Political rhetoric and political violence in the Trump era

The discussion over what political rhetoric is too “polarizing” and what kind encourages political violence.

As always, advocacy for war is usually not considered to be excessively “polarizing” or being about “political violence.” I would guess that when Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington later this month and addresses a joint meeting of Congress to campaign for Trump and demand open-ended American political and military support for his current genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, respectable pundits and most politicians will not accuse him of advocating for “political violence.”

Not only can we expect more violence from a party that now hails as “heroes” those responsible for an assault on the Capitol that resulted in seven dead, scores of injuries and other forms of trauma and assaults against 140 police officers, but it is already clear from what we have heard that the GOP will try to intimidate the media and political opponents from describing Trump and those around him as they are. They will, as [J.D.] Vance did, say that calling a fascist a fascist is what incites political violence, thus clearing further the path for the ascent of Trump and other fascists. And just wait until next week when the GOP convention canonizes Trump, presents him as a hero who has risked death for them, and offers up imagery that would make Leni Riefenstahl wince with its heavy-handedness. You may view it—or if you can’t stomach watching it, you may hear about it--as merely political excess.

But it will be much more than that. It will be an event that uses fascist memes and techniques to promote a fascist candidate at the head of a fascist movement and, as if that were not repugnant and threatening enough, it will promote further the us versus them divided America mentality that has had some suggest this country were already in the throes of a low-grade civil conflict.

The Trumpist Republican Party is literally an insurrectionist party that condones, advocates, and practices political violence, as seen in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack that Rothkopf recalled.

Seth Cotlar looks at some Republicans reactions to the assassination attempt:

A few hours after blaming tens of millions of non-Republican Americans for an act that turns out to have been carried out by a 20 year old registered Republican who has been described by his high school classmates as “a conservative,” the OR GOP then turned around and issued a statement calling upon “the media to stop feeding the contentious us-against-them culture amongst Americans. This tragic and inflammatory division in America has been created and perpetuated not only by the White House but also by mainstream media.” This may seem like a contradiction—decrying us-versus-them rhetoric while making evidence-free claims blaming “the left” for the attempt on Trump’s life—but it actually makes perfect sense if one starts from the authoritarian assumption that the Americans who don’t agree with you are “unhumans” or not “real Americans.” (2)

Digby Parton gives this description of the current environment:

According to Brady United, the nation’s oldest gun violence prevention group, 327 people are shot with guns every day in the United States. Over one million have been shot in the last decade. There are more civilian-owned firearms than there are people in this country. Gun violence is so ubiquitous that we only raise our heads once in a great while when the body count is shockingly high or the victims are particularly vulnerable, like elementary school children. But this weekend we all looked up sharply when a lone sniper shot at Donald Trump, grazing his ear, killing a spectator and wounding two others.

These shootings are all horrific but this one was particularly shocking because America's history of political assassinations is very long. We are living in one of our acute periods of political violence, whether from religious terrorism or unbalanced people who are radicalized on the internet [aka, stochastic terrorism]. There have been attempted assassinations, assaults and violent threats against members of Congress, the judiciary, the media and election officials in recent years and now the current Republican nominee for president, who also happens to be a former president. We are awash in political violence and the proliferation of guns has made it particularly deadly. [my enphasis] (3)

The Democrats are always tempted to fall back on calm-down, lower-the-temperature type rhetoric in situations like this. Which they often take to mean stock appeals to “bipartisanship” and encouraging everyone to be more polite to each other. All of which basically dodges the actual problem, as Digby describes it:

Donald Trump is a demagogue and there is no one in political life who is more rhetorically violent than he is. With all the talk of lowering the temperature, nobody's mentioned the fact that the most incendiary rhetoric about the event came from Donald Trump himself when he raised his fist and pumped it angrily yelling "fight" repeatedly to his crowd as he was led off the stage. I understand that he was probably in shock but that moment became instantly iconic and it was anything but calm and statesmanlike.

What did Trump mean by that? Was it just another opportunity to look tough, like his glowering expression in his mug shot? Was he hamming it up for the cameras? Or was he once again exhorting his followers to "fight" like they did on January 6? With all the lugubrious handwringing over Biden and the Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy, nobody seems to care that his instinct in that horrible moment was to incite more violence. [my emphasis]

Rachel Kleinfeld has a 2023 study that examines polarization in US politics in the context of current trends toward political violence. (4) Looking at the data on increased political polarization in the US Senate and especially in the House, especially since 1993, she writes, “Ideological polarization was highly asymmetric. Republican members of Congress were moving to the right ideologically much faster than Democratic members were moving to the left.” (my emphasis)

Thomas Mann and Normal Ornstein also looked at the asymmetric polarization in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012). As Ornstein has frequently noted in the following years, that one-sided polarization has become much sharper.

Polarization isn’t negative in itself. It becomes problematic if it leads to violent civil conflict or if, as in the American case, one of the two major parties takes extreme and undemocratic positions while the other tries to reduce polarization by being conciliatory to people who have no interest in conciliation. A central function of liberal democracy as it evolved over the millennia since the Greek and Roman republics is that it allows people to work out solutions to their differences without civil war.

Describing the period between 2006 and 2012, Mann and Ornstein explained what did not work in reducing the intensity of the polarization during that period:

What the country didn't get was any semblance of a well-functioning democracy. President Obama's postpartisan pitch fell flat, and the Tea Party movement pulled the GOP further to its ideological pole. Republicans greeted the new president with a unified strategy of opposing, obstructing, discrediting, and an impressive legislative harvest in his first two years but without any Republican engagement or support and with no apparent appreciation from the public. The anemic economic recovery and the pain of joblessness and underwater home mortgages led not to any signal that the representatives ought to pull together, but rather to yet another call by voters to "throw the bums out." [my emphasis] (pp. xi-xii)

Obama’s “postpartisan pitch” was a plea for both sides to be nice to each other that the other side had no interest in doing. And they were writing nine years before the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The Republican Party has not only been polarizing on issues but more intensely embracing a radical antidemocratic approach to politics since then. The radical right nature of the “astroturf” Tea Party movement was clear to anyone bothering to pay attention.

The polarization is not just rhetorical. And the inclinations of the Trumpista right toward political violence are not going to remedied by lazy concessions, polite pleas for civility to people who have no interest in civility, or by pretending that today’s Republican Party has any sentimental attachment to liberal democracy.

Trump has defined the Republican Party’s mission: “"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." (5)

Be cautious of one-dimensional explanations

Kleinfeld’s paper raises some important qualifications to common assumptions about the causes of political polarization, whether one considers such polarization good or bad. For instance:

In the United States, surveys (such as one by Public Religion Research Institute) find more intense and consistent negative democratic effects from far-right and right-wing cable news and radio companies and channels, such as Newsmax, One America News, and Fox News, rather than social media. Exposure to these offline forms of partisan news makes those with extreme attitudes even more extreme.119 Only one-tenth of insurrectionists arrested after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol received most of their news from social media; most favored conservative television and radio.120 An experiment in which people were incentivized to shift from watching Fox News to CNN showed that further exposure to partisan outlets, such as Fox News, was radicalizing and that incentivizing a shift from Fox to CNN led to more accurate and less polarized information. [my emphasis] (p. 27)

Go figure!

Notes:

(1) Rothkopf, David (2024): Hard Truths About the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump: It is Almost Certainly a Prelude of Violence to Come. Need to Know 07/14/2024. <https://davidrothkopf.substack.com/p/hard-truths-about-the-attempted-assassination> (Accessed: 2024-19-07).

(2) Colar, Seth (202): Normal people in an authoritarian party: On the Oregon Republican response to the attempt on Donald Trump's life. Rightlandia 07/16/2024. <https://sethcotlar.substack.com/p/normal-people-in-an-authoritarian> (Accessed: 2024-19-07).

(3) Parton, Heather Digby (2024): An instinct to incite: The challenge to tamp down political rhetoric in the wake of Trump's shooting. Salon 07/15/2024. <https://www.salon.com/2024/07/15/an-instinct-to-incite-the-challenge-to-tamp-down-political-rhetoric-in-the-wake-of/> (Accessed: 2024-19-07).

(4) Kleinfeld, Rachel (2023): Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says. Carnegie Endowment website 09/05/2023. <https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/09/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-the-united-states-what-the-research-says?lang=en> (Accessed: 2024-19-07).

(5) Kurtzleben, Daniella (2023): Why Trump's authoritarian language about 'vermin' matters. NPR 11/17/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary> (Accessed: 2024-19-07).