The dark cloud of political violence
In the early Obama years, I covered Tea Party rallies for my newspaper at the time, the Tribune-Review. The rallies at an abandoned air strip in Westmoreland County were a brew of the utterly mundane and the entirely outrageous.
The featured speakers, like former Pennsylvania senator Rich Santorum and the up-and-coming Herman Cain (both were running as Republicans for president) were, sad to say, forgettable. Cain, who went to enjoy a brief campaign moment in the sun, was so unimpressive that I failed to interview him after he spoke. (My bad.)
The crowds were the thing. My most vivid recollection is the half-dozen or so men armed with rifles. The rifles looked like Army M-16s.
Even at an event notable for eccentricities (a regular rally-goer dressed up like George Washington, which was harmless enough, except the guy seemed to figure he was the real Father of his Country), the weapon-wielders stood out.
They looked menacing. They spoke menacingly. They told me they would gladly go to Harrisburg to prevent this or that from happening. (To the best of my recollection, they were chiefly concerned with tax hikes.)
They scoffed at the notion that in the United States ballots substituted for bullets. The practice of democracy seemed to mean nothing to them, even though they insisted they were patriots more than a little eager to defend the country and its way of life.
That was in 2010 or thereabouts. Twelve years later, we are in a different America – an America in which the brandishing of weapons is now, apparently, a part of a normalized political landscape.
Recently, in Arizona, a federal judge ruled that it was OK for a group, some of whose members were armed, masked and wearing tactical gear, to patrol ballot drop boxes in Maricopa (Phoenix) and Yavapai (Prescott) counties.
The 24-hour patrols prompted charges of harassment by some voters.
The judge in the case ruled on First Amendment grounds that the patrols were lawful.
Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and a legal affairs commentator for NBC News, taking exception to the decision, writes that even a “threat of violence is very worrisome.
“Political violence,” Hasen noted, is “especially dangerous because it threatens not just physical harm but also the right to live in a free society where voting and public service are safe occupations.
“When people are intimidated out of voting or serving in office it is a loss not just for them; our whole society suffers.”
All kinds of democratic political activities suffer when harassment, or the threat of harassment, takes place. Even the garden variety activity of placing a political yard sign on one’s own lawn becomes fraught.
In 2018, Joanne Freeman, who teaches at Yale and authored a book about political violence in Congress in the lead-up to the Civil War called “The Field of Blood,” wrote in The Atlantic that “the politics of outrage” was more and more the norm in the United States.
“Politicians have appealed to our lowest common denominators,” she observed, “using the power of anger and intimidation to spread their message and get their way.”
She suggested that “the bullying of opponents into silence and frightening the public into the surrender of rights for the sake of security” was no way to run a democracy.
All of which brings up the recent assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in the couple’s San Francisco home. Paul Pelosi was bludgeoned by a hammer-wielding, middle-of-the-night intruder who apparently was hoping to break Nancy Pelosi’s kneecaps.
The Speaker was not at home. She was in Washington at the time of the attack.
The break-in and the attack represent much more than the bullying and the harassment of a political figure. The attacker had planned to disable and hold Nancy Pelosi hostage, a political crime just short of assassination.
Freeman writes that political outrage reached a crescendo in the United States in the 1850s, the decade leading up to the Civil War. The fights that took place in the halls of Congress ricocheted across the country. “Anger begat anger,” she says, making “cross-sectional” dialogue increasingly difficult. War became all but inevitable.
Heaven forbid that we’re not careening down a similar path today.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.