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A man was shot in the neck yesterday.
The victim was a political commentator. His Republican ideas fell roughly within the normal range of partisan debate. One part of his public image that he valued was a commitment to peaceably talk to anyone.
He was a young man, and healthy as far as anyone knew. He had a wife and two young kids, and they were present at the event where he was speaking. These details are important because they relate to norms. Norms control the spread of memetics, and memetics decide what happens next. Right now, the memetics are not looking good. For proof, just go watch the Instagram stories of people you used to know.
During his speech at a small university, a gunman sneaked up and gruesomely killed the man in front of his family and the audience. It was not an instant death. He was stopped mid-word under a banner that read, "Prove me wrong."
Later that day, after massive effort in vain from doctors and nurses, his wife became a widow and their two children lost their father.
Republican reaction is mostly unsurprising. He's a martyr. His family photos paint a picture of innocence destroyed by depraved violence. Comms are working hard to make sure everyone grasps the brutality of destroying a family in this manner.
Some have compared the path we seem to be on to Italy’s Years of Lead, a two-decade spate of pan-spectrum political assassinations from the '60s to the '80s. Others see echoes of the Weather Underground bombings in the US throughout the 1970s. Their point, in making these grave analogies, is that America is not immune to political violence that simmers bloodily and dysfunctionally below the level of civil war for years on end.
said yesterday, "We are running out of off ramps."What’s more interesting than the solemn fear on the right, however, is what’s going on with the left. The reactions from the normally fairly lockstep Democratic voting bloc have, in this moment, been far from monolithic.
There is a vocal segment of left-wing commentators reacting with glee about the killing. Another stripe seems to be taking an Obama-esque "we go high" approach, using the shooting to press a need for gun control while only quietly implying a self-made tragedy of dying by the thing you fought to keep legal.
Yet another subset, those of the center-moderating Newsom ilk, are expressing pure condolence, refusing to bring in the slightest hint of policy as they try to reach across the aisle as 'the adults in the room.'
There's one more faction at play, though, and at the popular level it may be the biggest of all. They're the hardline antinormative whatabouters.
This faction of the left is not just mocking the deceased, but is outright attacking anyone who is mourning him or expressing dismay about political violence, calling them hypocrites and loudly trying to pull the conversation back to the administration's wrongs abroad and at home. Their concern about the actual act, whether intellectual or emotional, seems to be approximately zero.
These are your friends and neighbors. These are the youth at large. These are the people I want to speak to and about in the context of the current American moment.
Their argument goes like this: “Why are you so upset about one act of political violence here at home when millions of people are suffering and dying due to political violence you either condone or ignore around the world? Please, spare us your selective indignation. Violence has been happening to the oppressed everywhere, and you didn’t care, so don’t act like this one man’s death is some unique horror when he himself was an advocate for the propagation of injustice.”
There is a certain sense to this on the surface level. For these leftist critics, wars are political and wars are violent, so naturally every death of an innocent in places like Yemen or Gaza is 'political violence' by definition. Neglect and the denial of resources, too, are forms of violence, so every death of poverty and despair is violence in an Engels sense, so long as a rich person exists somewhere in society. Most broadly, even language (or silence!) can be called violence, which means that the man on stage was himself engaging in a violent political act for which the action of blowing open his arteries and smashing through his spinal column, leaving him conscious, can be seen as perhaps defensively retaliatory.
By this expansive new definition of political violence, the bullet that killed the man on stage is placed in the same category as a child dying of malnutrition in a Mississippi trailer park, or a family killed by an airstrike in Syria, or a diabetic patient dying because they couldn’t pay for insulin. The people making this argument are essentially rhetorically submerging the singular event, one highly visible murder, in a sea of global and systemic violence until it loses all notability.
They know not what they do, or what Chesterton fence they are uprooting. They will be very, very sorry if they actually accomplish the rhetorical coup of redefinition they are attempting in the American cultural consciousness.
Why?
Political violence as a cultural concept is more than the sum of its parts. It has associated images, motifs, and moments in American history. It is Oswald, Sirhan, Booth. It is a creepy young man crouching in the crowd waiting to bring fear and misery to millions.
For some like Luigi Mangione, this set of images has a sickly luring effect, but for most it is repulsive. Why does the typical American man or woman with extreme political zeal and little to live for still reject the idea of blowing up a Supreme Court justice to swing the court in his or her favor? Why is it only the occasional freak who embarks on this odyssey of infamy? It's because the archetype of the political violence perpetrator in our cultural cognition is an other, a reject, a figure of shame. If you go down his path, you will be disowned by your loved ones and bring disgrace to your family in a media circus lasting decades. You soil our most sacred civic norms. You drag us into darkness. You are outcast.
But not if political violence is something that happens a thousand times a day.
There is a constant leftist temptation to take words that Western liberal tradition spent hundreds of years to make taboo and redefine them so that only a leftist worldview is free from the sin. 'Racist' largely fell to this destabilizing gambit over the past ten years, losing much of its hard-earned power to condemn in the process, and as a result conservative whites have predictably flocked from the failed Schelling point of race-blind conduct toward a much more sinister identitarianism. We're not going to like what happens if 'political violence' as a term suffers the same fate.
Put aside for a moment the utilitarian calculus of killing an 'evil' man for the 'greater good.' Put aside as well the analytical interrogation of the linguistic definitions of political and violence. What we're talking about right here is a détente that allows our democratic system to function, a détente that millions of young men and women online seem more than eager to destroy.
Morals, as J. L. Mackie lays out, are agreements created within human institutions over very long periods of time. They are built out of norms and memes, which shape each other. Norms limit what memes spread, and memes reinforce or break down norms in turn. They are not inherent, God-given, or inscribed on a quasar. Sorry, they're just not. This is the physical world. We construct our own codes of behavior.
American civil society, as such, has constructed a pretty sensible norm against threatening, maiming, or murdering prominent domestic political figures because of their beliefs. 'Political violence' is the name we use for these acts.
This norm didn’t come from thin air. It developed because we saw the alternative, constant violent strife, as undesirable and destructive. It’s a fragile status quo, in some ways, one we maintain through education, through our leaders’ rhetoric, through countless legal safeguards and cultural cues. When everyone, left and right, agrees that political violence is wrong and has a common understanding of what this shorthand means, it reinforces the norm and helps keep the peace.
On the other hand, when you categorically conflate the very specific act of shooting a man mid-speech with other forms of conduct like foreign arms sales or advocating for gun rights, you are propagating a meme that breaks down the 'special' character of the norm against civil assassinations. You are confusing the term, and thus weakening the taboo. You may hope, optimistically, that in doing so you are making deaths in Gaza less palatable to Americans, but you are probably just making domestic assassinations more banal.
Consider the person, perhaps your old friend from school, who is currently saying on their Instagram story, in effect, the following: “Actually, political violence is all around us all the time. It’s in every insulin price hike, every missed meal, every battlefield abroad. By comparison, one conservative talking head getting shot is not a big deal."
This is, to put it mildly, a dramatic redefining of terms. It’s taking something very visceral and concrete, the image of a man being gunned down in front of his kids because of his politics, and asking people to equate it with things that are happening every hour, every minute, every second as part of the background fabric of life on this planet. The effect of this redefinition, if it were to be accepted, would be to would drown us in noise. If “political violence” includes everything, then eventually the term means nothing. If the masses start believing that we’re basically living in a perpetual state of political violence already, because of all the social ills and global horrors out there, then the special shock or outrage that we feel at someone being shot on stage begins to dissipate. The taboo loses its talismanic power. Violence as a category becomes part of everyday life, and any action can be construed as defensible retaliation against aggression. That is very dangerous, very bloody society to inhabit.
Oh, and you know what else? Republicans are watching these Instagram stories, too. They’re not blind. They see the threat manifesting. The thing about moral norms is that you need to trust that your adversarial counterparty also buys in. Even if the Republican partisan does not ideologically believe in the violence of words or in social murder, he will not remain beholden to the norm of free speech if he gets nothing from it. He will not martyr his people to your asymmetrical tactics with no retaliation ad infinitum. Once the gloves come off, once each side has people committing real violence because the old norm is gone, we will have stepped off a cliff where climbing back up may not end up being that easy.
If we truly enter a period where assassinations, bombings, and street clashes become commonplace, then many who are currently happy to cheer for murder on Instagram will themselves be living in constant fear of horrific personal violence, longing for the quaint days of stable civic values of free speech.
I feel sorry for them, in their folly, I really do.
But we might not be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
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