Recently, The Washington Post published a deeply disturbing article about a campaign of harassment and intimidation that a Seattle man engaged in against Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal. It’s an excellent corrective to the various vague reports we see of rising threats against elected representatives, capturing the menace and personal toll on politicians by focusing on a single incident. By extension, it also hammers home the overriding need to ensure our officials receive sufficient protection, and that the government response to the perpetrators must be swift and effective.
Disconcertingly, the story also captures how very much the wave of intimidation coming from the right takes advantage of and perverts the values of a liberal, open society: using free speech rights to go up to, and pass, the line into threats; using the fact that most political officials live openly among their constituents to stalk and threaten them; and using our society’s strengths to subvert those very strengths.
As Volts’ David Roberts rightly notes, the article actually holds back from making clear that the vast majority of threats such as Jayapal underwent are coming from the right end of the political spectrum. Yet this wave of violent intimidation is in part the obvious consequence of a president who instigated violence throughout his term in office, and turned to violence on January 6 to remain in power. Over the last several years, Donald Trump and his supporters have not legitimized violence and intimidation so much as put them in play as ways to try to wreck democratic politics. We are at a point where we risk, if not legitimizing such harassment, then normalizing it, which would be a tremendous victory for the authoritarians and a deep, possibly fatal, wound to American democracy.
In this respect, the Post article indirectly highlights a glaring issue: the failure of the Democratic Party and other defenders of democracy to properly highlight and respond to the growing physical menace from so many on the right, and the way that mainstream Republican leaders cultivate and benefit from it. It should be obvious that you do not defend elected officials against a mass campaign of violence and intimidation by hesitating to discuss the extent of that campaign and its terrifying details. Yet this has effectively been the Democrats’ stance — to decry the intimidation in vague terms, and not to confront it fully, unambiguously, and ruthlessly.
In fact, the party should be proactively telling stories like Jayapal’s, drawing in detail the depravity and illegitimacy of these anti-democratic actors, and tracing their actions back to an atmosphere of encouragement spread from the highest ranks of the GOP. And if they are afraid of seeming too “partisan” by looking to place the blame where it lies — on GOP authoritarianism — then this must be seen as bipartisanship taken to a suicidal extreme. When the GOP engages in lies and propaganda that have as an inevitable result the incitement of violence against Democrats, nonpartisan officials, or even Republicans who refuse to bow to Donald Trump, then the Democrats need to be explicit in their criticism and unyielding in the objective of shutting this violence down.
This would hardly be politicizing security issues, but doing the right thing by weaponizing them, to hold to account a GOP that winks and nods, if not outright endorses, the use of intimidation and violence to make up for its steadily increasing unpopularity. Certainly after January 6, it is somewhat incredible to me that the Democratic leadership has not done a better job in publicizing ongoing existential threats to its own elected officials, not to mention to nonpartisan officials around the country who have been subject to similar harassment.
I don’t know if it’s disarray or incomprehension, but any attitude that violent intimidation will simply go away on its own misunderstands the nature of this violence and the forces behind it. The aim of these actions is to terrorize and to intimidate. The perpetrators are fueled in part by perceptions of their own impunity, and that their victims will not fight back, or are not able to. To disabuse them of their misperceptions, they must be confronted, exposed, and punished. A democracy must be willing to defend itself against its internal saboteurs, or it will not be a democracy for long.
While action by law enforcement is a necessary part of responding to the direct perpetrators of right-wing intimidation and violence, it is totally insufficient on its own. For example, the Justice Department formed a task force last year that’s responsible for responding to and prosecuting threats against election officials. Yet, as of today, out of more than 1,000 cases referred to the DOJ, a bare handful have been prosecuted. Part of the reason appears to be the significant protections current federal law gives to verbal and written harassment, based on free speech considerations. But the basic fact that in the meantime, hundreds if not thousands of election officials have now been traumatized and terrified by even protected speech means that the country needs to confront those at the top of the political food chain who are inciting and encouraging such violent intimidation. To change the current dynamic, a political response must bookend the law enforcement response.
In terms of threats to lawmakers, it does not seem like a coincidence that the most effective communicators of what it’s like to have their lives threatened are females among the Democratic caucus. In part this seems directly related to the fact that they’ve received a disproportionate share of the threats, but there’s also the basic fact that they’ve actually chosen to share the details in a way that I haven’t really seen male members do. The Post article is so gripping partly because Jayapal herself is so open about her experience, sharing her fear and sense of vulnerability. Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also been forthright about the terror of January 6 and the emotional damage it caused, as well as how the harassment she has received over the years has been amplified by her history of sexual trauma. You have to wonder if other (male) Democrats’ general fear of appearing vulnerable and weak has kept more from speaking out and giving substance to the wave of harassment. In a larger sense, you also have to ask whether the wish not to appear vulnerable is helping keep the Democrats from making this right-wing violent intimidation much more of a campaign issue.
The irony is that the details in stories like the Post piece are enraging and activating. They don’t make the ordinary reader think the Democrats are weak, but that the right-wing forces perpetrating this campaign are sick and crazy. Once again, it seems that the Democrats are hesitant to touch an emotional issue out of a fear that it might make the party appear too partisan or too angry to a mythical centrist voter or (more real) middle-of-the-road pundit. Detailed stories of harassment might make some Americans scared of these violent forces, sure, but I don’t think it will amplify the terror campaign or lend it power. Just the opposite — I think the larger effect will be to make citizens angry and determined not to let these right-wing freaks poison our neighborhoods with their hate and bully our elected officials, and to drive from office those in the GOP who lend a sheen of normalcy to a de facto war on America.