Thinking Your Way Into Political Violence?
Thinking Your Way Into Political Violence?
What happens if the national security state decides it doesn’t understand “We protect us"
I woke up yesterday to an email from The New Yorker talking about the ubiquity of political violence. Current Affairs just had a very good essay exploring why “political violence is all around us.” And while the two attempts on Trump’s life in less than 60 days punctuates the trend, it’s not a new thing; only a newly recognized part of how we think about political theater interacting with the real world.
If you haven’t been following, the larger inciting incident for this vibe shift is a mounting far-right pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, initiated by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance (whose home state happens to be Ohio), on the basis of nothing more than conspiracy theory. at has a good piece that can catch you up on this emerging major crisis.
Violence has always been part of the American imagination. Far-right violence has never vacated the American experience. And America makes no apology for the murders its state commits abroad. But in my lifetime, most Americans have not thought of killing inside the United States as a legitimate means to political ends.
That might be changing. In the most obvious sense, America is experiencing a tragic renaissance in far-right militias, and the whole point of the MAGA political project is that violence against designated enemies is a cleansing means to reactionary ends.
But on the left, that kind of thing has been anathema. In the concluding chapter of Grand Strategies of the Left, I even noted that:
Most Americans, and in particular leftists, are not ready to disrupt their daily lives with the ways and means required of truly anti-fascist ends. For now, career- and life-risking campaigns of sustained civil disobedience, general strikes sabotage, insurgency, or rebellion are almost entirely absent from their political imagination.
But that too might be changing. Two smart, fairly popular people I respect have called for armed community self-defense in response to the Proud Boys flooding into Ohio to attack Haitians…that’s new.
Labor leaders should be declaring vocally, “There will be no pogrom in Ohio, period.” And this really is an opportunity for politicians of courage to emerge—all those congressmen cosplaying hero on behalf of Taiwan and Ukraine have a chance to save lives and confront militarized violence in their own country…and yet we’ve seen nothing from them so far.
The calls from Kim Kelly and Malcolm Harris seemed to be immediately popular, eliciting virtually no pushback, even on a high-friction platform like twitter. And both are right about the need for communities to protect our Haitian immigrant brothers and sisters from attack.
If you’re opposed to racist murder, you don’t tolerate racist murder. And that means showing up for anyone being targeted by racist murderers. That was the burning ember at the essence of Black Lives Matter before it became a way for Nike to sell more shoes and Hollywood to tap into more diverse markets.
But there are unappreciated risks about what’s being demanded here—that is, armed community self-defense. You don’t have to be a “squishy lib” to worry about what happens after sections of organized labor convert to armed partisans.
So look: The cause here is just, and the intention is to prevent violence. Also, people are gonna do what they’re gonna do.
But it’s worth thinking about this strategically, including how, in a dialectical sense, this both works within and alters the political possibilities of our historical moment.