In the Age of Trump, there has been an increase in right-wing violence and terrorism. This includes obvious examples such as the Jan. 6 coup attempt, mass shootings and other acts of violence. The growing dangers of right-wing political violence also include increasingly open and direct calls for a second civil war, a sustained insurgency to remove President Joe Biden from office, threats against election workers who refuse to betray democracy, harassment of law enforcement and other people who are trying to hold Trump and his followers responsible for their crimes against democracy. Since Trump's election, Republicans have rushed to pass laws that permit and encourage right-wing vigilantism and other types of violence against left-wing protesters.
Today’s Republican Party and the larger “conservative” movement are trying to impose “a state of exception” on American society, where intimidation, thuggery, violence and terrorism are “acceptable” means for them to get and keep power. They believe that a “state of exception” is necessary — if not ideal — because the American right’s political project has been rejected across a range of issues by a majority of the public.
A belief in the legitimacy of such violence is animated by a very dangerous lie and assumption that once unleashed such acts can be targeted and directed like some type of smart bomb or shaped charge against the left. In the real world, the explosions and resulting shrapnel and destruction are rarely confined to one area and often hurt and kill friends and foes alike. The Republican fascists – and “mainstream” conservatives are imperiling themselves when they encourage and unleash violence and other anti-democratic forces against their perceived enemies on the left.
In his essential book “The Anatomy of Fascism," political scientist Robert Paxton provides this important context:
Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and ‘terrorists’ who deserved it.
The Republican Party’s recent struggle to elect a leader in the House of Representatives is a preview of how the normalization of right-wing political violence in the Age of Trump and beyond will, and is, being turned against “conservatives” and other members of the GOP who are judged to be insufficiently loyal to Trumpism and the neofascist cause. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard explains:
As Jim Jordan and his allies attempted to whip speaker votes last week, they kept running into a familiar refrain from their skeptics: The brass-knuckle tactics they were deploying were causing Jordan’s critics and their families to receive a slew of vicious messages—including death threats.
The Pynchonesque-ly named Iowa Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks reported that she had received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after switching her vote to oppose Jordan on a second speaker ballot. Georgia’s Drew Ferguson changed his vote after Jordan wouldn’t “calm down the hysteria” surrounding his nomination. Nebraska’s Don Bacon revealed his wife had grown so fearful after a barrage of intimidating calls that she had started sleeping with a loaded gun. On Friday, CNN aired a voicemail that the wife of one unnamed congressman received from a caller that threatened she would be “fucking molested” if she didn’t convince her husband to back Jordan.
Jordan may have publicly decried these threats, but his association with an effort to use threats and intimidation as an explicit political tactic—and as a means of cajoling fellow Republicans to get in line behind him—is the clearest sign yet of just how central such tactics have become for mainstream Republicans. Indeed, while they failed to have their intended effect, it’s abundantly clear that the Republican Party remains as comfortable with radical elements promising violent retribution as Donald Trump was during his effort to overturn a legitimate election.
As summarized by Mediate, in his new book, outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, warns that the political violence and thuggery embraced by some of Trump’s followers has already sabotaged the ability of Congress to follow through on its most basic responsibilities:
Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) revealed to biographer McKay Coppins that the threat of physical violence effectively kept many elected Republicans from voting to impeach or convict President Donald Trump, even though they wanted to.
Coppins is doing the media rounds to promote his new biography Reckoning and chatted with Brian Stelter for a thoughtful interview, which Vanity Fair published on Thursday.
NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen flagged one particular passage on social media, writing:
“Read this paragraph and tell me that the 2024 election can be responsibly reported using the same tools and terms in use for every national election.”
The passage in question reveals that many Republican members of Congress wanted to vote to impeach or convict the former president but that the threat of political violence by Trump supporters effectively kept them from doing what they thought was right. Stelter writes:
“One of the biggest revelations to me in my conversations with Romney was just how important the threat of political violence was to the psychology of elected Republicans today,” said Coppins, who recalled Romney telling him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment—vote to convict Trump or vote to impeach Trump—and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety. They were afraid of what Trump supporters might do to them or to their families.” That “raises a really uncomfortable question,” Coppins said, which is “how long can the American project last if elected officials from one of the major parties are making their political decisions based on fear of physical violence from their constituents?”
Violence is a type of “anti-politics” because it subverts the dialogue, consensus, compromise, and shared understanding of facts and reality. The importance of mutually agreed upon institutions, norms and values (“a rules-based order”) that a healthy democracy depends upon is undermined by violence.
So if taken to its logical conclusion, such a state of affairs necessitates that a political strongman or some other type of autocrat, dictator, or warlord is installed as a way of bringing order to chaos. This is the world that today’s Republican fascists and the larger white right are trying to create in America and around the world.
In the following interview Yale University historian Joanne Freeman, who is the author of "The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War," shares a warning about political violence in the Age of Trump and its larger implications for America’s future:
In some ways, discovering that our polarized present has some precedent is reassuring, and indeed, before and after the 1850s there were other such times. But “The Field of Blood” also reveals an extreme version of some of the problems that we’re experiencing today—and therein lie some lessons.
Extreme polarization; splintering political parties; distrust in national institutions; rampant conspiracy theories; a powerful new technology of communication — the telegraph; an increasingly dysfunctional Congress: this cluster of problems drove Americans not only to distrust their government, but to distrust each other, and with no outlet for the popular will, and the simmering problem of slavery dividing the nation, the end result was violence.
Of course, we’re not on the cusp of civil warfare. But it’s worth noting that the impact of allowing the national “we” to crumble can be mighty, and that discord and dysfunction on the national stage can break down the bulwark of public opinion that supports republican governance.
By welcoming and encouraging right-wing political violence and other thuggery in the Age of Trump and beyond, the Republican Party has normalized and institutionalized such antidemocratic forces — and they are coming for them first.
Donald Trump is very fond of the poem and song “The Snake," which he often recites at his political cult meetings as a warning about how “illegal immigrants” and refugees are going to poison and destroy (White) America. Of course, Trump has twisted and distorted the poem’s original meaning for his own nefarious purposes. But Trump is actually telling on himself and warning the Republican Party and the “conservatives” who support him about his and the neofascist MAGA movement’s true nature and plans. In reality, Trump and his MAGA people and other supporters are the snake who is going to bite and make lethally ill whoever is naïve and foolish enough to help them. That is what fascists do. It is their inherent nature.
