Hack Watch: America is Belfast Edition

The prevailing sentiment, after my recent reader poll on this question, was to keep Hack Watch here, rather than making a separate site for it, but to make it something less than a constant harangue. So here we go.

Beating the same drum that everyone else is beating, think-tanker Rachel Kleinfeld warns in Politico today that the American political right has descended into a bloodthirsty rage:

Her opening graf starts with silliness: “The public’s willingness to support partisan violence in America now approaches levels recorded in Northern Ireland at the height of its troubles.”

Whatever the public’s supposed willingness to support partisan violence in America, Belfast at the height of the Troubles was an unrelenting bloodbath (“The tone for much of 1972 was set weeks beforehand, on 4 December 1971, when 15 Catholics were killed by a bomb at McGurk’s bar in north Belfast…Later in December, four Protestant civilians, including two children, were killed by an IRA bomb on the Shankill Road”). Any comparison of the US today to Northern Ireland during the Troubles that doesn’t distinguish between the expression to pollsters of a willingness to support violence and the actual application of violence is irredeemably silly as it comes off the bat. Who are the Disappeared in the US in 2022? Who’s our Jean McConville?

Second, of course Americans think political violence can be legitimate. It’s why we have a country.

But the question of the threshold is critical. I absolutely think political violence can be justified, and is sometimes necessary. That doesn’t mean I currently intend violence, or foresee a near-term moment when I will. The general sentiment and the intention to act are not close.

So then Kleinfeld says this, and the links here are from her piece:

But on the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position. Hate crimes remain the purview of the normal criminal demographic: unemployed and unmarried young men without kids. However, those joining violent political events like the Jan. 6 insurrection are more likely to be married middle-aged men with jobs and kids. Those most likely to support violence on the right feel most connected to the Republican Party according to a November 2021 Bright Line Watch survey. This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.

Donald Trump isn’t entirely to blame for this shift, but he’s clearly super-charged it. Since 2016, violence on the right has followed the election calendar — rising and falling with predictability during periods when MAGA politicians fill campaign space with hate-filled, violent rhetoric to cement their base.

Many people who support violence would never actually commit it themselves. But when language that simultaneously depicts people as a threat and less than human becomes common, more aggressive and unbalanced individuals will act.

Language that depicts people as a threat? Hmm, let me try to think of some recent examples.

And let’s see, “people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.” Yeah, let me think really hard.

Kleinfeld’s maneuver is the current maneuver, the one in which disagreement and criticism are framed as mindless viciousness. “But even more pernicious to our democracy is that targets now include neighbors and local leaders,” she writes. “Election volunteers, school board members, public health officials, mayors — they are now part of a rolling group of targets whose lives can be ruined by a tweet depending on the latest conspiracy.”

This is the language of the batshit crazy NSBA letter, and the subsequent language of the school boards that have reported parents to the FBI for mere criticism.

It’s the language of SB 1100 in California, which gives local governments a set of repressive rules to apply in case the public “bullies” them by showing up at city council meetings to criticize elected officials.

It’s the language of California legislators who played at feeling scared because citizens sharply disagreed with an appalling legislative assault on the basic rights of parents.

It’s tedious, it’s pathetic, and it’s so constant as to be automatic. It’s like editors have a “right-wing political violence” story that they can summon up by pressing a button, and they can’t stop pressing the thing, like a lab rat getting cocaine.

You disagree with me — that’s being violent!

Not really.