In a recent piece, The Nation columnist Jeet Heer explores the connections between the right’s incitement of violence against the LGBTQ community and massacres like that at Club Q in Colorado Springs. In particular, he draws a compelling parallel between the phenomenon of lynchings in the Jim Crow South and our contemporary scourge of anti-gay killings. In the South, Heer writes, laws suppressing the rights of Blacks were accompanied by a regime of extra-judicial killings that also worked to maintain the “racist status quo.” Heer argues that the Republican Party and its right-wing supporters are currently working to enact a similar system of enforcement today:
The lynching culture of Jim Crow America had both a legal and an extrajudicial side. The legal side was all the laws that affirmed white supremacy. The extrajudicial side was the actual lynching, which was often winked at by the police and respectable society.
In 21st-century America, the right-wing push to reinforce heteronormative cultural domination has both a legal side and an extrajudicial side. The legal side can be seen in the anti-gay and anti-trans laws passed by governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas. The illegal side comes from hate crimes like the Club Q massacre.
A particularly chilling parallel Jeet draws is how, under both systems, the victims were blamed for their own targeting. In the case of Blacks, for not knowing their place and for being falsely accused of violence against whites; in the case of the gay community, for being a community of child abusers.
It’s been clear for a long time that the GOP and far-right extremists share a similar antipathy to the gay community, but the parallel dynamics that Jeer describes are eye-opening. The current anti-gay jihad might not be as extensive as the terror states established in the Jim Crow South to repress and discipline its African-American citizens, but the similarity in strategies and goals is nauseating and reprehensible. And in the present case, we can see how the wave of anti-gay laws are themselves serving to encourage and perpetuate anti-gay violence, resting as they are on dehumanizing and slanderous notions about a specific population of Americans. Perversely, in the right-wing mindset, violence then retroactively makes the laws still more justified, because there must be something wrong with gays if they keep provoking people to kill them.
Pull back the camera a bit more, though, and you can see that the strategy of legalistic methods twinned with threats and violence undergirds the wider GOP assault on American democracy and society, which I’ve argued constitutes a slow-rolling insurrection against this country. Even as multiple Republican-controlled state governments have worked to subvert the conduct of elections and undermine the votes of Democrats, their effort has been accompanied by a wave of intimidation against election workers and politicians. Even as enormous numbers of Republican officials maintain that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and suggest Democrats are the enemy, not simply political rivals, Democrats are targeted by actual violence, such as in the attack that injured Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Just as African-Americans and gays have been blamed for their own victimization, so the GOP has suggested a general perfidy on the part of the Democratic base and leadership, accusing it of stealing elections and encouraging voting by illegal immigrants — not to mention of being fundamentally un-American for the crime of living in urban areas.
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Despite the horror of high-profile racist and homophobic shootings, the United States in reality faces twin assaults from gun violence. In the more widespread and prevalent one, guns are involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of American annually in a wide variety of crimes, accidents, and suicides. And in a narrower but politically explosive phenomenon, of which the Club Q attack is the latest example, guns are used by domestic terrorists and other extremists to slaughter African-Americans, Latinos, Jews, and gays in an endless series of deadly hate crimes. Both strains of shootings are eroding our basic expectations that we should be safe from violence in living our lives and conducting our daily business. And though only the latter form of violence is overtly political in nature, all gun violence serves the ends of a far-right movement that has an interest in destabilizing American society, undermining faith in the government’s ability to provide for public safety, and promoting mutual fear among the citizenry in order to foster a racist tribalism.
Moreover, both strains of violence are rooted in a permissive and idolatrous gun culture that emanates overwhelmingly from the right side of the political spectrum. Legally, this culture has been made possible by deliberate misreadings of the Second Amendment — endorsed by a far-right Supreme Court majority — which substitute a broad individual right to be armed to the teeth over the clear constitutional intention to protect the ability of states to organize militias in their defense. But the roots of this culture seem to me to come from interrelated feelings of fear and of a desire for domination among millions of right-leaning Americans: a fear of people unlike themselves, and a wish to overcome this fear by dominating those otherized fellow citizens. And so the land has not only been flooded by firearms, but by a normalization of the very idea that it is perfectly reasonable, as you go about your day, that you might decide it’s necessary to shoot a fellow citizens for vague but ever-present reasons. Beyond this, the gun rights movement has made it not only legally simple for those inclined to violence to buy guns, but through this very easy access helped normalize the idea that killing itself is an ordinary and justified activity.
But massacres like the one at Club Q, accompanied by right-wing rhetoric that blames the victims for meriting their own demise, help us see a bleaker dynamic at play in the right’s unflinching support for unfettered gun rights. For if violence is viewed as necessary to keep certain Americans in line, like gays and African-Americans, then you can see how the broader mayhem enabled by easy gun access and the culture of violence it promotes might be seen as simply collateral damage to this terrorizing purpose. Sure, tens of thousands of Americans may be killed by criminals and relatives every year — but is this not a price that must be born in order to ensure adequate repression of America’s domestic enemies?
It is screamingly apparent that the country needs the strongest possible counter-offensive against this flood of guns and strategy of incitement coming from the Republican Party and its right-wing allies. If there is any silver lining to be found in these rivers of blood, it’s that the GOP’s complicity in extremist violence can’t be disentangled from its support for lax gun laws and whole-hearted embrace of gun culture as a central tenet of the party. A determined opposition can make the straightforward case that the right-wing’s obsession with guns is increasingly indistinguishable from support for a plague of domestic terrorism. The immediate goal should not be seen as eliminating guns or gun violence in the near term— the sheer number of the former, and the deep cultural embeddedness of the latter, make this a long-term project — but the process must begin. Rather, the nearer-term goal is deeply political — to make the GOP pay a serious and escalating price at the ballot box for integrating murder and mayhem into its political playbook. It should be obvious that a party that sees violence as a route to power deserves no seat at the American table, and that its complicity in mass shootings and general mayhem in pursuit of a quest for racial and religious domination is utterly disqualifying.
But to impose such a price, the Democrats must rid themselves of an institutional reluctance to confront the GOP or to escalate the unavoidable conflict between the two parties. Though centrist commentators would doubtless tut-tut were the Democrats to aggressively accuse the GOP of murderous incitement against vulnerable groups of Americans, or to describe in unambiguous terms the interplay between persecutory laws and unleashing of violence against such groups, I simply don’t see any other way to stop these horrifying dynamics. So far, the GOP and the right have had no incentive to question their strategy because it’s working; they are giving their base an enemy to hate, and in doing so are feeding a process of dehumanization and scapegoating that will inevitably lead to more violence — violence that right-wing propagandists assert is deserved by the victims. As political observers like Thomas Zimmer have written, this is a right-wing movement that will not stop on its own, but will only be stopped by a countervailing political force.