by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe
this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved
— I do not expect the house to fall
— but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
— Abraham Lincoln,
Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858
On June 14, 2017
a 66-year-old man named James Hodgkinson crashed a group of Republican
Congressmembers and aides practicing for the next day’s annual Congressional
baseball game, one of the few things Republicans and Democrats still do together
in our highly polarized capital. He brought a gun with him and, when he was
told the people practicing at the field in Alexandria, Virginia, were
Republicans, he started shooting them. One of the people he shot was
Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), who as House majority whip was the
third highest-ranking official in the House leadership.
It was because
of Scalise’s importance to the House of Representatives’ leadership that the
two real heroes of the event, Capitol
Police officers David Bailey and Crystal Griner, were present at all. As a
member of the House’s upper echelons, Scalise rates 24/7 protection from the
Capitol Police, whereas rank-and-file Congressmembers are pretty much on their
own. Once they realized what was going on, Bailey and Griner engaged the
shooter in a gun battle, and while both were wounded — Bailey seriously, Groner
critically — they were able to direct the shooter’s fire away from his intended
targets until D.C.’s own city police came on the scene, joined the battle and ultimately
killed Hodgkinson.
The Alexandria
shooting, which left four injured and Scalise in critical condition facing
multiple surgeries to get his body working again, wasn’t the only mass shooting
in the U.S. that day. At the other end of the country, in San Francisco, a
disgruntled ex-employee of United Parcel Service (UPS) showed up at his former
workplace with a UPS uniform and a gun. He fatally shot three drivers and then
turned his gun on himself.
And that wasn’t
the only suspicious incident that took the lives of innocent people in a major
urban area on June 14. A giant apartment building in London called the Grenfell
Tower went up in flames, killing at least 30 people. No one yet knows whether
the fire was accidental or deliberate, but given what’s been happening in
Britain lately — at least three recent major terrorist attacks, two in London
and one at Ariana Grande’s tour concert in Manchester — it’s understandable
that a lot of people in the U.K. are wondering whether this was yet another
attack.
Though embattled
British Prime Minister Theresa May (who just lost a major election and is
holding on to power by the skin of her teeth) has promised an aggressive
government response, protesters have taken to the streets demanding justice for
the Grenfell victims as well as more money to help the survivors. The British
government has arrested a 43-year-old man named Omega Mwaikambo, not for any
involvement with the fire but for posting video of a man leaping out of the
building onto his Facebook page. More recent reports on Grenfell (see
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/20/15829416/london-fire-grenfell-tower-explained-political-crisis)
have said the fire was an accident but have blamed the building management, the
British government and others for allowing the building to become more
vulnerable to catastrophic fire.
The Alexandria
shooting was inevitably compared to an incident that had taken place 6 ½ years
earlier in Casas Adobes, Arizona, a suburb of Tucson. On January 8, 2011 U.S.
Congressmember Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) was hosting a public appearance
at a Safeway parking lot which she called “Congress on Your Corner.” A
22-year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner approached her with a gun and shot her
in the head. She survived, but suffered so much brain damage she eventually
retired from Congress. Five people died in the attack, including federal judge
John Roll, Giffords’ staff member Gabe Zimmerman, and nine-year-old girl
Christina-Taylor Green.
Guns
When I first
heard of the Alexandria shooting, my first reaction was relief that no one,
other than the alleged shooter himself, had died from it. My second reaction
was hope that Congressmember Scalise will not only survive his injuries, but
will do so in good enough shape that he — unlike Gabrielle Giffords — will be
able to continue in Congress. My third reaction was a brief glimpse of hope
that now that it’s happened to a Republican Congressmember as well as a
Democratic one, maybe, just maybe, this
will break the logjam through which Congress has been unable to pass any sensible gun legislation that just might keep deadly
weapons out of the hands of crazy people.
No such luck.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of Alexandria is that no one is talking about any sort of rational gun
legislation emerging from the horror. We’ve seen mass shooting after mass
shooting in this country — Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, the list goes on and
on and on — and nothing
has broken the stranglehold the National
Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun nitwits have on our politics. Indeed,
the Alexandria shooting happened just four days before NBC-TV was scheduled to
air an interview between Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones, far-Right radio
commentator and owner of the InfoWars Web site, who has become notorious for
saying the December 14, 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Connecticut was a hoax cooked up by the Obama administration and the
alleged victims were really “child actors.”
America is in
love with guns. Our national mythology centers around the successful conquest
of the American West because we had guns and the Native people we took the
country away from didn’t. Every mass entertainment medium in the U.S. — movies,
TV, books, records, theme parks — promotes armed conflict and violence as the
way to solve all problems. Four U.S. Presidents have been assassinated, and
scores of others, from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Gerald Ford and
Ronald Reagan, have been the victims of unsuccessful attempts.
And America’s
love of guns has only grown and deepened in recent years. The U.S. Supreme
Court has interpreted the Second Amendment — “A well regulated Militia, being
necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — as if it has nothing to do with militias and everything to do with
allowing Americans to own just about any sort of firearm they want. The NRA
used to support some restrictions
on private ownership of guns — notably background checks to keep them out of
the hands of the mentally ill — but as their political power has grown, so has
the hardness of their line, to the point where they oppose reasonable gun
restrictions they once supported.
“Political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Chinese revolutionary and Communist premier Mao Zedong once famously said. In the U.S. not just political power but
personal validation seems to grow out of the barrel of a gun. The NRA has
definitively won the battle over whether there will be any meaningful limits on
Americans’ access to firearms. After the June 3 terror attack on London, in
which the perpetrators mowed down some of their victims with motor vehicles and
stabbed others to death, President Trump snottily tweeted, “Do you notice we
are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a
truck!” Brits responded that the attacks would have been even more horrific,
and the death toll far higher, if it were as easy for private citizens to get
guns in their country as it is in ours.
It says volumes
about how deep America’s love affair with guns runs that Mexican drug cartels
send their people across the border to the U.S. to buy guns because Mexico has
effective anti-gun laws and we don’t. One of the big reasons George W. Bush
became President after the 2000 election and Al Gore didn’t was the NRA mounted
anti-Gore campaigns in Tennessee and West Virginia, successfully carrying those
states for Bush. In what was otherwise a razor-thin election, Gore therefore
became the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972
to lose his home state. Had he carried Tennessee, he would have been President
and Florida wouldn’t have mattered.
Likewise,
Hillary Clinton lost the Presidency to Donald Trump in large measure due to
gun-rights supporters who repeated over and over again that if elected,
“Hillary is going to take your guns away.” It got so bad that she attempted to
neutralize the attacks by having herself photographed with a hunting rifle.
Just as the rise of the radical religious Right has made it impossible for
anyone to be elected to high public office in the U.S. without believing not
only in God, but in an interventionist God who takes a direct role in human
affairs and can be appealed to through prayer (which would disqualify most of
the authors of the U.S. Constitution, who were Deists), the rise to power of
the NRA and its supporters has made it impossible for anyone to be elected in
the U.S. without acknowledging the power, legitimacy and rightness of the gun
lobby.
Polarization
The combination
of an armed citizenry and a highly polarized political environment has a lot of
potential outcomes, all of them bad. In the U.S. in the 1850’s it at least took
the form of an organized conflict between the federal government and 11
secessionist states, which ended in the pro forma abolition of slavery in the U.S. — though the North eventually pissed
away the victory it had so dearly won on the battlefields of the Civil War, and
within 20 years or so African-Americans were once again a second-class
population, bereft of political rights and reduced to an economic status as
close to slavery as Southern state governments, landowners and businesses could
get away with.
In Germany in
the late 1920’s and early 1930’s it took the form of pitched battles between
Right- and Left-wing militias in the streets of the major cities, which the
Right ultimately won. They ended up ruled by a dictator, Adolf Hitler, who
promised to unify the country, end the partisan divide and make Germany great
again. The result, of course, was World War II and the Holocaust.
More recently
we’ve seen the price of the deadly combination of political polarization and an
armed citizenry in Rwanda, Congo, Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq, Syria and everywhere
else in the world where those two conditions coexist. If we haven’t seen
violence and all-out civil war in 21st century America yet, it’s
only because so far only a few crazies are doing the actual shooting. The rest
of us are arguing about it over social media and grabbing one incident or
another to propagandize for our own causes and attack our political
adversaries.
When Gabrielle
Giffords was shot a lot of American progressives immediately blamed it on the
hatred and venom regularly spewed forth by Right-wing talk radio and Web sites
like the one sponsored by former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah
Palin, which showed a graphic of certain Democratic Congressmembers with
cross-hairs over their faces as if someone with a telescopic rifle was aiming
at them. The Right, in turn, said the shooter had been a lone nut and they shouldn’t be blamed because he’d gone crazy, shot up
a public meeting, killed a federal judge and wounded a Congressmember.
The Alexandria
shooting puts the shoe on the other foot. Unlike Jared Lee Loughner, James
Hodgkinson left a trail a mile long on social media depicting his hatred of the
rich and the Republican Party for enabling them. One of the photos of him
that’s circulated since the attack shows him with a sign calling for a return
to the ultra-high income tax rates (up to 90 percent) in place during Franklin
Roosevelt’s Presidency. He was apparently involved in one of the Occupy
camp-outs and volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign — though
Sanders, after the attack, made a statement that was both heartfelt and
obligatory: “Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society.”
At least some
people on the Right have been consistent. In a commentary published in the Los
Angeles Times June 16, National
Review contributor Dan McLaughlin wrote,
“The blame for violent acts lies with the people who committed them, and with
those who explicitly and seriously call for violence. People who just use
overheated political rhetoric, or who happen to share the gunman’s opinions,
should be nowhere on the list.”
Others haven’t
felt the same way. In a tweet, pro-Trump talk radio host Bill Mitchell said,
“The Left in this country is ushering in a new #CultureofViolence where violent
hate is the new normal.” Mitchell added that these Leftists were
“DomesticTerrorists.”
Another
Right-winger, Harlan Hill, linked the Alexandria shooting to the New York
Public Theatre’s current production of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, in which the actor in the title role is costumed to
look like Trump. “Events like these show EXACTLY why we took issue with NY
elites glorifying the assassination of our President,” wrote Hill, whose
message was retweeted by Donald Trump, Jr. The younger Trump had already led a
successful campaign to get major corporations like Delta Air Lines and the Bank
of America to pull their funding from the New York Public Theatre in protest
against the production.
Not that blaming
political violence on real or perceived political adversaries is anything new
in America. When Abraham Lincoln was murdered and his vice-president, Tennessee
Senator Andrew Johnson, took over, Johnson’s opponents said that “the Rebellion
has been vaulted into the President’s chair.” America’s third Presidential
assassination, the killing of William McKinley in 1901, was widely blamed on
publisher William Randolph Hearst because when the assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was
arrested, he had clippings of Hearst’s anti-McKinley editorials in his pockets.
It’s become a
cliché to say that growing numbers of Americans in 2017 have taken traditional
political disagreements to new levels, not just arguing with people whose
politics differ from theirs but actively hating them. The U.S. used to have
stable party alignments that lasted for decades: the Republicans won all but
four of the 14 Presidential elections between 1860 and 1928, and the Democrats
won all but two of the seven between 1932 and 1964. Since the passage of the 22nd
Amendment, formally limiting the President to two terms, no major party has won
more than three Presidential elections in a row — and only once had a party had
a streak even that long (the
Republicans, with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and George H. W. Bush in
1988).
The rapid-fire
alternations not only in control of the White House (the Democrats from 1992 to
2000, the Republicans from 2000 to 2008, the Democrats from 2008 to 2016 and
the Republicans from 2016) but Congress as well (the Republicans from 1994 to
2006, the Democrats from 2006 to 2010, the Republicans from 2010 in the House
and 2014 in the Senate) have led to a situation in which each party attempts to
mobilize its base and push through as much of its program as it can before the
pendulum swings back and puts the other major party in charge. As American
politics have evolved in the modern era, the battle lines have become harder
and the demand for all-out victory ever greater, to the point where Republicans
and Democrats deny the legitimacy of any process that leaves the other party in
charge.
Absent an
immediate short-term crisis that directly threatens the entire country — like
the 9/11 terror attacks at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency and the
economic collapse at its end — the parties these days show virtually no
interest in compromise. And this is a good deal more true of the Republicans
than the Democrats. Republicans so totally opposed Bill Clinton as President
that they looked for something — anything
— on which to impeach him and remove him from office, and they found it in his
ham-handed attempt to lie his way out of a sex scandal. Democrats, probably
because of the dubious way in which George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000,
claimed with virtually no evidence that his 2004 re-election was equally
rigged.
When Barack
Obama took office as president in 2009, he actually made overtures to the
Republicans, hoping he could ease the partisan divide in D.C. and get some
things done that would have broad-based support. The Republicans were permitted
to offer 170 amendments to the Affordable Care Act — though ultimately not one
Republican voted for the final bill. Instead Obama was greeted with a
scorched-earth opposition that seemed to take its cue from the song Groucho Marx
sings in the movie Horse Feathers: “We
don’t care what he has to say/It makes no difference anyway/Whatever it is,
we’re against it.”
It got even
worse when the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in
2010 and the Senate in 2014. Formerly noncontroversial measures to keep the
government open turned into bitter pitched battles and periodic government
shutdowns. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings on
Obama’s last U.S. Supreme Court nominee — and, with far less publicity, on
100-plus nominations Obama had made to lower Federal court judgeships. His
hope, eventually fulfilled, was that he could keep those judicial vacancies
open until a Republican would be elected President and could use them to pack the
courts.
Now Donald Trump
is President and he has solid Republican majorities in both houses of Congress
— and they’re using this power to eliminate, root and branch, everything Obama tried to accomplish. Obama was for the Paris
agreement on climate change? Trump pulled us out of it. Obama wanted the
financial industry regulated so the masters of Wall Street would have a legal
obligation to put their clients’ interests ahead of their own; virtually the
first thing Trump did in office was to put an end to that. Obama wanted the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) to safeguard Internet neutrality so the giant corporations that control
Americans’ access to the Internet couldn’t use it to promote their own
businesses and politics at the expense of everyone else’s; Trump put an end to
that and picked FCC commissioners whose policies will turn the Internet into as
much an exclusively Right-wing preserve as talk radio.
As Ronald
Brownstein pointed out in a June 15 column on the
Atlantic Web site (
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/gop-trump-congress/530340/),
the Republicans who control the House and Senate “have
advanced deeply conservative policy proposals — with House Republicans voting
to repeal the major financial regulations approved under former President
Barack Obama, and Senate Republicans working in private toward a plan to repeal
Obama’s Affordable Care Act. … In both chambers, GOP leaders have rejected even
pro forma negotiations with Democrats to order to advance a
legislative program centered on repealing a wide array of Obama-era actions.
Trump’s executive orders have likewise centered on undoing his predecessor’s
regulations program, particularly those limiting the carbon emissions linked to
global climate change.”
In his article, “This Is Not Populism,” from the June 2017 Monthly
Review — which argues that Trump’s
politics and policies actually represent a new form of fascism — John Bellamy
Foster goes even farther in describing Trump’s and his administration’s
ideological commitments. “In addition to the well-known ‘Muslim ban’ and the
proposed wall across the U.S.-Mexico border,” Bellamy Foster writes, “the Trump
administration has pressed for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ …
the gutting of environmental protections and scientific agencies; the
elimination of most federal regulations on business; a trillion-dollar increase
in infrastructure spending; a huge rise in military spending; the effective
elimination of Obamacare; the end of Net neutrality; and steep cuts to taxes on
corporations and the rich. Trump has filled his Cabinet and advisory positions
with a ghoulish ensemble of billionaires, Wall Street insiders, hard-line
generals, alt-Right ideologues, and climate-change deniers.”
Apocalypse
Of course, people on both the American Right and Left have been saying those sorts
of things about each other for decades. In the 1930’s, the Right charged that
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was destroying individual liberty and
freedom and bringing America under Communism by stealth. In the 1960’s Southern
Democrats opposed to racial equality and the civil rights movement said that
Northern Democrats and their Republican allies were trampling on the sacred
ground of “states’ rights” (also the justification Democrats in the 1860’s had
used to proclaim their “right” to leave the Union so they could still own Black
people as slaves). In the 1980’s American liberals and progressives saw Ronald
Reagan as the destruction of everything they held dear — the person who would
destroy what welfare state existed in the U.S., would wipe out the power of
organized labor, and would so extensively arm the world that there would be a
World War III.
More recently, the Right saw Bill Clinton — actually an
accommodationist, centrist President who moved the Democratic Party closer to
the “Washington consensus” of corporate capitalism über alles and some crumbs thrown here and there to the working
classes — as the devil incarnate. Billionaire financier and Right-wing activist
Richard Mellon Scaife funded something called the “Arkansas Project,” which
involved sending minions armed with cash to Clinton’s home state to find people
who would be willing to share derogatory information about Bill and Hillary
Clinton. Most of the people they offered money to didn’t have any derogatory information about Bill and Hillary Clinton,
but that wasn’t a problem: they just made some up and happily got their hands
on some of Scaife’s money in return. The lies spread about the Clintons by the
“Arkansas Project” have proven remarkably durable; they got quoted over and
over and over again by Right-wing media
during the 2016 campaign and were a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
When George W. Bush became President by fiat of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, it was the Left’s turn
to demonize the current President. He was ridiculed as a know-nothing idiot, a
puppet with either Dick Cheney or Karl Rove pulling his strings. He was
denounced as a war-monger and as an
incompetent weakling who couldn’t even manage the government response to
Hurricane Katrina, much less keep the entire economy from collapsing at the end
of his term. Had it not been for the 9/11 attacks and the “he’s the only
President we’ve got” unifying effect from them, which for several years made
criticizing Bush seemed downright un-American and pro-terrorist, the
vituperation against Bush would have been even worse than it was.
Then the U.S. replaced Bush with Barack Obama, a
(half-)Black short-term Senator with an exotic name, and the Right-wing
propaganda machine really went into
full swing. A bizarre movement, led by the man who would become Obama’s
successor, claimed that Obama wasn’t even U.S.-born — an obvious metaphor for
the visible way in which Obama was
different from the 42 men who had served as President before him. Obama was
denounced as a puppet of 1960’s white radicals or Muslim imams or goodness knows who else — like most conspiracy theories,
the anti-Obama jeremiads were longer on imagination than coherence — and while
the Right was denouncing him, the Left was treating him the way they had
Clinton, as a sell-out whose obeisance to Wall Street and the globalist “trade”
agenda were greasing the skids for total corporate control of the U.S. and the
world.
Vigorous political debate is one thing. Demonizing your
opponents and treating them as the scum of the earth is quite another. The Rube
Goldberg political system the framers of the U.S. Constitution put together was
designed deliberately to put as many roadblocks as possible in the way of
sweeping change from either Left or
Right. It also contained many undemocratic features, because the framers didn’t
like the idea of democracy and wanted to make sure the U.S. remained a
representative republic, governed not directly by the people but by carefully
selected officials whose superior education and understanding would enable them
to give the country not so much what the people wanted as what they needed.
One reason the Republican Party has been so much more
successful than the Democratic Party in recent years is that the Republicans
have shrewdly exploited all the undemocratic features of the U.S. Constitution
— the Electoral College, the apportionment of two U.S. Senators to each state
regardless of its population, and the sweeping powers the Constitution gives
state legislatures to draw Congressional districts and to determine just who
is, and who isn’t, eligible to vote. The Republicans have responded to the
demographic challenge against them — the way sectors of the population (young
people, poor people, people of color) likely to vote Democratic are growing
faster than those likely to vote Republican — not by changing their message to broaden their appeal, but by
passing laws against so-called “voter fraud” that are designed to keep people
who won’t vote Republican from being able to vote at all.
The Republican Party is also the beneficiary of a
decades-long ideological project that has made it a remarkably coherent and
consistent party, libertarian in its economic philosophy (opposed to government
regulation of business, environmental and labor protections, and committed to
the destruction of the big social insurance programs one by one — first the
Affordable Care Act, then Medicaid, then Medicare and finally Social Security)
and at the same time highly authoritarian in its social attitudes, particularly
in its belief that government ought to determine who should be able to have sex
with whom and how they’ll be allowed to deal with the consequences of that.
It’s taken over a century — the process started when Theodore Roosevelt was
denied the Republican nomination in 1912 and ended up running for President
under a new party that was in many respects more progressive than either the Republicans or Democrats — but today the Republican
Party is a consistently Right-wing party with no room for progressives,
liberals or even moderates.
As we saw from the way the so-called “moderate” House
Republicans caved on the vote on the American Health Care Act — passing the
final bill even though, in an effort to appease their Right-wing base, instead
of answering the “moderates’” criticisms of the original bill they actually
made it worse, and the “moderates”
voted for it anyway — to be a Republican in the U.S. in 2017 means to endorse a
pro-corporate, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-science, anti-people of
color, anti-women, anti-Queer agenda. That’s why I’ve said in previous
endorsement editorials in Zenger’s Newsmagazine and on this site that any Democrat is better than any
Republican, and why I’ve called to an end
to useless, counterproductive, destructive attempts by progressives and
Leftists to form or maintain alternative parties. Like it or not, the Democrats
are the only game in town for Americans at all to the Left of the Republican mainstream.
And the Democrats certainly have their problems. Ever since
the Reagan years, the Democratic party has been fundamentally divided between a
pro-corporate “centrist” wing and an anti-corporate progressive wing. Indeed,
the division goes back even farther than that historically — at least to the
1920’s, another period of Right-wing ascendancy in American politics which the
Democrats responded to by splitting into pro-business “moderates” and
pro-labor, pro-social welfare progressives.
The modern-day corporate Democrats emerged as part of the
effort to keep the party’s Congressional majorities — and the huge campaign
donations and lobbyists’ favors they brought in — following the realigning
Presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, in which Right-wing candidates Richard
Nixon and George Wallace smashed the New Deal coalition and revealed that vast
swaths of the American working class that had traditionally voted Democratic
had been brought to the Right by the Republicans’ shrewd exploitation of their
racism and cultural conservatism.
There have been three major battles between the corporate
and progressive wings of the Democratic Party in the last two years: the fight
for the 2016 Presidential nomination between Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders; the fight for the national party chair between Tom Perez and Keith
Ellison early this year; and, more recently, the fight for the California state
party chair between Eric Bauman and Kimberly Ellis. In all three cases, the
progressive — Sanders, Ellison, Ellis — came heartbreakingly close to winning,
but lost.
In another sort of political system, one more open and
democratic — like Germany’s, which allocates its national legislature
proportionately so you can vote for an alternative party and have a shot at
real power instead of just throwing your vote away — that would be the signal
for the progressives to bolt the Democratic Party and start a new one of their
own. But in the U.S., where both laws and traditions constrain electoral
politics into two and only two
significant parties, that would be a sure route to political suicide and
oblivion.
So we have an ideologically consistent Republican Party and
an ideologically inconsistent Democratic Party, riven by contradictions to a
point where many voters say they vote Republican simply because they know what the Republicans stand for, whether or not they agree
with it, while they don’t know what the Democrats stand for. And we have a
political environment in which the Right and the Left — large segments of them,
anyway — have explicitly endorsed political violence as a way to achieve their
ends.
Leftists at UC Berkeley, with the tacit support of the
city’s elected government and its police force, successfully suppressed the
free-speech rights of Right-wing journalists Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Instead of taking them on in open debate, so-called “Black Bloc” activists kept
them from speaking altogether — and city officials and police cooperated in
this suppression by telling Coulter and Yiannopoulos they could not guarantee
their safety, thereby giving the “Black Bloc” mobs veto power over who can and
cannot speak within Berkeley’s city limits. That was not only offensive and
wrong morally, it was dumb politically. It played right into the hands of the
Right, whose master political narrative is that it is they who are the oppressed minority being hounded into silence
by sinister, evil progressives.
And yet the Right has done this, too. It was apparent when
Donald Trump, as a Presidential candidate, not only encouraged his supporters
to use violence against people who heckled at his rallies but promised to pay
for their legal defense if they were arrested for doing so. It was seen on the
eve of the Montana special election for Congress, in which the Republican
candidate head-butted a journalist who tried to ask him how he stood on the
American Health Care Act. Not only did the Republican win the election anyway,
but on the night he declared victory he gave a pro forma apology to the journalist he’d assaulted — and his
supporters booed him because they thought an attack on a representative of the
“liberal media” was something he should be proud of, not something for which he
should feel he had to apologize.
One other factor is increasing both the propensity and the
seriousness of political violence in the U.S.: the Internet. Thanks to the
power of social media, conspiracy theories on both extremes that used to lurk
in the shadows now flourish in the light of day. What’s more, news coverage on
the Internet generally is extraordinarily self-selecting; the major access
sites all base their results on “algorithms” that basically assume that once
you have read something, you will want more of the same. If you log on to Fox
News, the search engines will direct you to Breitbart, InfoWars and other
Right-wing sites, many of them dealing in conspiracy theories. If you visit The
Nation, the engines are likely to send you
to The American Prospect, Daily Kos,
Tom’s Dispatch and other Left-wing sites.
The result of Internet news coverage has been to negate the
old saying that “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own set
of facts.” What people who get most of their information from Fox and other
sites to the Right think is “really” going on in the world is going to be
profoundly different from what people who get most of their information from The
Nation and other progressive sites. The
Left and the Right online increasingly peddle two wildly different and
incompatible sets of “facts,” and what’s more they represent that they are telling the “truth” and the other side is lying.
Meanwhile, the influence of the mainstream corporate media
— newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and networks like NBC, CBS and ABC — is dwindling. They used to be
regarded as impartial purveyors of objective truth; now, as they recede in
importance and influence and more ideological news sources grow in importance,
the mainstream media are routinely criticized by both sides — by the Right as part of a “liberal media”
conspiracy to deceive the American people, and by the Left as witting or
unwitting dupes of their corporate paymasters.
So we have an increasingly polarized country in which
citizens are becoming more extreme in their views — and more emotional about
their politics. People who used to say they “disagreed” with people on the
other side of the political fence now say they “hate” them. They’re also
becoming more self-segregating: more and more accounts are circulating of
people who make friends only with people who agree with them politically, and
this only got worse after the 2016 election when a lot of liberals and
progressives started saying it literally
made them sick to be around people who had voted for Trump.
The combination of factors — a more polarized citizenry,
less willing to agree with each other even on the very existence of objective
facts; a less rational and more emotional level of political discourse; a
Republican ruling elite crafting major bills in secret because, as Senator
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told the Los Angeles Times, “We have zero cooperation from the Democrats, so getting
it [out] in public gives them a chance to get up and scream”; and also a
country that is increasingly awash in guns — makes for a very explosive and
dangerous political environment in which innocent people may literally find themselves being killed in the crossfire of partisan
battles. To paraphrase Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ famous line for Bette Davis in the
film All About Eve, “Fasten your
seatbelts — it’s going to be a bumpy century.”
