These Violent Delights
Conservatives fetishize violence. Liberals fetishize non-violence. What could go wrong?
One of the defining elements of the Trump era was the liberal idea that Trump himself was so obviously incompetent, crooked, sexist, racist, etc., he would be his own worst enemy. This mode of thinking extended from the Hillary Clinton campaign, who saw him as a self-evidently weak opponent, through the Mueller investigation and Trump’s first impeachment — both of which relied on, politically at least, appeals to liberal notions of patriotism, national honor, and American exceptionalism. In short: “I’d like to see ol’ Donny wriggle out of THIS jam.”
Beyond Trump, there is a strong liberal tendency to see apparent contradictions as inherently unstable. Fossil fuel companies are poisoning the planet — it simply can’t go on like this. Or, the grotesque wealth inequality revealed and exacerbated by the pandemic, where billionaires go to space on a lark and working people deplete their savings, is simply unsustainable. It’s a seductive mode of analysis, equal parts “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” and “I demand to speak to the manager.” It’s also a mode of thinking that relies on patience rather than action, compromise rather than antagonism, and, most of all, an appeal to authority that may or may not exist.
The truth is, fossil fuel companies could very well just cook the planet. Wealth inequality could just keep getting worse. On a long enough timeline maybe those dynamics are unsustainable because society will collapse to one degree or another, but there’s nothing about our currently political system that will necessarily course correct.
One aspect of our political lives where there is a very clear disconnect is in the conservative and liberal approaches to violence — specifically street-level, interpersonal physical violence. The asymmetry was on full display following the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people and injuring a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Conservatives across the entire movement celebrated the verdict, granting Rittenhouse top-tier cable news puff pieces, stumbling over one another to offer him a Congressional internship, and generally reveling in his realization of their collective blood-lust fantasies.
Those reactions to Rittenhouse’s acquittal have to be seen as one pole on the spectrum of conservatives’ increasingly open embrace of extralegal violence. There’s no shortage of similar examples: the wink-nod-am-I-joking-or-not tweet from Rep Paul Gosar, or the implied violence of Rep Lauren Boebert calling Rep Ilhan Omar a suicide bomber. (Boebert’s just-joking shtick continued in her post-non-apology video, where she again accused Omar of supporting terrorists and promised she would always “shoot straight” with her constituents.) It’s no accident that Omar received at least one vicious death threat after Boebert’s comments were widely disseminated. Another recent example that comes to mind is Rep Madison Cawthorn’s promise of “bloodshed” if future elections are rigged, like in 2020, which was not rigged. Trump, of course, thrives in this rhetorical register, as when he called on the street-fighting fascist gang the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the actual violence that Rittenhouse and his fellow cop-adjacent vigilantes have unleashed, including — in my mind at least — the preposterous and terrifying attempted coup on January 6th. The entire Republican Party is in coalition with these forces, a point Jonathan Chait made recently in New York Magazine. Chait — who is always better when writing about the right than the left — was specifically talking about the events of January 6th, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to include the GOP’s approval of Rittenhouse’s actions as another example of the dynamic he highlighted.
Rittenhouse is of course only the most high-profile white vigilante who self-deputized to aid in the reactionary crackdown against the George Floyd uprisings in the Summer of 2020. Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and any number of other semi-official groups, not to mention ad hoc white gangs, all saw an opportunity to aid police in their violent repression of racial justice activists. As I wrote for The American Prospect at the time, the symbiotic history of vigilantes and cops in the United States dates back at least to the creation of the first KKK during Reconstruction, and has continued more or less unbroken since then.
But if the right has rekindled its barely dormant joy in fascistic street fighting, liberals have doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) down on their fetishizing of non-violence, not as a tactic or strategy, but an end in-and-of itself. And the kind of non-violence that liberals continue to fetishize isn’t relegated to interpersonal physical violence. It extends equally — or more — to the inviolability of property, that heavenly category of being that, not coincidentally, was Rittenhouse’s pretext for playing Rambo.
To see exactly how far apart the two parties are in their approach to vigilantism, look no further than Rep Eric Swalwell’s response to the Rittenhouse verdict. “We have more peaceful marching to do,” Swalwell tweeted. “To where? Every ballot box across our land. Lace up.” Okay, buddy. Do you have a plan b? Joe Biden, avatar of moderation, took the moment to underline the inherent legitimacy of the US criminal punishment system. “The jury system works, and we have to abide by it,” Biden said.
The left was virtually uniform in its reaction that the system that brought Rittenhouse to trial was designed to protect him from the outset and at every stage of the ordeal, which it certainly did. But with a few notable exceptions, there is little above-the-surface self-defense organizing or theorizing among leftists, and exactly zero (0) among MSNBC-watching liberals. There are anti-fascist groups working below the radar to disturb fascist organizing, including with physical force if necessary — and even some liberals secretly enjoyed watching Richard Spencer get punched — but for the most part any discussion of “violence” within the left-liberal discourse is almost entirely about property destruction. (See this Ezra Klein column about Andreas Malms’ How to blow up a pipeline for more.)
Just to underline the point here, Biden, Swalwell, and the rest of the Democratic Party are not working in coalition with the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association. Democrats can barely stomach DSA — don’t expect them to link up with Rose City Antifa any time soon.
For as much as liberals have embraced a folkloric telling of Black liberation entirely free from violence, there is a long tradition on the left of engaging in self-defense and community defense, including with arms. Within the history of Black freedom struggles, two of the go-to resources are Charles Cobb’s This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, and Robin Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe. Mark Bray’s Antifa offers a good history of specifically anti-fascist counter-violence.
It’s worth being explicit here that I don’t think the left should fetishize violence, nor do I think the left should take a page from the NRA playbook and begin arming itself to the teeth. For one, I would like to live in a country with fewer shootouts, not more. For another, there is no equivalence in treatment in the US criminal system between reactionary, white supremacist violence and violence carried out by oppressed people trying to free themselves. To state the obvious, self-defense and stand your ground laws de facto apply only to white people, and are more likely to be a successful legal defense when the victims are Black. The same is true of conceal and carry laws. Left protesters regularly face the prospect of decades behind bars, not to mention terrorism charges, for property damage crimes. They will not find leniency or sympathy in the courts after committing actual violence.
All of which brings me back to where we started from. For as much as I find this asymmetric development between the right and left/liberals extremely troubling, I don’t think it’s inherently fragile. I think there is actually a fairly durable — if horrifying — political reality in which the right feels increasingly emboldened to terrorize people in the streets and liberals continue to see the high road not just as the only road worth taking, but as the only road that even exists. The left may very well look back to the history of Black sharecroppers arming themselves against white former enslavers and find lessons to draw on — but they will not find liberals cheering them on the way Tucker Carlson’s audience embraced Rittenhouse.