The Way We Live
Now, Part Four
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.
