidation and violence. I argue that if ignored, such violence could threaten to undo the achievements of the Blue Wave and cause to founder the best efforts of Indivisible, Swing Left, and other new activist organizations to “pave the way to the post-Trump era” (Indivisible on Offense, p. 2).
Part One, “Indivisible on Offense and Galvanizing the Democratic Party in the Current Climate of Political Violence,” (published Nov. 20, 2018) focused on how to renew the Democratic Party as an effective political force in today’s harsh national environment. Part Two below reviews the challenges of dealing with the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism in the U.S. as a political problem and proposes possible responses to it as an existential threat to democratic institutions and progressive values.
Fallout
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are now busily pursuing their investigations of the attempted mail bombings targeting Democratic politicians and Trump critics as well as the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the failed attempt to shoot congregants of a Black church in Jeffersontown, Kentucky by avowed white nationalists just before the midterm elections. It is astonishing to note that these extraordinary incidents of political violence had virtually disappeared from the press and social media two weeks after they occurred. Thanks to the news media’s short attention span and to the rush of events — from the midterm elections and the firing of Attorney-General Jeff Session to the California wildfires and the mass shooting in a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, CA — today these acts of domestic terrorism have largely dropped out of the national conversation in old and new media. Even Donald Trump, Republican and Democratic politicians, and progressive and liberal groups have fallen silent on the topic, though it must be noted that the House did pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on Nov. 15th. Perhaps part of the story also has to do with the longstanding tendency of the U.S. as a former settlement colony and one of the most violent industrial democracies simply to forget and repress its violent past, especially its political past. But, as I argue below, also part of the story is that it has become all too apparent that our political and legal culture is poorly equipped to deal with the roots and methods of political violence in its various forms.
It is not clear what direct effect, if any, these horrific events had on the elections. We will have to await the findings of post-election research, but it would appear that they did not deter voters, for voter turnout reached historic levels for both Republicans and Democrats. The wider political fallout is unclear as well: Trump’s overall approval rating remained unchanged even as he continued his attacks on George Soros and other “globalists” (the revived codeword for Jewish financiers) after news broke that one of the mail bombs was destined for George Soros himself, or Trump blamed the Tree of Life’s small congregation for not having posted an armed guard. At 43% it is about the same as Barack Obama’s two years into his first term at the end of 2010 when the Democrats lost a record 64 seats in the House. This is a far cry from Richard Nixon’s ratings (24%) when he left office in 1973 under the threat of impending impeachment proceedings for his role in the Watergate scandal.
Call It by Any Other Name
Since the kick-off in 2015 of the last presidential campaign, a climate of fear and intimidation has dominated national life in the United States to a degree not seen in a long time, poisoning our politics and reaching into our very relationships with family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Trump and his Republican allies do not hesitate to deploy all manner of political intimidation and public bullying against their opponents including publicly encouraging violent acts by supporters or otherwise unstable citizens and residents through straightforward racist and anti-Semitic appeals. With the rash of acts of political violence on the eve of the midterm elections, the unthinkable has now happened striking fear in the body politic and risks transforming our political landscape for many years to come.
Unprecedented acts of intimidation and domestic terrorism demand an equally unprecedented response. However, any robust response to rightwing political violence and acts of domestic terrorism in the U.S. immediately comes up against a legal and bureaucratic void: there are no terms designating this type of violence or its perpetrators as such. Simply naming the problem is a challenge in and of itself. There are several reasons for this. As the Nov. 3, 2018 New York Times Magazine overview by Rolling Stone investigative journalist Janet Reitman reminds us, domestic terrorism is not a criminal category nor is domestic terrorist a criminal identity (p. 49). There is “international terrorism” committed on U.S. soil by either “international terrorists” from abroad or “homegrown violent extremists” (or, H.V.E.s, born in the U.S. but inspired by foreign ideologies or groups). But no domestic terrorists supported or encouraged by U.S. organizations. There are domestic “hate crimes” that target victims because of their membership in a certain social group or race but they are not considered “political” (tied to a political ideology or group); and there are “violent extremists” who often commit them but who, if they are white nationalists or supremacists, are not rigorously tracked by national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This government omission has been partially filled by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League that focuses on anti-Semitism.
Why is this the case? Perhaps most obviously, there is the fallout from 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. and the prosecution of the War on Terror. The international terrorist threat posed by Muslim jihadists absorbed the resources and attention of the FBI and other agencies as well as those re-organized under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. This fixation continued right up through the Obama administration. Many readers will recall their frustration upon learning that both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey declined to designate Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist who shot to death nine Black congregants in Charleston, S.C. in 2015, a domestic terrorist even though he presented his act as meant to “protect the white race.” Like virtually all mass shootings and bombings targeting specific groups in the U.S., it was classified as a hate crime emptying it of practically any political valence. It also had the effect of reducing his motivation to personal animus as opposed to viewing it as an expression of white supremacist violence pure and simple worthy of law enforcement’s attention.
Perhaps Reitman’s most important point was this: the neglect by law enforcement and intelligent agencies of threats to public safety by white nationalist groups was the result of a political process whereby Congressional Republicans and their rightwing allies including veterans groups effectively had them removed as an object of governmental expert policy and public concern by pressuring successfully for rescinding a Homeland Security 2009 report on violent white supremacist groups, banishing the term “rightwing extremism” from the law enforcement lexicon, and halting investigation of far-right groups promoting violence (p. 47).
Trust in Legal Institutions
Further hampering effective responses to the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism is the apparent willingness among Democrats and their liberal allies to trust in existing law and legal institutions alone to carry the day as if writing criminal statues, issuing court rulings, and practicing law enforcement existed in a political vacuum. This would appear to be especially the case among well-known jurists and legal journalists. For example, in response to the nomination of a Brett Kavanaugh, who had been groomed by the rightwing Federalist Society and led a well-documented career as a political operative and deeply conservative jurist, prominent liberal commentators refused to see his appointment in political terms (the culmination of a thirty-year GOP strategy to create a hard-right Supreme Court majority) or as an agent of a political agenda.
Rather some argued that he was very well qualified for the job and that his testimony should determine his fitness for the job (ACLU Legal Director David Cole). Legal reporters were content to note that his views on lying as an impeachable offense had somehow “evolved” from supporting it when Democrat Bill Clinton was president to being against it when Republican George W. Bush became president (New York Times correspondent Adam Liptak). Similarly, former FBI Director James Comey in an op-ed piece urged readers to trust the FBI to do a thorough investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault — as if the FBI were naturally immune to political pressure or couldn’t be set up to fail in its task by a resolutely hostile administration and Republican Senate majority (which is exactly what transpired).
Later, such idealistic thinking appeared to extend to the Florida recount when after Election Day, Republicans sent operatives and angry crowds to intimidate the Broward County Supervisor of Elections and her staff chanting “Lock her up!” in what appeared to be a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount fiasco. The initial Democratic response was to reassure TV viewers that they had matters well in hand and would appeal to the courts. They left matters at that. No call was made to mobilize local Democratic voters to counter or deflect them so the recount could proceed unhindered. This is hardly an inspiring reply to what seemed to be a breaking political emergency. In the end Broward County failed to meet the deadline for submitting totals for the recounted ballots.
It is discouraging to observe that after decades of documented GOP skullduggery and political intimidation, Democrats continue to pursue strategies that assume that the law or existing protocols and procedures will triumph in face of opponents determined to corrupt current statutes and overtly politicize the courts, law enforcement, and the electoral process.
Relying on the First Amendment
Finally, buttressing Democratic and liberal trust in legal institutions is the interpretative tradition of the First Amendment that defends robust, uninhibited, and wide-open political debate as essential to effective self-government and focuses on the consequences of utterances rather than on their content. It stems from court rulings going back to the 1920s that views all public forms of speech as free trade in “the marketplace of ideas” and thus protected by U.S. law however hateful and injurious they may be unless they lead (so-called “fighting words”) immediately to acts of physical violence. This has been the basis of Supreme Court decisions up through the 2010 Westboro Church ruling and for the ACLU’s opposition to “hate speech” codes, which the courts have systematically struck down.
It also is the rationale for the ACLU’s support for granting public permits to march or hold rallies to groups with records of violence including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to parade in full regalia through heavily Jewish neighborhoods with many Holocaust survivors and the neo-Nazis and white nationalists to march through Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The implication of this unbending stance has been that by protecting freedom of expression so defined, the First Amendment will foster liberal democracy and that our institutions are sound enough to repel the siren call of white supremacy and neo-fascism. The assumption seems to be that the state is the principal source of threats to democracy, not civil society groups, that governmental authorities who might be called upon to regulate public speech generally pose a greater threat to democracy than the speech and actions of demonstrably violent rightwing organizations.
However, it did not take long for the alt-right and white nationalists to figure out how to manipulate and “weaponize” this interpretation of the First Amendment and to deploy it very successfully to intimidate and threaten opponents and incite followers to violence in any space deemed “public.” They are quite aware that rare is public speech that has been blocked because of its violent intent or content. Instead of a positive tool of political dissidence in majoritarian democracies, in their hands the constitutional right of free speech has become one of political intimidation and dominance.
In international legal parlance, the existing U.S. doctrine of freedom of expression is termed “absolutist,” namely, one of no “proportionality,” that, as Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler points out, is not balanced by consideration of other constitutional rights and social values such as safety, privacy, dignity, equality, respect, and so forth and can overlook the distinction between protected “speech” and unprotected “conduct.” It is deemed “exceptional” in international law, and one that its defenders claim to be one of the defining features of U.S. democracy that sets it above all other constitutional democracies — and, in the minds of some, essential to the functioning of democracy pure and simple as if public speech weren’t regulated at all in the U.S., unlike under other existing governments. As Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has commented, “A great many Americans are convinced that the right to free speech in this country is absolute, as though various American authorities did not police pornography, the portrayal of sex in movies, and the language used by broadcast media, to name just a few of the most obvious speech-regulation practices that Americans encounter every day.” Of this First Amendment tradition the work of Dartmouth historian of anti-fascist movements Mark Bray asks the hard question: What if the First Amendment as currently interpreted and contemporary legal practices related to it don’t prevent rightwing violence, let alone stop what I am calling here acts of domestic terrorism? Where does that leave us as concerned citizens and residents?
Psychologizing Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism
Working within the narrow interpretive frame of the First Amendment it is virtually impossible to draw a meaningful causal line between individual and group speech and actions inciting violence on the one hand and actual physical assaults including shootings and bombings that occur “later” on the other. Compounding this difficulty is the marked preference by law enforcement officials and the press to view perpetrators of acts of violence as mentally “unstable” or disturbed. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine that authors of such heinous crimes possessing a balanced, normal psychological profile. But in such a view it is as if the psychological and political motivations operated in entirely separate spheres of human activity. It conveniently disconnects personal actions from larger social contexts and makes them a matter of individual psychology or idiosyncracy devoid of any political significance or consequence. Thus the family background of the accused becomes the center of investigation not, say, the enabling discourses and exemplary actions (that render such crimes sayable, thinkable, and doable) and the organizations that propagate them or carry them out.
This is the same script from which politicians, news outlets, and pundits preferred to read in their reaction to an earlier act of domestic political terrorism — the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Tucson) in January 2011. Clarence W. Dupnik, the local sheriff overseeing the investigation, begged to disagree and demonstrated a better understanding of how political intimidation can work to incite unstable citizens to engage in political violence:
“There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol. People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences….”
In other words, Dupnik suggests, psychological and political motivations can go hand in hand even if current juridical practice is reluctant to acknowledge it. Adroit rightwing demagogues are perfectly aware of this, even if our political elites prefer to look the other way. They seem to count on it in their fiery speeches and to assume that the targets of their attacks understand this, too, in hopes of achieving the desired result of plunging their victims into a state of abject fear with the full knowledge that under existing law they stand exposed without any meaningful legal redress or protection. Taunting their political opponents, some speakers openly speculate that some disturbed listener may act on their words for which they deny in advance any responsibility.
Countering Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism
The attempted mail bombings and the shootings in Pittsburgh and Kentucky just two weeks before the elections plunged the nation into the political unknown: the unthinkable had happened and left the usual brokers of national agendas at a loss for what to do. As I have attempted to show, their political and legal toolkit has proven itself to be inadequate to the task. Building on the suggestions made in Part One that the Democratic Party and allied organizations adopt a more combative and resolute posture in political conflicts in government and the public media, below I list possible ways to anticipate and respond to acts of political violence and domestic terrorism. The new House Democratic majority will have a crucial role to play here, and, once again, Indivisble.org’s new action plans will be essential guides to galvanizing the new House majority into availing itself of the body’s full legislative, investigatory, and media powers.
As before during the last two years, this effort will require the mobilization of the activist groups that helped create the Blue Wave. To repeat some of our key points from Part One, this initiative will require departing from ingrained political habits of the past: 1) taking rightwing violence seriously; 2) ending the fixed practice of silence; 3) dropping a purely reactive stance; 4) developing a nimble politics of anticipation and imagining the unimaginable; 5) creating a rapid response infrastructure; 6) adopting a non-nonsense posture and going on offense. Just how “public” and how “discreet” these different types of activities should be will be a matter of careful strategy and forethought. It is question of smart political stagecraft:
· Naming it: perhaps one of the greatest tests of a new, no-nonsense Democratic Party will be its willingness to call out — not debate — political violence and domestic terrorism for what they are and not bury them: their authors, their violent rightwing and white nationalist organizations, their anti-democratic motivations, their methods and acts, examples of willing GOP collusion, other active enablers, support among law enforcement, and their political consequences. The operative meme would be “protecting democracy,” something Democrats are already considering as a leading theme in the months ahead. It would connect interlocking goals such as undoing voter suppression initiatives with pushing back against campaigns of political intimidation including threats of incarceration and assassination, racist and anti-Semitic speech, and inciting crowds to commit physical aggression. There are plenty of existing documentation and data to draw on in the public domain plus confidential private and government documents that could be subpoenaed.
· Educate the public and the press: start a considered campaign on what are political intimidation and violence, how they work, how they transform politics and poison national life, and how they can undermine democracy. It would include consideration of the limits of existing legal and political protections including the First Amendment. This effort involves more than issuing occasional high-sounding statements and press releases but creating a constant drumbeat in the press, local town halls, Congressional offices, and the halls of power. A start towards achieving this may be perhaps found in the next points:
· Take seriously the fearful legacy of past political violence, especially in the case of the Democratic Party whose leaders and allies still remember well the systematic violence practiced by the authorities and civilians alike against the Civil Rights and other social movements and the decapitation of liberal and progressive leadership by assassins in the 1960s and 1970s (John F. and Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Harvey Milk). It arguably still casts a shadow today over any Democratic Party or liberal initiative against political violence.
· Anticipate fierce GOP resistance and retaliation (especially once the Democrats assume power in the House and begin holding hearings and launching investigations): everything from attempts to co-opt and trivialize the issue of political violence much in the way Mitch McConnell after the Kavanaugh hearings called on Congressional colleagues to practice bipartisanship to personal smears and repeating accusations that the Democratic Party abets domestic terrorists (i.e, undocumented immigrants), that Jews and Blacks are fomenting violence (per 2017 NRA video), etc. to issuing straightforward threats of physical harm. To which Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to state that there is currently one political party — not just a single personality — that has made political intimidation and violence an entire political program and form of governing.
· Put domestic terrorism and political violence on the national agenda:
o the new Democratic leadership in the House can initiate a series of hearings on the inadequacies of current statutes and policies. They would compel officials from law enforcement and national security agencies to explain their domestic anti-terrorism policies (such as they are), and why they have ceased tracking white nationalist groups with a demonstrated record of political violence.
o Study the policies of other countries including Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. There is much to learn from their experience — both what to avoid (abuses of governmental authority, restrictions on democratic liberties) and perhaps what perhaps to borrow.
o Develop policy options. For example, one could include revisiting the FBI’s list of violent groups under surveillance; the recent reclassification of the far-right Proud Boys as an extremist group has already helped disrupt their activities. Another option is to consider how to move against imminent threats. Study examples of missed opportunities for discrediting political violence, nipping it in the bud, or breaking its momentum, such as the Gabrielle Giffords attempted assassination in Tucson, Arizona in 2011, the Charlottesville march of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in 2017, or abroad, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 after an anti-violence rally in support of the Oslo Accords in Tel Aviv in the wake of an extremely violent Likud Party campaign to have him removed from office.
o Moreover, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Judiciary Committee, and the Homeland Security Committee could launch investigations into cases of egregious foot-dragging and failings by these agencies, possible support of rightwing terrorism by politicians and media companies, law enforcement agents’ relationships with violent rightwing extremists, and the political process whereby “violent rightwing extremists” were removed from law enforcement’s lexicon. This would have the added benefit of bringing House Democrats focused on national security (Schiff, Swalwell, Pelosi) to devote some of their considerable energy to these domestic threats to our democracy.
o The House hearings and investigations could be followed up by legislative “messaging bills” meant to correct lacunae in criminal statutes and law enforcement surveillance. They would have the advantage of signaling to voters the problem of white nationalist violence and domestic terrorism as a priority for the Democrats and of forcing Republicans to go on record on this issue (Indivisible on Offense, p. 8)
o These initiatives will be met by the full force of the GOP and rightwing media machine.
· Use budget authorization bills, perhaps even leveraging “must-pass” legislation to force Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other agencies to change their inadequate policies (Indivisible on Offense, pp.11–12)
Conclusion
Rewriting the current inadequate script on political intimidation and violence from which politicians, the press, and citizens and residents have been reading will be no mean task, especially in the current harsh national climate that leaves little room for new thinking and innovative and courageous policymaking. It will be an eminently political process driven more by open conflict than by consensus. As such, it will draw establishment Democrats out of their traditional comfort zone of hopeful bipartisanship and will mean taking political risks of a kind quite alien to them. Which is why confronting political violence and domestic terrorism as a political problem will require the transformation of the Democratic Party in terms of its self-image, public posture, and overall approach to political conflict that I laid out in Part One. This transformation will come from below and outside. From newer and younger elected officials and people assembled in Congressional offices and hallways, town halls, and the streets. This will be a strenuous endeavor. and there isn’t much time to take back our democracy and restore dignity and safety to public life.
Thanks to the Blue Wave, U.S. “democracy is now back on life support,” and for now the steady march towards legal authoritarianism and illiberal democracy has been slowed. But the onrush of violent events has not diminished but rather has accelerated, and there is a political party and its allies that have willingly committed themselves to a program of fear-mongering, intimidation, and acts of skullduggery for decades and have no demonstrable interest in stopping the wave of political violence.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.

Creating Courageous & Robust Strategies, Part I: “Indivisible on Offense" and Galvanizing the Democratic Party in the Current Climate of Political Violence

Roddey Reid

Source: U.S. Congress, photo via Wikimedia Commons; Indivisble.org; 

photo via Wikimedia Commons (BY SA 4.0)

Article also available here on Medium .com.

In the wake of the publication of my last blog posting, “We Have Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power” (Medium.com, Oct. 27, 2018) that was prompted by acts of domestic political terrorism just before the elections, a fellow member of Indivisible San Francisco asked me to flesh out my call for “a robust and courageous counter-strategy, which is what is needed to anticipate and combat the growing waves of right-wing and white nationalist violence in our country that has acquired a momentum that now feeds on itself.”

Today, in light of the electoral Blue Wave that caught most observers by surprise, and the release last week by Indivisible.org of its new activist guide (Indivisible on Offense: A Practical Guide to the New Democratic House), I want to offer several ideas about not only how to anticipate and counter political violence but also how over the next two years Democrats — and liberals and progressives generally — should confront Republican acts of intimidation. This is no small task as Republicans — now more than ever — have undergone accelerated radicalization over the last 10 years at the hands of first the Tea Party and its funders, then Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and finally Donald Trump. They do not hesitate to deploy all manner of political intimidation and public bullying against their opponents including publicly encouraging violent acts by supporters or otherwise unstable citizens and residents through straightforward racist and anti-Semitic appeals.

I want to argue that confronting the aggressive tactics of such remorseless opponents will require a transformation of the Democratic Party in terms of its self-image, public postures, and overall approach to political conflict in governmental institutions and the public media. As a Hungarian colleague, who has watched apprehensively as the U.S. has edged closer to the kind of legal authoritarianism or illiberal democracy already in place in his home country, put it, thanks to the Blue Wave “democracy in America is now back on life support.” But absent changes in Democratic politics and a strategy for countering political intimidation and violence, the best efforts of Indivisible and other new activist organizations to “pave the way to the post-Trump era” (Indivisible on Offense, p. 2) may well founder. I worry that Democratic leaders, under the pressure from a rush of events (domestic terrorist attacks, a constitutional crisis, what have you) will revert back to their old strategies that met Republican aggression with tepid responses that command the respect of no one. Remaking the country entails, I argue, remaking the strategies of the Democratic Party and its allied organizations.

As I wrote previously, there are now signs of a new awareness that the GOP’s rightwing violence is not just an ethical problem or one of “civility” but a political one as well. It has often worked for them very well but now poses a threat to our democracy. After the discovery of mail bombs targeting Democratic politicians and Trump critics, for once Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer cast aside their reflexive expressions of hopeful bipartisanhip and issued an aggressive rebuke to Trump and Republicans for creating the harsh national climate that enables such heinous actions. They finally seemed to realize that even-handed, bipartisan approaches meant to reassure the public in the past are simply not equipped to deal with the roots and methods of contemporary political violence. But one statement, however strong, does not constitute a robust strategy, which is what is needed now, all the more so in that acts of political skullduggery and intimidation continue to occur almost daily as the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and GOP attempts to discredit and stop the Florida recount make clear.

Most likely, things will only get worse over the next two months during the legislative lame duck sessions before Republicans cede control of the House of Representatives and seven state legislatures to victorious Democrats. The Blue Wave did not come as a surprise to the GOP although its very depth most likely did. But I doubt it will destabilize or paralyze them in any way (the case may be different for Trump). Let’s not forget: the Republicans are masters of the long game, and they probably made the cold political calculation that achieving a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court for thirty years via the Kavanaugh appointment would cost them the majority in the House and some state legislatures in 2018, which they could always win back in 2020 or 2022. It was a price they were willing to pay.

Countering the Republican Attack Machine and the Threat of Political Violence

By now political intimidation and public bullying have become a well-oiled — and successful — political tool that in the hands of the current administration and its right-wing allies is no longer a reprehensible method of campaigning but has become a form of daily governing. To be effective it entails an element of surprise that pre-emptively seizes the initiative, dominates the news cycle, and throws opponents off-balance by virtue of its aggressive timing, speed, and volume (streams of tweets, disciplined talking points, Internet bots and trolls), and extreme content (saying and doing the unthinkable). It can even incite people to cross the line and commit outright acts of terrorism against opponents.

So what are Democrats and their liberal and progressives allies to do?

Many of the answers lie right before our eyes. In a sense they are simply extensions of what activist groups like Indivisible.org, Swing Left, Sister District Project, and Democratic Socialists of America have been doing all along over the last two years, which have been largely ignored by the press and mainstream media. They performed the patient, detailed work of nuts and bolts policymaking, lobbying, stiffening liberal politicians’ resolve, holding them accountable, promoting new candidates, registering new voters, and turning out the vote. They also joined the more public, direct actions of Black Lives Matter, #TakeAKnee, Muslim ban protests and the massive Women’s March and March for Our Lives meant to restore a sense of dignity and safety to public life, and supported the work of these groups’ fearless organizers.

Both kinds of aggressive responses to the new administration’s agenda created the groundwork that made the Blue Wave happen. But it is not clear that the lessons of their dogged and courageous political actions were fully appreciated by the Democratic Party leadership, although recent concessions made by Nancy Pelosi to the House’s growing Progressive Caucus is a good sign, at least of a shift in internal party power dynamics if not in the leadership’s fundamental approach to the political challenges facing us all.

So here are a few ideas in the form of suggestions for fresh — and perhaps more effective — approaches to the ongoing political crisis. They are divided into two parts to be published separately: Part One below is devoted to renewing the Democratic Party as an effective force in the current harsh climate of political intimidation and public bullying; and Part Two formulates suggestions of how to deal with the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism as a political problem and existential threat to democratic institutions and progressive values. The suggestions in Part One provide the basis for and lead to those in Part Two in a follow-up posting.

Part One: Robust Strategies and Counterstrategies

This involves good defense but also good offense now that Democrats will control the House and seven additional state legislatures starting next January. I want to argue that the most robust strategies will continue to include both the nuts and bolts legislative and electoral activism outlined in great detail in Indivisible’s original and new guides and the pressure of numbers outside of the ballot box as in the mobilization of citizens and residents in politicians’ offices, legislative chambers, and in the streets.

Good Defense

· Exit the fixed practice of silence: simply ignoring Republican and right-wing provocations and aggression or greeting them with enunciations of lofty principles not backed up by meaningful action hands the political field — and the news cycle and its dominant narratives — to the perpetrators. Examples go as far back as the racist Willie Horton ads that helped destroy Michael Dukakis’ candidacy in 1988 and up to Brett Kavanaugh’s and Lindsay Graham’s recent denigration of the motives of their Democratic colleagues in terms of wild conspiracy allegations reminiscent of the worst days of McCarthyism. In the face of endless baiting by Republicans, choosing whether and how to respond is no easy task, but a rigid policy of non-response is self-defeating.

· Drop a purely reactive stance. Waiting for Republicans to act again leaves them with the initiative and makes Democrats and their allies look weak, a fatal flaw in the current gladiatorial theater of dominance.

· Develop a nimble politics of anticipation:

o Think of this as the political equivalent of earthquake preparedness.

o Take seriously right-wing violence in all its forms because it has often worked — from smears and character assassination, disinformation and “gaslighting,” and fear-mongering to verbal threats of physical assault and assassination and actual acts of violence. Think through how politically damaging they have been

o Develop a rapid response infrastructure for if and when you decide to respond in the form of not only political messaging and talking points but also mobilization of supporters to gather in offices, halls of government, or on the sidewalk to put pressure on right-wing politicians and their allies. This is something that Indivisble.org, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, and other groups have excelled at and from which the Democratic Party could learn. Such an infrastructure would have perhaps come in handy two weeks ago when the GOP sent hundreds of operatives and supporters to Broward County, Florida to help block and discredit the recount. One striking example of a successful rapid response is Black Lives Matter’s reply to a video released by the NRA June 2017 featuring Dana Loesch who accused Jews and Blacks of fomenting violence and threatening them with retaliation. Displaying a mastery of quick response, Black Lives Matter issued a powerful video that countered slander within the same news cycle and demanded that the NRA retract the inflammatory tape.

o Examine points of vulnerability. In other words, look in the mirror and review past and present statements, policies, and actions — and even personal biographies — for potential weaknesses (misleading appearances and associations, ambiguities that need clarifying, inconsistencies, etc.) that political enemies can seize upon and exploit. Remember there is no psychological, social, or ethical boundary that can’t be violated. The essence of intimidation is doing the unthinkable to destabilize an opponent. For that reason alone, intimidation is hard to live with and hard to anticipate. Sadly, in today’s politics appearances — and their manipulation — are everything, and we can’t afford to overlook them.

o So, spend some time imagining the unimaginable from the point of view of a hostile and ruthless opponent and sensationalist mainstream media that are quick to indulge in cheap cynicism and skeptical hearsay and take steps to pre-empt or ward off such attacks. In 2016 Hillary Clinton ran a defiant campaign but she failed to take seriously how vulnerable her candidacy would be to issues concerning her private email server, hacked emails, speeches to the Wall Street firm Goldmann-Sachs, and dysfunctional campaign staff until it was too late.

Good Offense

As Indivisible on Offense writes, “Offense is exciting, but it’s more complex than defense” (p. 2). Why is that so? In part, the document seems to suggest, because we now have the opportunity of defining the issues, setting agendas, and initiating action instead of simply responding to Republican policies and legislation. But in order to do this, Democrats have to abandon past ways of dealing with the harsh climate of political intimidation infecting our public life:

· Break with traditional Democratic cautiousness that seems to come into play whatever the electoral outcome: lose, party leaders preach “caution” and win, they still urge “caution.” The caution is always directed at their liberal/progressive base, never towards the centrists that have populated the upper ranks of the party and who are responsible for many of the electoral failures of the past 30 years. Such Democratic actions reveal a fundamental commitment of energies and resources regardless of circumstance to a narrow strategy of predictable electoral outcomes and, it must be said, internal control. It has not been an expansive, risk-taking approach but rather one based on a zero-sum model of political authority and capital that are viewed as always prone to atrophy: if you use it or share it, you lose it. It can never truly grow. In this view, additional investments and expenditures in the way of adopting new narrative frames or themes, pursuing new strategies, appealing to disgruntled or apathetic never-voters, expanding its voter constituency, or opening up party echelons to new blood, can only deplete the party’s strength, never increase it. It would seem that its political capital must be saved for a future time — a time that is almost always deferred and rarely materializes.

· Adopt a no-nonsense posture and take the offensive. This is probably the toughest task awaiting party leaders and their allies, especially since they have shown themselves to be invariably risk-adverse. Just recently, they wrapped themselves in the mantle of “civility” without explaining what they mean. Thus they left it up to the media and the Republicans to define it for them in a way that always discriminates against progressive causes and deems any form of non-violent direct action illegitimate. Even Hillary Clinton now has expressed doubts about the wisdom of civility as a political stance. And given news media outlets’ tendency to apply a double standard to Democrats (when they attempt to occupy the “higher ground” in the face of smears and intimidation) and to engage in staging superficial, false “equivalences” between the parties, powerful messaging is all the more needed. The goal is to render a more offensive political posture entirely reasonable and legitimate to the press and the general public and, last but not least, positively feared by Republicans.

o To do this Democrats have to prepare their supporters, the public, and the media for this new, more energetic profile. This will require no small effort, for the image of past timidity and inaction weighs heavily on any new Democratic initiative. As any good sociologist or business consultant will tell you, in large organizations in decline, a sclerotic, risk-adverse leadership generally is incapable of renewing itself on its own, committed as it is to past policies, strategies, personnel, methods, etc. It will be no less true of Congressional leaders, the Democratic Leadership Council, and the Democratic National Committee. It will take pressure from younger, newly elected officials, Democratic voters, and liberal and progressive activist groups whose unstinting efforts helped create the electoral Blue Wave.

o This also involves new narratives and rallying cries on issues that voters care about and will continue to care about for years to come. It also includes a new combative tone that goes beyond outrage to communicate firmness and resolve as well as an unwavering commitment to protect and take care of their constituents and vulnerable citizens and residents generally. The backbone of this new combativeness is more than attitude: it involves pursuing set of policies about issues citizens and residents hold dear: a living wage, defending Obamacare and extending the healthcare protections of Medicare and Medicaid, a secure retirement, a robust infrastructure, access to public services, and a humane immigration policy. Instead of following the script adopted by the mainstream media and Republicans, Democrats, liberals, and progressives must constantly re-write it themselves and flood the Internet and cable outlets with it seizing control of the news cycle and talking points. Call it Indivisible’s “agenda-setting power” on steroids (pp. 5–6).

o This fearless posture will thrill the base and put the opposition on notice not to mess with you. It will also impress onlookers. People are attracted to dynamic, self-confident, and active organizations that appeared poised to get things done and stand ready to take care of their own. Nothing elicits more contempt than failed paternalists who demand all control but take no responsibility and leave their members unprotected in face of the assaults by their opponents.

· Cease issuing automatic calls for bipartisanship. This is especially important when such calls are publicized without making clear that there would be political consequences for the GOP for not accepting them. As Indivisible on Offense aptly puts it, “No one from the Senate Republican caucus is going to save us, so Democrats must refuse to ‘go along to get along’” (p.19). Make bipartisanship conditional, not an inflexible principle or identity. Standard Democratic boilerplate for years, appeals to bipartisanship now seem tired and empty, and in light of the Party’s record of ineffective responses to GOP’s scorched-earth tactics, weak:

o These tactics do not reassure liberal and progressive voters who thirst for inspiring, courageous leadership willing to take chances

o but they do encourage Republicans who know they do not face determined opposition

o they tie the hands of Democratic politicians and their allies for when the time comes to push back against the GOP and go on offense

Absent a robust defense and offense, I fear that the Democratic Party will continue to be the largely ineffective force it is today in Washington and state capitals.

Conclusion

Being subjected to daily barrages of political intimidation is exhausting. For many it has even been traumatic. Such political violence is meant to drive us from the political arena and keep us home, off the streets and away from the halls of power. It will surely continue. And possibly so will acts of domestic political terrorism that pose an even more existential threat to our institutions and progressive values (see Part Two). So we shouldn’t let the success of the Blue Wave delude us into thinking that the national nightmare is almost over. Rather, “democracy is now back on life support,” and we could still lose it. Thus there is a lot of work to do. That is one of the points of Indivisible’s new guide.

In the end, it’s about converting some of the style and substance of new activist groups and public marches into tactics and strategies of Democratic politicians and their allies. It’s about combining passion with craftiness, energy with strategy, in other words, developing political street smarts that invest as much in meaningful actions as in a lofty self-image.

The point is to re-galvanize our sclerotic political process, take back our stolen future, and restore dignity and safety to public life.

UP NEXT: “Creating Courageous and Robust Political Strategies, Part II: Countering Acts of Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism”

Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.

We’ve Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power

We’ve Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power

The Way We Live Now, Part Four

 Sources: Common Dreams; Michael Vachon; CNN

Author’s Note: Just as I was finishing this essay, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh occurred, one of the most violent anti-Semitic acts in modern American history.

In Plain Sight

As federal and local law enforcement agencies pursue their investigation of the multiple pipe-bombing attempts targeting Democratic politicians and Donald Trump’s critics, the horror of this act of domestic political terrorism shouldn’t make us forget that we have been here before and that the current crisis is one in a long series of threats and actual acts of physical violence going back many years. Politicians, the mainstream news outlets, and pundits are struggling to come to grips with the gravity of the situation and the necessity of developing concrete counterstrategies but the evidence that this exact scenario was in the offing has been in plain sight for some time. References have begun to crop up in social media to the over 40 bombings of abortion clinics in the U.S. as well as to deadly LGBTQT bashings but apparently absent from public memory is the call to armed insurrection issued by Fox News host Glenn Beck and CNN’s Lou Dobbs right after Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration, for which they paid no penalty. Also forgotten are the Tea Party rallies fall 2010 that were held in close proximity to official town hall meetings hosted by Obama on the proposed Affordable Care Act at which members of the audience showed up with loaded weapons. In both cases Democrats responded with silence. These incidents were a potent reminder, if ever one was needed, that many of the accumulated 300 million guns in the U.S.—twice as many as in 1968—had a purpose other than personal enjoyment, one that was profoundly political and served as a silent—and not so silent—form of intimidation of political opponents.

The Tucson Assassination Attempt

Two years later, in January 2011, the threat of armed political violence culminated in the mass shooting by a gunman who targeted a staunch defender of the Affordable Care Act, (Jewish) Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), at an outdoor meeting with her constituents, and left her severely wounded and six other people dead. This was perhaps at the time the most consequential act of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing by white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in 1995 that killed 168 people, most of them government employees. The assassination attempt came after a hard-fought electoral campaign in which Giffords’ opponent Jesse Kelly, an ex-Marine and Tea Party member, distributed flyers calling for voters to come out to a meeting and shoot an assault rifle to support him in defeating her (“Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully-automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly” [sic]). During the same election, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had even featured an electoral map of congressional districts of Democratic members of Congress, including Giffords’, who had voted for the Affordable Care Act, with crosshairs of a gunsight superimposed on each district. After the Tucson shooting Palin remained defiantly unapologetic. Similar images would later re-appear plastered on the van of Cesar Sayoc, the alleged mail bomber of Democratic politicians and liberal supporters, featuring this time around Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in the crosshairs.

How did Democrats respond? As did Republicans, by denouncing the attack as a national tragedy and issuing calls for the cooling of political rhetoric, as if both parties were equally culpable. The theater of bipartisanship won the day at the expense of clear-eyed analysis. The local sheriff overseeing the investigation, Clarence W. Dupnik, had no such qualms and demonstrated an understanding of how political intimidation can work to incite unstable citizens to engage in political violence:

There's reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol. People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences….

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.

 

Denial: Not Taking Political Violence Seriously

Nearly two years since Trump’s Electoral College victory, with the exception of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, Democratic leaders have largely continued to conduct themselves as if they are not interested in taking the full measure of the destructive methods of their opponents, or worse, as if they are looking for reasons not to take political violence seriously. His campaign was a breakthrough that unleashed frightening and uncontrollable public dynamics, and the overtly violent political culture and white nationalism that he has mainstreamed have reshaped American politics for years to come. Until Trump supporters revived the anti-Hilary chant “Lock her up!” at Trump’s rallies this fall and extended the threat to Senator Diane Feinstein after the Kavanaugh hearings, and Michael Moore released his film 11/9 with his clear-eyed view of recent political violence and skullduggery, the liberal political establishment and the mainstream media as if by common agreement, rarely made mention of Trump’s call for the incarceration of his opponent should he win the election, and for her assassination by the Second Amendment People (i.e., gun owners and members of the NRA) should she win. And Trump’s successful incitement of crowds to rough up protestors and the members of press have been passed under virtually universal silence. There were a few exceptions like New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Democratic leaders and journalists acted as if they hoped that the intimidation and threats would cease or go away, much in the way of an abused partner or spouse who pleads, “Oh, honey, you really didn’t mean it, did you?” But, of course “honey” did mean it, or rather, sees no reason to stop and can’t help himself or herself (philandering, drinking, physical violence, verbal abuse, psychological harassment, etc.) and will do it again. And again. One of the goals of the massive January 21st Women’s March was to disabuse party leaders of that illusion early on, but successful as it was, it is not clear their message got through to the Democratic establishment. One has only to think of the case of James Comey, then director of the FBI whose re-opening of the Bureau’s investigation into Hilary Clinton’s email server helped seal the fate of her campaign. After his firing in May 2017, it appeared that all was forgotten and forgiven by Democrats and liberal pundits, as he took up cudgels against Trump.

Our Transformed Politics

The 2016 presidential campaign took place in a public climate of uncontrolled violence as the United States witnessed acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, Orlando, Florida, and San Bernardino, California, brutal treatment by private security contractors of Native American protestors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and a wave of video recordings of unprovoked police killings of African-American men. In this harrowing context, the primaries and general election constituted a traumatic lesson to forgetful Democratic politicians of the power of right-wing intimidation and violence to affect the outcome of election campaigns. They were a reminder that threats and fear-mongering are not occasional excesses of contemporary right-wing politics and policies but an integral part of them. They also recalled to those who had eyes to see and ears to hear political violence’s transformative power: it affects not only targets but also perpetrators, and it doesn’t leave the political field as it found it. It can re-write the political script from which politicians, the news media, and pundits all read. Not only can smears, physical threats, and skullduggery paralyze and defeat opponents, but especially when they come from the White House, they can also legitimize the most authoritarian politics and energize the movement or party that deploys them, be it through political speeches, tweets, rallies, or protests. Republican politicians and their right-wing followers now revel in intimidating and threatening others, glory in it, and find each other and bond through it, even forge a new group identity by means of it.

For many supporters Trump’s violence is the very measure of his liberty and authenticity. Perhaps as much as the fulfillment of any one of his electoral promises or policies (that of course contain their own violence) from tax cuts for corporations and the 1% and appointing a hard-right majority to the Supreme Court to erecting protectionist trade barriers and building a wall against immigrants. He is the fantasy figure of the defiant white man. It was striking how quickly Trump’s verbal intimidation and threats against immigrants and the news media after his inauguration no longer put off establishment conservatives but rather drew them in; they fell behind him, not the reverse. The GOP did not transform him; rather he re-made the Republican Party in his own image proving Beltway insiders wrong again. His approval ratings among registered Republicans has remained largely steady at 80-85% and his overall approval rating among likely or registered voters is as high as it has ever been--44%.

In the hands of the current GOP leadership and Donald Trump, threats of political violence, public intimidation, and acts of skullduggery are not just occasional tools of rough and tumble political campaigns but rather an entire political program and even a form of governing. During the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham countered the poised, careful but emotional testimony of Professor Christine Blasey Ford in response to questions by a Republican prosecutor with a violent preemptive denigration of the motives of their Democratic colleagues. To the wild conspiracy allegations reminiscent of the worst days of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Democratic Senators remained silent allowing the GOP slanders and staged outrage to course through media outlets unanswered. This has been their preferred tactic to acts of Republican intimidation and character assassination over the last 30 years going all the way back to the racist Willie Horton ads targeting the candidacy of Michael Dukakis in 1988. Seizing on their new-found advantage since Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the Republican leadership and Trump, like the seasoned bullies that they are, are now smearing the #MeToo movement as the threat of mob rule in a bid to divide Democrats and delegitimize the Democratic Party as “too extreme and too dangerous to govern.” 

Since the launch of the last presidential campaign, our political atmosphere has crackled with the threat of potential violence. Fear and dread proliferate and paralyze; at their most powerful they can even shape people’s responses, provoking blind panic and, in some cases, counterviolence. The current climate recalls some of the most traumatic years in our recent political history—the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and the Iraq invasion, the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton but perhaps also the stolen presidential elections of 2000. The latter was a case of political thuggery carried out in full view of TV cameras. Many readers will recall, as the Florida vote recount proceeded and reports of physical assaults on poll workers by Republican operatives came in, the air became thick with the threat of political violence. You could cut the mounting climate of fear and dread with a knife, and Al Gore and old guard Democrats hesitated and relented, as if haunted and paralyzed by the unspoken traumatic memory of multiple political assassinations in the 1960s—from civil rights workers and John F. and Robert Kennedy to Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and (later on) gay rights politician Harvey Milk. When the Republican partisans on the Supreme Court put a stop to the recount, Democratic politicians woke up to find themselves ejected from the political arena by a coup d’état and did not muster the courage to say so to the nation.

As we try to make our way through the ongoing pipe bomb crisis—twelve bombs and counting and a prime suspect in custody—for once Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer cast aside their reflexive expressions of hopeful bipartisanhip and issued an aggressive rebuke to Trump and Republicans for creating the harsh national climate that enables such heinous actions. This is a far cry from their public reaction to the Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt and a welcome departure from their usual lackluster response to political intimidation and public bullying. There are now signs of a new awareness that GOP violence is not just an ethical problem or one of “civility” but a political one as well: namely, it has worked for them very well and poses a threat to our democracy. However, one statement, however strong, does not constitute a robust and courageous counter-strategy, which is what is needed to anticipate and combat the growing waves of right-wing and white nationalist violence in our country that has acquired a momentum that now feeds on itself. The genie is out of the bottle: just am I finishing this essay one of the most violent anti-Semitic acts in modern American history has occurred, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It comes on the heels of Trump’s attacks on George Soros and other “globalists” (the revived codeword for Jewish financiers) that he continued even after news broke that one of the mail bombs was destined for George Soros himself.

Author’s Note 2: This is the fourth installment in a series, The Way We Live Now, on the current public climate of fear and intimidation in the United States that has been building for years and since the kick-off of the last presidential campaign in 2015 has come to poison our politics and reached into our very relationships with family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Part One, “The Emotional Toll of Public Bullying and Political Intimidation,” focused on the experience of the sheer power and psychological effects of bullying in general and public bullying and political intimidation in particular. Part Two, “How Political Bullying and Intimidation Work: A Practical Guide,” looked at how public bullying works as a concrete method and set of political tools dating back to the 1980s and provided readers with a map through this potent minefield and a way to anticipate future acts of aggression. Part Three, “Political Thuggery & Party Identities,” explored why over the years Republicans and their right-wing supporters have freely resorted to extremely aggressive political tactics—and just as important--why Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies have often failed to take seriously such acts of political violence and skullduggery by their opponents and respond accordingly. Part of the answer, I argue, lies in their respective practices of loyalty and identity, social composition, and conceptions of governing.