Debate Delayed

The Quick and Dirty: The problem with the debate over political violence in the United States is that it comes years, if not decades, later than it should, and addresses symptoms, not causes. Because the competing narratives have incentives to cast those who disagree as being deliberately unreasonable, the underlying problems that people are responding to aren't being addressed, let alone fixed, in a way that they likely would be if the debating parties viewed each other as rational actors, responding to something that they genuinely consider dangerous. It's not difficult to find an "extreme" position that people would oppose, even if it won an election, or a position that, were it to win an election, would cause people to suspect that something was afoot. The problem is that a lot of people seem to believe that only positions odious to them would fall into such categories.

The Long Form: As the Left and Right of American politics develop larger constituencies that are mutually hostile to one another (and increasingly hostile to those whose support they find lacking), conversations concerning political violence in the United States has become more and more common.

Generally speaking, the media outlets I read/listen to tend to be "center-left." Genuinely centrist media is pretty thin on the ground, in part because politically-loaded commentary tends to drive audience share, and centrism isn't known for its strident partisan attacks on the political wings. I have no real interest in more straightforwardly Leftist ideals and commentary, and the center-right media in the United States that strikes me as actually worth reading, is not so much so that it's worth paying for; media that both leans right and is supported by something other than direct subscriptions tends to quickly devolve into, at best, a somewhat mild version of "own the libs," which is still too negative, and too personal, for my tastes. (The more more stereotypical "right-wing media" is, of course, right out.)

Center-left commentary on political violence tends to be worried, with a slight tinge of hysteria. I suspect that this is because the American Left also tends to be the most worried about (certain forms of) gun violence and perceives the outbreak of political violence in the United States as being a steady stream of Columbines, Route 91 Harvests and Pulse nightclubs, as armed White sexists, ethno-nationalists and other forms of bigot undertake one shooting spree after another, with the lobbying arm of the American firearms industry running interference for them.

The article and podcasts that I have read and heard recently tend to have a focus on the expending range of actions that the presumed armed and dangerous are now understood to be worthy of a violent response. But missing from this aspect of the discussion is a worldview that sees threats all around itself.

The partisan nature of the debate asserts itself in the usual way; there is an assumption of what the underlying reality of everything is, and that assumption is never really questioned. And right now, one of the assumptions being made is that people are either "committed to democracy" or they aren't and the American Right's commitment to democracy is fading, while it's still alive and well on the Left.

If you've read this far, you're likely aware that I'm going to posit that this view is overly simplistic and self-serving. When I speak to people who I understand to be Left-learning (and who often self-identify that way) they tend to be less than 100% committed to democracy (however they happen to define it). They, too, believe that it's sometimes proper, or even necessary, to fight for what one understands to be right when it is threatened by others, even if that threat comes in the form of a lawfully-held election.

After all, the American Revolution was simply a form of political violence. And while it's true that Great Britain had a monarch at the time, Parliament existed. It's taken for granted that the colonists had legitimate grievances with the English Crown and that the rebellion and subsequent war were legitimate ways to act on those grievances. What tends to be lost in all of this is the idea that this understanding of legitimacy wasn't universal, let alone objective and self-evident.

As the United States devolves into political camps that see each other as hostile, and, more importantly, deliberately malicious, those camps are going to make threat assessments that come back as dire and existential. Okay, so the American Left sees the Right as having devolved into outraged hysteria over trivialities, manipulated by self-interested political actors who should know better. This is different from the Loyalist position (which is now regarded as obviously wrong) during the Revolution precisely how?