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.
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