Today Professor Richardson and Erick Erickson managed to echo each other in a way that is positively eerie, as if their epistemic bubbles are connected by some hidden tube, perhaps like the hypothesized connection between astronomical black holes and white holes. Richardson is up first, discussing, initially, the censuring of Rep Gosar (R-AZ) for his hacked anime of himself killing Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and assaulting another, before coming to a conclusion:
This is an important moment. It appears that all but two Republican lawmakers are willing to embrace violence against Democrats if it will lead to political power.
There is a subtle difference between their willingness to defend the violence of the January 6 insurrectionists, and today’s stance. When Republicans have defended the insurrectionists, they did so with the argument—false though it was—that the rioters simply wanted to defend the country from a stolen election. Today there was no pretense of an excuse for Gosar’s violent fantasy; it was defended as normal.
The march toward Republicans’ open acceptance of violence has been underway since January 6, as leaders embraced the Big Lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and then as leaders have stood against mask and vaccine mandates as tyranny. Those lies have led to a logical outcome: their supporters believe that in order to defend the nation, they should fight back against those they have been told are destroying the country.
When Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization devoted to promoting right-wing values on campuses, spoke in Idaho last month, the audience applauded when a man asked when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” the man said. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk denounced the question not on principle, but because he said it would play into Democratic hands. He agreed that, as he said, “We are living under fascism.”
Erickson, also today, has to go back in history a bit to make a case, before coming to these conclusions:
According to a 2001 report, “Leftist extremists were responsible for three-fourths of the officially designated acts of terrorism in America in the 1980s.” They tend to be younger and better educated than right-wing extremists and they tend to live in urban areas thereby making high population centers more target-rich. (Source)
Most importantly, progressives have now internalized several propositions that make it very likely they are about to re-embrace their historic violence.
First, progressives believe they are now the majority in the United States. Progressives, bolstered by media, cultural, and academic institutions present themselves as the dominant actors, voices, and policy makers in the United States. As much as the right, in the Bush and Obama era, sought to run hardcore conservatives in moderate areas convinced they could win, now progressives are routinely rallying around progressives in moderate areas convinced their victories are inevitable.
Second, progressives view the GOP as a threat to democracy. In so doing, just as some Republicans have internalized 2020 was a stolen election, it has become dogma for Democrats that the GOP is suppressing votes. Voter suppression explains the Democrats’ losses and, again, the progressives believe they’re really dominant. As they internalize both that the GOP is suppressing the vote and that the GOP is a threat to democracy, as a wave election shapes up in 2022, we should expect the left to mobilize more aggressively to stop those they view as a threat to democracy.
Third, progressives have internalized both that we have only a decade to stop the irreversible destruction of the planet and that non-progressive forces are blocking solutions with the help of corporate interests. They truly believe we’re headed towards the end of humanity as we know it unless extreme measures are taken yesterday. They fundamentally, truly, and very literally believe the planet is at a tipping point and the United States must act immediately. But the United States will not act because of Republicans, Joe Manchin, and corporations.
There’s more points, but I’ll stop here. Except to note that his assertion that progressives live in their own little bubble sounds a lot like the right-wing epistemic bubble that has been recognized for twenty years:
Fourth, while only about a quarter of Americans are on Twitter, it is predominated by progressives who increasingly in the real world and online are more prone to self-isolate with likeminded people. It makes them less able to relate, more willing to believe their own narratives and mythologies, and less able to understand or tolerate dissent. It makes it more likely that progressives will both generate and believe online agitation against conservatives and bolster the first point — they think they are the majority. They think Twitter is real life. This is not my opinion. This is the actual data. See also this.
Bold mine – the words that describe the Republican Party stalwarts the best are what he uses for his political opponents.
There are a lot of “it’s worth noting” things in both posts. Erickson mentions the old Weather Underground group, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, without noting that it was an anti-Vietnam War group. The Vietnam War is best known for the dubiousness of everything connected to it, from how the soldiers were treated by society, to the deceptions practiced by the military, right up to and including the Secretary of Defense, to the barbarity of both sides. He wishes to bring to the fore a supposed lefty tendency to violence, without mentioning the terrible tragedy of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, or the shocking actions of Kirk that Richardson mentions.
And there’s no mention of the admittedly difficult subject of measuring frequency of violence, nor the question of the morality of violence – when is violence considered justified? If someone takes a completely legal action that threatens someone else’s existential future, is violence justified or not in the face of intransigence? How about the suggestion that violence connected to the abortion issue is simply murderous violence would no doubt draw protests that they’re protecting unborn babies – a ridiculous remark to my ears, but justified to him.
Richardson, likewise, ignores her own side in favor of the other. Even today, though, we can see extreme actions by the left, such as this:
Two young women scaled a huge coal handling machine shortly before dawn on Wednesday, disrupting operations at the world’s largest coal port for several hours to protest what they say is Australia’s lack of action on climate change.
“My name is Hannah, and I am here abseiled off the world’s largest coal port,” 21-year-old Hannah Doole declared on a live-streamed video as she hovered high over massive piles of coal bound for export. “I’m here with my friend Zianna, and we’re stopping this coal terminal from loading all coal into ships and stopping all coal trains.” [WaPo]
It’s not precisely violence, but it is an extremism. How many more steps before murder becomes acceptable?
For me, I see this as another example of one of my favorite morbid subjects, the historical demographic shifts described in SECULAR CYCLES (Turchin & Nefedov), in action. There’s no doubt that each of these writers are elite members of society, one a professor on the left, and the other a lawyer and radio host on the right (who, incidentally, disclaims being an intellectual), and one of the observations of Turchin and Nefedov is the tendency of a disintegrating empire’s elite to engage in internecine warfare, once all existential foes have been vanquished and overpopulation has set in. Richardson and Erickson are each attempting to control the narrative by which the “warriors” essential to the power of the elites will be attracted to this or that faction, one by spinning stories that invoke American history, mostly from the American Civil War forward, the other using a religious foundation that preserves an element of irrationality and love of amateurs quite out of proportion to its destructiveness to society.
And which side will win? I remain a rationalist and agnostic, which means I find Erickson’s moral and intellectual foundation at least somewhat dubious. Nor is Erickson’s history particular encouraging. For example, his claim that the passing of Justice Ginsburg and the ascension of Judge Barrett to SCOTUS would result in riots and bloodshed, to the fault of Ginsburg, never came true. Some people turned red in the face, it’s true, but it wasn’t bloodshed. In brief, Erickson’s understanding of how the world acts is not something I’d put money on.
But the left, traditionally the resting place for at least pretending to respect science, has certainly diminished my confidence in the last few years. Between, again, violence, and the apparent dismissal of the liberal democracy under which we’ve lived for so long, in company with the use of debate as a way forward, in favor of near-religious decrees, it’s become hard to see a clear way forward without dismissing this political grab for power. When Erickson or, more credibly, Andrew Sullivan dismisses claims of meritocracy, or punctuality, or any of a number of other qualities as being merely tools of oppression, it is depressing – not because either is wrong, but because they are right, and it’s a self-condemnation of the left and its lack of intellectual rigor.
In the end, we may see violence on both ends, and whether this is a condemnation of political positions or religious institutions or civics education, I don’t know. I deplore it. But it may be inevitable.
