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Column: Thinking about rhetoric and violence
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: June 23, 2017
We should be disturbed by efforts to delegitimize the investigation of President Donald Trump and his administration. Last week, President Trump and allies took to social and conservative media to decry the investigation as a witch hunt being perpetrated by a legal team larded with Democrats.
This discussion, which should be fairly straightforward, has now been mined with the prospective implications of last week’s shooting at an Alexandria ball field. When a 66-year-old, self-employed Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to murder a group of Republican members of Congress and staffers, it shook a country in which serious violence rarely intrudes on our politics.
Most people on either side of the political commentariat restricted themselves to expressing concerns for the victims and relief that no one was killed. Still, a predictable hot take emerged under which the shooting was the inevitable result of violent left-wing political rhetoric. Kathy Griffin’s tasteless pose with a decapitated Trump head loomed large in these takes.
I don’t find this argument terribly compelling, although I also believe depicting the decapitation of the president unacceptably coarsens our discourse, regardless of whether it prompts actual violence.
Any political or social movement carries the risk of attracting some people whose primary driver is a desire to hurt people and break stuff. In general, the less mainstream the movement is, the more likely it is to attract some of that personality. The Alexandria shooter’s history of violence toward members of his family strongly suggests this sort of damaged personality.
If someone believes his political beliefs make a more appealing front for a mundane desire to do violence, I’m not sure how much policing of our rhetoric can deter him.
I do believe that our political discourse should avoid dehumanizing attacks, outright lies and calls for violence. In fact, we should routinely reaffirm the principle that change should be sought through the ballot rather than the bullet. But I can’t claim any great confidence that we can do much about lone wolf attackers who can access military-grade firepower.
Happily, there’s little evidence that a lone wolf attack is enough to touch off widespread political violence. While the attack in Alexandria is a continuing trauma for those involved and a source of anxiety generally, it is unlikely to create any long-term disruptions in our polity.
Large-scale political violence occurs when a substantial portion of the population no longer believes the government to be legitimate. This is why various screeds against the investigation—most notably the tweetstorm unleased by the president after the shooting and public statements by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—should concern us.
At this point, the available evidence suggests a non-trivial chance that he has engaged in a pattern of obstruction serious enough that Congress may act to remove him from office.
President Trump is a historically unpopular president, but he retains a core of highly energized, fanatically devoted supporters who will discount whatever they see or hear if it does not support him. Various theories about the end game of this strategy have been proposed, from clearing the way to fire by Independent Counsel Robert Mueller to making impeachment proceedings politically unpalatable.
That makes the campaign against the Mueller investigation smart politics of a sort, but only for the sake of protecting Trump’s power and prestige. Over the long run, they have the potential of doing real damage to our political process and to the stability of American society.
The insults to the investigatory process are of a piece with the president’s regular fulminations against the “deep state” and denunciations of his own staff. The likely effect will be to deepen the beliefs among Trump’s core supporters that he is being attacked through an illegitimate process.
It feels like the country is closer to endemic political violence not than any time since the 1960s, and possibly since the years immediately preceding the Civil War. In this era of deep political and cultural divisions, it would be lovely if we could cool down the rhetoric. It would be amazing if we could simultaneously disagree and acknowledge the humanity of the other side.
But through it all, we need to respect the importance of what we talk about when we talk about politics. The rhetoric can get heated because this stuff matters. It goes to the core beliefs through which people define themselves and not infrequently lives are at stake. We can’t expect every political disagreement to be expressed through competing dispassionate white papers.
But we should expect that our thought leaders will not throw the whole system into doubt. Arguments about policy must respect the process of politics.