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).

Friedrich Adler, Karl von Stürgkh, and violent civil disobedience in First World War Austria

November 2 is the first anniversary of the deadly terrorist attack in Vienna last year that took the lives of four people and wounded 23 more.

The presumed assailant, who was killed by police during the attack, was an adherent of the Islamic State and is thought to have secured his weapons from a radical Muslim group that in part operated in Vienna. This hour-long documentary ont he attack from the Vienna daily Der Standard is in German but partly in English: "Neun Minuten – Ein Jahr danach": Die Dokumentation zum Terror in Wien 10/30/2021.

This Deutsche Welle report from a year ago is in English: 'Islamist terror attack' in Austria's capital Vienna leaves four dead 11/03/2021.

Political violence has been a lot in the US news lately, thanks to the radical Trumpistas. A few recent examples:

• Will Bunch, ‘When do we get to use the guns?’ The life-or-death stakes of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Philadelphia Inquirer 10/31/2021
• David Neiwert, Hacked Oath Keepers data exposes how deeply ‘patriot’ extremism has penetrated the mainstream Daily Kos 10/29/2021
• Paul Rosenberg, How extremist Christian theology is driving the right-wing assault on democracy Salon 10/31/2021
• Matt Ford, The Right’s Embrace of Political Violence Is Escalating New Republic 10/28/2021
• Alfred McCoy, Are We Ready for the Next Trump-Led Coup? The Nation 10/30/2021

I also just finished a recent book dealing with the four-day armed conflict in Austria in February 1934 that despite the brief length of the shooting has gone down in history as the Austrian Civil War. It was the turning point at which the authoritarian regime of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss took the decisive step of completely suppressing the democratic constitution of the Austrian First Republic, which he effectively had put on ice a year before. What his government pulled in February 1934 was a kind of self-coup, with some notable similarities to what Trump and his militants attempted on January 6.

In the process of all this, I also brushed up a bit on "Austromarxism" associated with Austrian Social Democratic leaders like Otto Bauer and Karl Renner which was known for its active critical engagement with non-socialist sociology and which through scholars like Carl Grünberg also exercised an important influence on the philosophical tradition that in the 1930s came to be known as Critical Theory. (The real thing, not the phantom bogeyman of "critical race theory" over which the Republicans are currently hyperventilating.)

And in the process I took some time to refresh my recollection of an assassination of an Austro-Hungarian Imperial official that didn't have the drastic immediate repercussions of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the unfortunate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. But it was nevertheless a notable political event.

Friedrich Adler (1879-1960) was the son of Victor Adler, founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAP, now SPÖ). (In an it's-a-small-world observation, Victor once lived in the building where Sigmund Freud later lived and had his counseling room with its famous couch. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, lived just down the street.)

Friedrich studied physics in Switzerland, where he become friends with Albert Einstein. Friedrich at one point declined a faculty appointed because he thought it should go to Einstein, who did accept the post. Victor had pushed Friedrich to pursue a science career because he did think politics would be the right field for him. But Friedrich eventually became a Social Democratic journalist and an important figure in the SDAP.

When the First World War broke out in the wake of the Archduke's encounter with Gavrilo Princip, Friedrich held to the prewar line of the Socialist International that the national parties should oppose the war, which in their official view would be an imperialist war for the benefit of the capitalist classes. But, notoriously, when the war broke out, most of the Social Democratic Parties including the SDAP still led by Victor Adler opted to support the own countries' war efforts.

Douglas Alder recounts Friedrich's political trajectory in Friedrich Adler: Evolution of a Revolutionary German Studies Review 1:3, Oct 1978). On October 21, 1916, two years into the First World War, had lunch at the Hotel Messel and Schaden in central Vienna and then fired several bullets into the head of another diner, Count Karl von Stürgkh, then the Prime Minister of Austria. Friedrich planned the assassination carefully, hoping to spark antiwar sentiment within the SDAP. The reactionary Stürgkh had suspended the Austrian Parliament in March 1914, months before the beginning of the war.

How then, one might ask, did Friedrich Adler wind up living until 1960? Alder describes the course of Friedrich's trial and subsequent history in his account. Friedrich surrendered to police right at the hotel. He did not try to claim a legal justification for his actions, and he fully expected to be executed for it. His friend Einstein, also a socialist with strong antiwar leanings, offered to come to Vienna to testify in Friedrich's defense.

Friedrich actively opposed any kind of insanity defense on his behalf and was determined to claim that it was a conscious decision based on a political goal. As Alder writes, "He never felt remorse for his deed nor depression about his future," which he assumed included his own execution. "According to expectations, the court found him guilty and condemned him to death." Friedrich was allowed to testify for three hours at his trial, where he explained:

Therefore, the moral justification of my act in my eyes as a citizen is perfect. The ministry has torn the constitution apart; the ministry has given up its legallity [sic]; the ministry had given up its job of concerning itself with the laws of Austria, and there remains no other way than the way of force ...

Individual citizens, in my opinion, are justified to use force when the laws are destroyed. Everyone is justified to grasp justice on the basis of necessity which the government has caused. Yes, every citizen has not only the right to force, rather in my position, also the duty to intercede in that moment where all constitutional approaches fail - where there is no parliament, where there is no guarantee of justice, where all these have been taken away. Only a demoralized citizenry that has allowed itself to be seduced of all its conscience will stand aside. It cannot be a question of law; it is a question of duty.

Adler presented his assassination of Stürgkh as an act of civil disobedience for which he was willing to accept the legal punishment of death. His basic argument included the following elements, which notably did not include presenting himself as a martyr:

1. Stürgkh's government had lost its moral legitimacy
2. It had also lost its legal and political legitimacy by failing to follow its own laws
3. All attempts at a constitutional remedy had failed
4. Now only an illegal act of force can restore a legitimate government
5. He saw the assassination as a moral and patriotic duty, despite its illegality
6. He saw the killing as an act of conscience, despite its illegality

Given the currently operative use of "terrorism" to refer to attacks aimed at random civilians, like the Vienna attack of November 2020, it's worth noting that Stürgkh's assassination was a targeted act aimed at a government official, however one decides to evaluate it today.

In fact, Friedrich Adler's act did find some public resonance. Here it's important to recall that as the war began in 1914, there was a wide expectation that it would last probably a few weeks. Public enthusiasm for the war effort may have been exaggerated by official propaganda. But no one expected the prolonged mass slaughter that ensued. And no one expected it to end with the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires.

As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the First World War in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

It was then that political and social systems, centuries in the building, came apart - sometimes in a matter of weeks. And others were permanently transformed. It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position - and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began. World War II continued, enlarged and affirmed this change. In social terms World War II was the last battle of World War I.

In the case of Friedrich Adler, even so blatant an act of treason as murdering the head of government right in public didn't bring the execution he fully expected to receive. Emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916 less than a month after Karl Stürgkh left this mortal world. He was replaced by the last Habsburg emperor, Charles I. Charles first converted Adler's sentence from death to 18 years at hard labor. On November 1, 1918, he pardoned Adler completely. Early the next year, the monarchy was replaced by Austria's democratic republic, a key goal the SDAP had always sought.

As Alder relates:

Friedrich stepped out of prison a folk hero. During the long months between his arrest and pardon, he became the object of international leftist adulation. Peace crusaders in Austria and Russia called for Dr. Adler's release. Radicalized workers and soldiers greeted his release with a call for him to be the Austrian Lenin, leading the Bolshevik revolution in Vienna. ... He urged the workers to rally behind the new Austrian Republic and the Social Democratic Party that Victor Adler's death, on Armistice Day 1918, left in the able hands of Otto Bauer.

Despite popular enthusiasm, Friedrich didn't aspire to a major role in party leadership, though he remained active in Social Democratic affairs, "He died in Switzerland in 1960 after a distinguished effort as an international socialist leader which included harrowing months during World War II helping Jewish refugees escape from Hitler."

Thomas Edsall tells us that Republicans and Democrats are violently partisan

I believe Thomas Edsall may have just set a new record in "Both Sides Do It"-ism in his columan, No Hate Left Behind New York Times 03/13/2019.

Edsall sometimes does good reporting on the far right. But has also been positioning himself as a liberal concern troll at least since his 1991 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, co-authored with Mary Edsall. That book is a good reflection of the general atmosphere among Clintonesque Democrats of that time. The kind of thing you hear in those clips of Joe Biden in the 1990s talking about "predators" to justify draconian federal crime laws that put huge numbers of young black men in prison for minor drug offenses.

In this column, at a time when far-right violence in the US is common and left-wing versions virtually non-existent, and with Trump playing Viktor Orbán in the White House, Edsall blames partisanship and inclination to violence on, yes, Both Sides Do It!

He cites a study called "Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies" by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason. Some other time, I may post more about that paper itself. But how Edsall uses it in his column should immediately raise questions about how well the survey material correlates with his argument.

Unless you're a FOX News junkie or a TV pundit, it's painfully easy to see right now how radical right political violence is a serious problem with no far left parallel on the "other side" in the US. So Edsall's citations like this need to be absorbed with some very critical judgment:

We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.”

Kalmoe and Mason analyzed the data to see what kind of voter was likely to adopt extremely critical views of the opposition party:

Strongly identifying with one political side is associated with increased political hostility toward opponents in terms of moral disengagement, partisan schadenfreude, and partisan violence. 

... Contrary to the expectation that the losers of elections might be more inclined to violence, the two authors determined that winning increases support for violence against the opposition.

There was “significantly more support for partisan violence among strong partisans when told their party was more likely than not to win in 2020.”

Overall, the authors wrote, “our evidence suggests that winning more than losing prompts strong partisans to feel less opposed to partisan violence.”

Edsall is just being a brat in that interpretation. The question he cites is near meaningless unless supplemented by others, most notably a differentiation between whether the responsdents are talking about legal, official violence, e.g., the police arresting someone planning a mass murder, or extralegal violence.

There is an obvious possibility on why people might more inclined to violence if their side wins. The Republicans think the Democrats would try a violent uprising against Trump because that's the kind of thing old Republican white people are being fed on a daily basis by Republican-leaning media figures. That's divorced from reality, of course. On the Republican side, however, Trump himself is threatening extralegal violence if a Democratic President is elected in 2020. And there is plenty of hardcore rightwing political violence actually happening now.

There's nothing surprising in itself sinister that people would think that if their party's candidate wins, the other side would start engaging in violence, and therefore legal, official, governmental force would need to be used to counter it. And since Trump is actually threatening and encouraging violence, and since far right violence is happening right now, it's pretty obvious why Democrats would think official force might be need in response to extralegal violence by people sympathizing with the loser of the election.

Tom Edsall's interpretation of statistics, and of politics, need to be read with particular care.