When GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively harassed Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Capitol building last week, Greene was clearly trying to manufacture edgy media “content” to boost her already-well burnished bona fides as a far-right provocateur. But more than this, Greene’s actions express the Republican Party’s drift toward intimidation and violence to achieve its political goals, the rough outer edges of its offensive against American democracy. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the GOP House leadership’s tolerance for Greene’s behavior the same week that it defenestrated hard-right Representative Elizabeth Cheney “because she spoke out against Trump and because she pushed back against his lies about the 2020 election,” as expert on authoritarianism Brian Klaas puts it, speaks volumes about what the party considers inside political bounds. This tacit endorsement of Green’s tactics, in which physical confrontation of fellow elected officials is considered yet another tool in the toolbox, needs to be taken seriously as a threat not only by the Democratic Party, but by the news media and the citizenry.
Joanne Freeman, a history professor, meticulously documented the history of 19th century congressional violence in the lead-up to the Civil War in her amazing book Field of Blood. She describes how Southern senators and representatives relied on physical intimidation to set the limits of debate on issues like the expansion of slavery in order to retain the South’s outsized power in American governance. The deployment of bullying and outright violence were aimed at intimidating their opponents.
But as Freeman reminded us in a tweet last week, such Southern behavior was hardly an expression of unquestionable power - quite the opposite:
History shows that members of Congress who feel the need to consistently and aggressively harass and threaten their colleagues often are people who know that they are in a minority and might very well lose power in a fair system.
Bullies exist because they fear fair outcomes.
For me, this helps clarify the dual challenge posed by the aggressive rhetoric and behavior of Greene and the larger GOP. On the one hand, their threats of violence need to be viewed and treated with deadly seriousness, as an assault on the working of democracy itself. (As Freeman wrote shortly after the January 6 insurrection, “This is the logic of bullying. It’s democracy by force — which, of course, isn’t democracy at all. It’s a demand for one-party rule.“) Ocasio-Cortez did the correct thing by calling on House leadership and security officials to “take real steps to make Congress a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.” But fascists like Greene try to turn efforts to call out their behavior into evidence of Democrats’ weakness, an attempt to validate the bullying behavior and lay the groundwork for its escalation. And so Greene’s response was to write a tweet making fun of Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns for her personal safety; this was Greene’s way of asserting that her intimidation had worked, while pretending that it was only AOC’s cowardliness that led her to think Greene was actually trying to intimidate her.
AOC’s own tweeted response to the incident feels right to me: she described Greene as the sort of person she used to have thrown out of the bar back in her bartending days. In one fell swoop, she related Greene’s behavior to a belligerence everyone is familiar with, as well as intimating that she’s dealt handily with the likes of Greene before. Crucially, she acknowledged Greene’s abusive behavior by asserting that she won’t be cowed by it —an essential step in standing up to bullies of the schoolyard or congressional variety. AOC’s response also engages with the second major challenge of dealing with aggressive behavior: not allowing yourself to get sucked down to their level of intimidation and violence. Greene’s preferred outcome, I would guess, would be for AOC to lose her cool and resort to the same sociopathic behavior as herself, hustling after Greene in full view of the television cameras and demanding that Greene debate her — at which point, I would guess, Greene would be cunning enough to switch roles and attempt to paint AOC’s identical behavior as evidence of an unhinged person who prefers intimidation to a calm debate of political issues. For Greene, the goal is not meaningful engagement on the issues of the day; it is to discredit and destroy the opposition by short-circuiting the norms and ideals of democracy itself.
Crafting a response to one-on-one intimidation like Greene’s, and the more serious cultivation of violence that the Trumpified GOP has engaged in, will be a necessary element of rolling back and defeating the Republican Party’s authoritarian threat to American democracy. The Democrats need to be ready for more GOP representatives to engage in Greene’s bullying tactics, and have strategies prepared to turn such intimidation to their advantage; whatever mental or emotional problems Greene might have, the tactics she’s engaged in are both rational and predictable. Democrats have to take these tactics seriously while also drawing attention to the fundamental weakness that drives them. The GOP engages in such behavior because it needs to appear strong when it is in fact weak and in decline by the basic standards of a democracy. Having embraced an identity as America’s white supremacist party, it has now hitched its future and very survival on a diminishing demographic, on regions of the country that by and large represent the economic past, and on the unraveling of our democracy. Again, as Freeman put it, “Bullies exist because they fear fair outcomes.” Democrats would do well not only to bear this in mind, but to make sure they’re educating the American people about the rotten roots of the GOP’s turn to violence and intimidation. And they should take faith and comfort in the fact that most people really dislike bullies.