Lately, I’ve been trying to argue how the Republican embrace of political violence during the Trump years — from the former president’s suggestions that supporters beat up protestors at his rallies, to the grand fascistic crescendo of the Capitol assault — should taint a broad range of the GOP’s anti-democratic measures that preceded this escalation and that continue through the present. You might phrase it like this: violence is what authoritarian-minded people turn to when gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression fail to get the job done, but they’re all part of the same authoritarian playbook.
But a huge part of the reason I want to make this connection between violence and other anti-democratic methods is because political violence is uniquely destructive and irreconcilable with democratic politics. Peaceful means of addressing our conflicts and doing the public business, whether through voting or legislation, is so much a part of our system that I would guess most people usually didn’t even think about this basic assumption of nonviolence — at least not until the Trump presidency. That’s why the phrase “peaceful transfer of power” seemed, until this year, to be a sort of redundancy, a piece of old-fashioned verbiage dragged out ritualistically every four years. Of course transfers of power are peaceful, why wouldn’t they be? Sadly, we have learned otherwise.
This is why the Democrats can’t hesitate to tie the GOP not only to the Capitol assault, but to broader instances of right-wing violence and intimidation around the nation that have been fostered and in some cases overtly encouraged by Republican politicians. The GOP comfort with political violence needs to be kept very much at the forefront of the Democrats’ case against the Republican Party. This is both because it’s crucial to stop the violence, but also to deny the GOP the plausible deniability in which the party seeks to cloak its increasing comfort with it. You can already see the second challenge playing out with the Capitol attack, with many in the Republican Party condemning the assault, yet finding themselves unwilling to hold President Trump to account for inciting it, or to renounce the myth of a stolen election that helped ignite the insurrection. Meanwhile, still other elements of the right claim the attack either wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed, or was the work of leftist agitators like antifa.
This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it, too: the Republican Party is attempting to reap the upside of violence while evading the downside. One of the main downsides is that a great majority of the American people are repelled, horrified, and angered by political violence, as well they should be. The baseline taboo nature of violence for most Americans has doubtless played a large role in keeping it to the margins for many years. But we can now see that all the play-acting of militia types has simply been laying the groundwork for attacks and insurrection, as Josh Marshall discusses here.
It should be clear that the GOP is not making common cause with the armed far-right just because they want their votes, though the necessity of squeezing out every last vote of their diminishing white base does encourage this courtship. Republican politicians who speak approvingly of armed gangs that take over statehouses and show up at Black Lives Matter events as auxiliary police forces know full well that the purpose of these armed men is to intimidate and terrorize their political opposition. For a horrifying example of this phenomenon, check out coverage of the growing amity between militia movements and Republican politicians in Michigan. In that state, the two groups have found common cause in opposing a Democratic governor and Democratic legislators around coronavirus measures. It’s a profile in cowardice, opportunism, and moral turpitude, not to mention a case study of fascist politics in action.
Yet GOP politicians are happily signing onto such intimidation as a political tactic to overwhelm, demoralize, and strike fear into their Democratic opposition. This report from Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo describes how this is not a future problem, but has already traumatized some of those targeted by right-wing extremists around the country. Reporting on protests at state legislatures in Michigan, Oregon, and Idaho, he writes that, “The lingering threat of political violence, legislators told me, still hangs over the work they do daily. It has chilled the democratic process and made elected representatives afraid for their own safety, and in some cases hesitant to fully express their views.” One state representative remarked to Shuham, “[D]oes it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?” Even now, the right-wing terror campaign is already having its intended effects, to the benefit of the perpetrators and their GOP allies.
In the Capitol assault, we see the outlines of an even more terrible strategy: killing your political opponents when you can’t beat them at the ballot box. In the context of January 6, such behavior has been widely acknowledged as treason and insurrection; the task of Democrats now is to communicate to the American people that “lesser” forms of violence, such as when Republicans ally themselves with armed right-wing militias, likewise constitute treason and insurrection. And while they need to appeal to the decency of most Americans, they also can’t take for granted that the use of political violence is self-apparently bad. It’s essential that the taboo nature of political violence be revisited and revived; that these grounds for condemning, repudiating, and rolling back the GOP be made crystal clear.