My favorite scene in my favorite Tom Clancy movie is a little throwaway moment in The Hunt for Red October. The Soviet and American navies are jousting in the north Atlantic, with their exercises designed to provoke each other. An American F-14 goes careening out of control as it lands on a carrier and the commander, played by the late, great Fred Thompson, fumes, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we will be lucky to live through it.”
So let’s follow the progression: Two weeks after Trump was elected, Mike Pence went to see Hamilton on Broadway and got a respectful talking to from the stage. There was a long pause on this sort of direct action until, last Tuesday, Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled as she ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Three days later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders went to dinner at a restaurant called the Red Hen and the owner asked her to leave. And on Sunday, Maxine Waters upped the ante by suggesting that rather than just ask Trump staffers to leave, citizens ought to mob them and shame them, Cersei Lannister-style, whenever they are seen in public.
This is a disgusting and appalling lack of civility and a departure from the norms of American political discourse and I cannot fathom where liberals got the idea for it and, by the by, here is a list of some things the current president of the United States of America said while campaigning for his office:
“Maybe he should have been roughed up.”
“Part of the problem . . . is no one wants to hurt each other anymore.”
“I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will.”
“The audience hit back. That’s what we need a little bit more of.”
“If you do [hurt him], I’ll defend you in court, don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll beat the crap out of you.”
“Knock the crap out of him, would you? I promise you, I will pay your legal fees.”
It’s a mystery, isn’t it? Where in the world did Maxine Waters and the Red Hen and the people in that Mexican restaurant come up with such terrible, norm-shattering ideas about civility?
Also, please understand that it’s not just Donald Trump. Here, for instance, is a piece by a gentleman named Jesse Kelly at the Federalist the day before Sarah Sanders was politely asked to leave the Red Hen. It’s a long excerpt, but bear with me, because it’s important:
You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others didn’t. . . .
The Indians were faced with something that faces all civilizations. It’s something we face now. They were facing the unstoppable force of inevitability. Many of them knew it. The settlers from Europe were about to take over every inch of this country. Some tribes, like the Choctaw, chose to play nice with the government in hopes that their peaceful gesture would be returned. They got a Trail of Tears for their kindness.
But some tribes, like the Lakota, chose a different path. They chose war. Leaders of the Lakota like Sitting Bull knew full well how this war would end. Nevertheless, he gathered thousands of young warriors in the Black Hills and made his enemy feel some pain before he surrendered. He scored a decisive win at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and collected some scalps. Yes, the U.S. government prevailed in the end, but General Custer and his 200 men weren’t there to see it. . . .
Some on the Right believe that tyranny in this society, as in all societies, is inevitable. The people who will micromanage every aspect of your life are not God-fearing conservatives. They are leftists, and they are vicious.
They are not political opponents in the sense that you have a debate with them. These modern-day leftists want you to lose your job. They want to destroy you. How do you think they’re going to treat you when they finally sit in the seat of power for good? So fight them tooth and nail. Make them longfor the day when you’re no longer fighting them. Be the Lakota. . . .
So, back to scalping thing. When you make that long trek to the reservation the leftists have set up for you—and make that trek you will—what memories do you want to take with you? When living in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything in your life, you will want to have been a Lakota. You’ll want to know, to remember, even just cherish the knowledge that, one day, you rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain.
I would tell you, Fred Thompson-style, that this sort of talk will eventually get someone killed, but perhaps you’ve forgotten about Heather Heyer. You shouldn’t have.
* * *
It might feel satisfying to lay all of the blame for this at the feet of Donald Trump. It is, after all, darkly humorous that the same people expressing outrage at the conduct of the Red Hen owner were all happy to say that Trump’s moral failings didn’t matter because they were electing him to be a president, not ordain him as a minister. They’re able to compartmentalize moral standing apart from professional duty for the commander in chief, but not for a restaurateur.
But while satisfying, it would be wrong. Norm-busting didn’t start with Donald Trump. Remember the Weathermen? The SDS? The Chicago Democratic convention in ’68? Preston Brooks? Roger Griswold? Bloody Kansas? The Civil War? Every decade of European history for the past thousand years?
The reason we have norms in the first place is because there is always an undercurrent of violence in politics. And that’s because, to invert Clausewitz, politics is war by other means. One of the great accomplishments of Western civilization has been, for the most part, to push that undercurrent way down deep. It has not always worked. It will not always work.
Americans tend to look at a place like the former Yugoslavia and think that that sort of unpleasantness can’t happen here. And maybe it couldn’t. America has strong institutions, and institutions matter when it comes to keeping undercurrents of violence submerged. Though perhaps you’ve noticed that none of America’s institutions—our governments, our churches, our civic organizations, our universities, our families—are as strong as they used to be.
Which is why so many people were prospectively worried about Trump. Not because Trump was the source of some new brand of political violence, but because political violence is a Pandora’s Box. And once it is opened it cannot be shut until it burns itself out—because everyone loves this sort of thing, when it’s their side doing the scalping. Putting a man like Donald Trump in the presidency gave oxygen to these elements or, to mix our metaphors, pushed the undercurrents that have always been there much closer to the surface. What people failed to realize is that a thing like Donald Trump’s presidency doesn’t just bring out the white nationalists. It brings out the radicals in response. It opens the box for everyone.
Now maybe it’ll all work out for us. Our institutions might be diminished, but they’re still relatively robust. It’s just one hipster farm-to-table restaurant, one geriatric congresswoman, one crank on a website. One guy threatening to kidnap and kill a congressman’s kids. (Oh yes, this is a thing which happened last week, too.) But these situations are inherently unpredictable. Black swans are gonna black swan.
For instance, there is a white nationalist rally coming to the nation’s capital this August. This is a contingent event which almost certainly would not be taking place absent the election of Donald Trump, whose norm-breaking and incivility emboldened and elevated such fringe groups. Who knows who, or what, will be emboldened by their march. Or by the reaction to it.
Since the 1970s, our norms have kept political violence out of the mainstream. We all took comfort in the dictum that America’s politics took place mostly between the 40 yard lines. Today we have a president who has called for physical assaults on protesters, an opposition party that is trending toward actual, out-and-out socialism, and open urban warfare between radical and reactionary forces.
This business is out of control. And we will be lucky to live through it.
