I first noticed it during active-shooter situations and terrorist attacks. Everybody would agree that what was happening was horrible, of course, the injuries or even deaths and the destruction. But that wasn’t the part that really seemed to move people. What people really found exciting was arguing about who was probably at fault in the period before that became common knowledge. And the sides were clear: People on the Left would predict that the terror had been wrought by someone on the Right or by a member of the Right’s favored groups, and people on the Right would predict that the terror had been wrought by someone on the Left or by a member of the Left’s favored groups.
Once I saw it somewhere, I saw it everywhere. Sometimes the debate persists even after the case had been solved, as in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016. The shooter, who killed about 50 people, had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State, but because Pulse was a gay club, some commentators worked to classify it primarily as an instance of anti-LGBT violence rather than of Islamic fundamentalist terror.
At the extreme, an attack with a clear target might be called a “false flag” — a staged event, one in which people victimize themselves or a group they’re part of to gain some status in the public eye or to bring their favored issues, generally ones relating to their own supposed victimization, to the fore. These do happen, of course, the best examples being the many high-profile hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, such as many viral incidents on college campuses following the election of Donald Trump or the infamous staged attack on actor Jussie Smollett. But just because hoaxes do occur does not make every “false flag” accusation fruitful or reasonable — just ask Alex Jones.
This “you’re the violent ones” dynamic plays out prospectively, too. Some major event transpires, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the partisan’s first thought is to search for examples of nutjobs on the other side calling for some kind of violent reaction. Of course, such nutjobs are never hard to find — that’s part of the human condition. But what fascinates me is the division within the camps. One kind of person thinks it will be good for their side to commit violent acts against the other. Who knows what mechanism of political change they have to posit to justify that belief? But then another kind of person thinks it will be good for their side if the other side commits violent acts, and they often seem to look forward to the other side’s violence just as much as some on their side thrill to have an excuse for their own.
Reflecting on recent and current events bears this thesis out. Opponents of free expression elsewhere in the world cheered the recent stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie, taking the ugly attack to be some kind of good and just event in itself. In the United States, the attack’s effect is mostly to return the censoriousness and violence of some prominent ideologies to public discussion and to strengthen various political cases, such as that of committed opposition to Iran, for instance. Washington Free Beacon journalist Drew Holden noted on Twitter that articles in the Atlantic described Trump supporters as “calling for violence” in the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago but called a pro-abortion group that took credit for acts of vandalism “The Right’s New Bogeyman,” writing that “right-wing activists and politicians are eating it up.” Holden’s point is that the articles, in tandem, seem to position right-wing groups as violent but also as opportunistic in their calling attention to left-wing violence — obviously a framing that opens itself up to charges of hypocrisy.
But what’s really interesting isn’t whether the political sides are hypocritical in using such a tactic but the mere fact that they do — that it is politically desirable to have been the target of political violence.
A clear result of this dynamic is how politically motivated and partisan framing seeps its way into the coverage and commentary surrounding acts of political violence. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald used to tell a joke — his worst fear, he said, was a terrorist attack on an American city with massive casualties because of the political backlash that might accompany it. The joke is meant to parody our difficulties in seeing evil acts for what they are when committed by those whom our prior narrative frames present as good. I think we sometimes see a kind of reversal of this dynamic with hoaxes such as Smollett’s — people keep asserting that, though this particular thing didn’t occur, it’s the kind of thing that occurs. When actual violence indisputably happens, we seem to take a second to think about whether it’s the kind of thing that occurs, too.
Breaking news coverage and discussion often skips right to the partisan framing of incidents involving political violence, whether to extrapolate broader generalizations from a perpetrator’s political and ideological affiliations or to shy away from discussing such motivated violence lest it gives ammunition to those on the wrong side. “Investigators Hunt for Motivation and Movements of Man Accused in Rushdie Attack,” read the now-changed headline of a New York Times piece last week, as if the motivations of a 24-year-old Shiite extremist who attacked a man with a still-existing fatwa edict and $3 million bounty on his head are somehow a mystery. Meanwhile, all these commentaries and metacommentaries about who is denying what and who is being hypocritical and who stands to gain (this very article included) start to outnumber the discussions of the object-level violence. This all comes with the fear that such coverage of and debate about incidents of political violence, including speculation about violence emerging from unrelated, nonviolent events such as the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, serves to invite violence to be considered just another political tool in the partisan arsenal rather than what it is.
To be the target of the other side’s violence is powerfully attractive because it combines four political desires in one. First is the desire to be seen as on the side that upholds the norms and institutions of liberal democracy. The calm center of American politics is often a good place to appear to be. In the early days of the Trump presidency, the twin specters of “alt-right” militias with their silly shields and antifa hooligans with their ridiculous masks seemed to bookend public political discourse. The less association one had with either side the better.
Second is the desire to be seen as a victim, or a potential one, bravely speaking one’s mind against a violent mob baying at the gates. This gives a political actor the appearance, truly or falsely, of bravery and moral urgency. What they say seems more important, and it seems as though they’re risking more to say it. Being under attack for our ideas garners more support for our ideas, more support for us as people, and more support for us as a group. This desire is why you see increased usage of rhetoric among activists and liberal commentators about “bodies,” which are, invariably, in some position of palpable physical danger, real or imagined. Last month, for instance, when Democratic congressional staffers organized a brief sit-in of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office over demands about climate change, the organizing staffer, whose father is also a Democratic congressman, claimed laughably, “We are putting our bodies on the line because we have no other choice.”
Third is the desire to represent an opposing ideology as leading inexorably to violence. In politics, we often judge claims not for their truth but for the effects of believing that they’re true. The death count of communism is the strongest proof against it, regardless of whether its atrocities followed logically from its doctrine. When we find a violent, terroristic person who claims adherence to an opposing ideology, we naturally but still opportunistically draw a connection between acts and beliefs.
The fourth desire may be the darkest, and it’s a bit contrary to the first. Once I’m seen as the brave and law-abiding victim and my opponents are seen as the evil adherents of a violent ideology, it may start to strike people that public norms of civility and even free speech ought to be suspended in their case. They are an exception to the rules of toleration, and their violent acts speak to their exceptional nature. Liberal democracy has plenty of fans, but many of them are only reluctantly so, and they pull against the constraints it places on their political programs, especially when it comes to their conduct toward political enemies. Surely we needn’t tolerate the intolerant! Surely liberalism can’t unilaterally disarm against those who would seek to usurp it! Contemporary film and fiction often dramatize tensions between the lawful good characters who follow their society’s code to pursue justice and the chaotic good characters who must break the code to save it. Contemporary political groups, too, often have their lawful and chaotic sides, seeming in some ways to disagree but in other ways to work in tandem.
I find something unsettling in the eagerness people seem to feel for opponents’ political violence. Ethically, we shouldn’t thrill at the possible breakdown of political norms and the possible growth in political violence, and intellectually, we shouldn’t seek to blame every bad thing on our political enemies. Many horrible things have political factors somewhere in the causal chains leading up to them, but there are many other kinds of factors in those chains as well, and there are plenty of killers and other wrongdoers who have motivations that don’t seem to have anything to do with politics at all, such as the perpetrator of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, from still unknown motive. It warps the world and our interactions in it to take politics to have such central importance.
Even where politics is clearly concerned, this constant search for violence on our opponents’ parts seems to undermine our representations of what’s really going on. American sports fans often castigate European soccer with regard to its stars’ propensity for “diving” — for acting like they’ve been fouled when they haven’t. A contest that turns on which team can best appeal to the referees no longer measures sporting ability. Similarly, a contest that turns on which party can make the most of the bad acts of the worst people in their opponents’ camps no longer seems to measure whatever political contests would ideally measure.
The one positive thing about this tendency, though, is that its very prominence, the fact that people on all parts of the political spectrum engage in it, speaks to the fact that there still are some political “rules” out there for the referees — the voting public, I guess — to base their decisions on. And those rules still do seem to forbid political violence and impose harsh sanctions for it. Unfortunately, and in line with the fourth desire considered above, a sense that such political violence is pervasive seems to carry with it the risk that such violence will start to seem justified — defensively, as it were, as a response to other political violence. We will know there is a real problem when people by and large stop rooting for the other side to be violent and start rooting for their own side to be.
Oliver Traldi is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy.
