The Surprising Lack of Violence in American Politics
Not long ago I was generally in favor of direct redress of grievances, like this and this. These public interruptions happen to lots of politicians, but I highlighted two that happened to Mitch McConnell because many of the problems I’m writing about today can be traced to the way he changed the political game in the United States. I’ve often written here that Donald Trump is not a cause of our political problems, but a symptom. There is no singular root cause of the problems in American politics, but McConnell is a major player among the root causes. It is also one of my favorite stats in politics that Mitch McConnell was my senator when I was born; he was also the senator for all of my kids when they were born.
Many politicians are like McConnell—entirely inaccessible to any voter who doesn’t have several thousand dollars to shell out toward his political war chest. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Voters across the country don’t have any access to their elected officials anymore. When was the last time your senator or congressperson came to your town and held an open forum?
So, my thinking went, if someone like McConnell is gonna try to make his constituents’ lives uncomfortable and difficult, without giving them a chance to weigh in— for instance by taking healthcare coverage away from almost half a million Kentuckians—then he deserves to have his life made uncomfortable and difficult by his constituents.
But that was in the ancient age of 2018-2019. The world is different now.
In our new political epoch violent threats to politicians are no longer a tinfoil hat pastime. Or, maybe they are and it’s just that a lot more Americans have opted into this fall’s most trendy conspiracy fashion accessory. The Capitol Police have fielded more than 10 times the number of violent threats against elected officials than they did just a few years ago. It’s so bad now that even the perpetually concerned Susan Collins is afraid that someone might get killed. Honestly, I’m a little surprised someone hasn’t already.
The United States isn’t immune to political violence. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s there was an awful lot more than there has been in the modern era, but violence in the modern era is growing. The question that has been puzzling me is, why haven’t we (thankfully) seen more violence in recent years?
I hope you’re enjoying this letter so far. You can subscribe to make sure to catch every edition of The Constituent. It’s completely free!
The American political system is fraught with systemic failures that would lead to worrying violent tendencies in any age.
Perhaps more than ever before, elected officials are not responsive to their constituents needs. Problems from scam calls to crypto scams, from big tech to meat monopolies, from affordable education to immigration are all fixable with just a little savvy and political will. But political will doesn’t exist.
Thanks to McConnell’s successful campaign to get as much money from the rich and powerful into politics as possible, the voices of the masses can’t make a difference. For the most part, all a representative needs to do is protect their flank from a primary challenge, and they will continue living high on the fatted DC hog for another cycle.
Given these systematic logistics, elected officials paradoxically have the incentive to avoid fixing problems. Because politicians never actually have to face their constituents, they never feel the need to actually do anything. The incentive is quite the opposite. A problem solved is a problem that cannot be used to leverage rage. Angry voters are the most reliable voters, and solving problems might make voters less angry—so, why solve problems? Blaming the other side and pretending the problem might actually be solved without them is the strategy that optimizes election prospects in our current political age. So, that’s the only strategy we get.
Look at abortion. For 50 years abortion was in a status quo that most of the country was comfortable with. A vast bloc of conservative Christians became reliable single-issue voters because they wanted to make Jesus happy with their government. Then the Supreme Court took away Republicans’ ability to obfuscate through the legislative process, and changed that status quo on its own. The results have been a disaster for the Republicans who have to live with the change they only pretended to really want. Fixing this problem for Republicans meant it couldn’t be an anger issue for Republican voters.
Why fix big tech monopolies, even when some of them are causing depression and suicide in their customer base, if fixing it means politicians can’t gin up their voters afterward? Why fix an immigration system if fixing it means one side can’t rally around a wall, and the other can’t call those rallying racist? Why actually do anything?
Doing things means that elected officials have to take a vote. Taking a vote means making a decision, and some voters might not be happy with that decision. Instead, everyone can be kept in a blur of anger where it’s easy to flip-flop and say the right things to the right people, but never actually having to choose the flip or the flop. Even simple, popular fixes like decriminalization of marijuana or prescription drug reform can’t get considered because then people couldn’t be angry about them.
This vast antipathy toward solving problems leads people to more anger because nothing gets done, and problems persist. On top of this, many attempts to distract from this collective legislative failure come by pointing the finger at the other side. Add to that the anger stoked around issues by those who ought to be solving the issues, and it’s an honest mystery why more people haven’t become more violent in recent years.
These failures of the political system lead people to feel like they are being abandoned or left behind. I have written about how much these failures have left behind Trump voters. White men, and non-college educated white men in particular, have seen their standard of living actually fall in the last 50 years. While some groups’ standards increased more slowly than others, this group has seen an actual decrease.
But economics is complicated, and any politician trying to explain that the free market and deregulatory economic agenda was the major cause of this degradation is going to lose. Nobody wants to come to a rally to hear an economic lecture. This explanation will be particularly unconvincing when Republican leaders aim to make their voters angry about social issues. Social issues are much easier to understand than economic issues—or at least much easier to scapegoat. This anger at a changing society is easily merged with anger about changing economic conditions, even though the two have separate causes. It probably goes largely unnoticed that Trump voters have been the overwhelming winners under the Biden economic framework.
This stark sense of change—and more importantly, social and economic loss—is only compounded by the inability of the political system to address problems. When people feel a sense of loss, they believe they have less to lose if they get violent.
Think about the Civil Rights era. Whites saw Blacks becoming more economically, civically, and socially liberated. Rather than realize that markets are interconnected, and increased wealth for minorities would lead to increased wealth for everyone, they saw the gains of minorities as a loss to themselves. They hadn’t lost anything in reality, they simple felt they had lost something because the law now said Black Americans were equal. This sense of loss led to a lot of violence.1 Rather than share high quality public amenities, Whites destroyed those amenities--literally destroying economic assets just so Black Americans couldn't use them.
Given the political and racial lines along which we see this sense of grievance and victimhood, it’s a miracle our society hasn’t seen a lot more violence.
Having fun? Learning something new? If so, do me a favor and let your friends know about The Constituent.
This isn’t a both sides problem.
Violence on the right is rising; religious and right wing violence make up by far the largest portion of political violence. This does include Islamic terrorism, but that in itself is a small portion of the violence. Christian violence, however, is rising.2 The trends in who commits political violence are also changing. Historically, left wing violence has been more likely to be committed against property, and right violence against people. On both sides violence was generally spurred on by social unrest of young adult men still trying to find their way in the social hierarchy. They had less to lose, and once they found steady employment, and had their own family, the tendency towards violence abated. This is no longer the case.3 Now, white, middle class, conservative, and often Christian men well into their 30s, who have families and jobs, are moving toward violence more than ever before in modern America. Some have even targeted minority groups because they thought God wanted it.
Politicians on the right repeatedly use dehumanizing language—calling immigrants and infestation, calling Democrats demons, calling BLM activists communist pigs, etc—a well known motivator toward intergroup violence.4
In the present day we have all the ingredients of political violence from past eras, plus a few more. The red scare and the gay scare politics have just changed color. Now we have the squad scare and the trans scare. There are still McCarthy type politicians who are happy to whip up their base to anger—some so brazen that even no-sense-of-decency McCarthy might blush.
Everyone who disagrees is the enemy, even if those disagreeing are on the same side. Trump went off on Mitch McConnell, putting a target on Mitch McConnell’s back on Atlantic City Twitter. The man who organized and orchestrated two impeachment acquittals and two mendacious Supreme Court confirmations for Trump doesn’t even get a pass from the right’s violent fantasies.
Tucker Carlson has no compunction about devoting entire weeks of the flagship conservative cable show to the dangerous Replacement Theory. The degradation of values has become so blatant that white nationalism and Christian nationalism are now the functioning baseline of the Republican primary voter.
Both parties suck, and pointing that out is important. Yes, there are cases of violence on the left, and that is also a terrible problem. But, in this case, there isn’t an equivalence. The problem is overwhelmingly right wing, and right wing leaders increasingly seem to be taking that as a point of pride.
In the past political eras the Republican party was able to keep the racial resentment and John Birch conspiracy types relegated to the darkest corners of their political galaxy. They were able to use a political planetary defense system to redirect the bigotry every time that asteroid was headed toward our society. No longer.
In those days defeating the worst from within was like a game of Whac-a-Mole; beat it down wherever it pops up. Now, with one click from rage-baiting social media platforms like Facebook, the worst humans can realize they aren’t alone—there are millions more just like them. This coalition of the asinine is now pulling others who have been disinfected down with it.
Now, secession is openly embraced by thoughtless leaders. Elections are allegedly stolen. Democrats (and if this weren’t something people actually believe it would be too ridiculous even for SNL) murder babies and drink their blood to stay youthful. Assassination talk is just teammate banter these days. And I haven’t even mentioned the January 6th insurrection in this entire post.
The social and economic conditions are ripe for violence; the political arena refuses to solve any problems; the media pushes for violence and rewards ragebait; and our elected officials try to convince their voters that every problem that exists would be solved if we just got rid of the other party.
I consider it an honest-to-God miracle that we haven’t seen widespread political violence, and I hope it never comes to that. Maybe the best explanation is just my running theory—that Baby Boomers were the Worst. Generation. Ever. and it was just their collective awfulness that led to violence in the Vietnam era. Maybe we can credit excellent police work—from the non-escalatory police response to the Jan 6 insurrection to the foiled plot to kidnap and assassinate a governor. I’m really not sure why we have been able to avoid violence for so long. Honestly, an objective assessment of the situation seems like we should have had a lot more violence than we have.
But political violence is growing. Here’s to hoping our luck doesn’t run out.
Thanks for reading The Constituent. If you’d like to support the newsletter, here are a few options.
-Thanks,
McGhee, Heather. The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. One World, 2022.
Armaly, Miles T., David T. Buckley, and Adam M. Enders. "Christian nationalism and political violence: victimhood, racial identity, conspiracy, and support for the capitol attacks." Political behavior 44, no. 2 (2022): 937-960.
Kleinfeld, Rachel. "The rise of political violence in the United States." Journal of Democracy 32, no. 4 (2021): 160-176.
Moller, Arlen C., and Edward L. Deci. "Interpersonal control, dehumanization, and violence: A self-determination theory perspective." Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 13, no. 1 (2010): 41-53.
Rai, Tage S., Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham. "Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 32 (2017): 8511-8516.