On March 14, 2016—just past 15 months ago, but it seems a whole lot longer—I wrote as follows:
Donald Trump is…not just about the Republican Party’s nomination for President, and he is not even just about the presidential election. He is a harbinger, a warning, of a very deep strain of irrationality rising within the American body politic. He is, too, an incubator of potentially significant political violence. He has organized no para-military organization of course, but every time he threatens to punch someone in the nose he is, in effect, giving permission for his followers to be transgressive, not to exclude being violently so. If he is denied the Republican Party’s nomination for President, or, failing that, if he loses the November election, we should expect violent reactions—on what scale no one can say. We should start thinking now about how most wisely to deal with them.
Obviously, given what happened yesterday on a baseball diamond in Alexandria, it is now apparent that I should have added to that thought the prospect of anti-Trumpean violence should Trump actually get elected President. But 15 months ago that still seemed to me, and to most others, highly unlikely.
I confess to having worried that anti-Trumpian violence and pro-Trumpian counter-violence might break out in Washington, and perhaps elsewhere, on Inauguration Day—and in that, according to subsequent read-outs of U.S. Park Police planning, I was not alone. Mercifully, that did not happen to any significant extent. But since the Inauguration we’ve seen rising violence on campuses—the attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury, trashings after Milo Yiannopoulis appearances at Berkeley and other universities, the coldblooded murder of Richard Collins III near the University of Maryland campus—and at least two sucker-punch cold-cockings of Richard Spencer, Weimar-reminiscent scenes of street confrontations in Portland, Oregon, and more.
And we’re barely passed one hundred days of the Trump non-Administration. One gets the feeling that if the scandal heat were not focused on the White House with such intensity, and if any legislative “successes” existed to date, the level of violence might be worse. And it could get still worse.
But why? Well, first, as H. Rap Brown once put it, “violence is as American as apple pie,” and you don’t have to be a descendent of slaves to take the point. Reading John Wesley Powell’s post hoc 1869 description of Kit Carson’s terrorist war against the Navajo in 1863-64—as though Carson’s tactics were perfectly fine with J.W. Powell, the founder of the Cosmos Club—is enough to induce spasms of vomit (except perhaps in people who don’t mind if a Congressional candidate beats the crap out of a reporter in Montana, and then go and elect him in a landslide anyway).
No, of course, Montana notwithstanding, we mustn’t project 21st-century norms back into history; it’s nor fair or intellectual best practice. Yes, someone tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in March 1981, hoping to add him to the list of martyred Presidents (Kennedy, 1963; McKinley, 1901; Garfield, 1881; Lincoln, 1865). The sharp point, however, is that, along with our continuing (and, some argue, strengthening) gun-nut subculture, outbreaks of political violence should not really surprise us. Americans did not expand over an entire continent during the course of three centuries, fighting a gruesome civil war along the way, by holding cotillion dances and offering items in trade to the natives. Pioneers turned ruralists needed guns, if only because there are bears and wolves, dear to harvest, and occasional lunatic neighbors and predatory passers-through. If he lacked a gun or a fairly easy way to get one, would the late, unlamented James T. Hodgkinson have been likely to assault Republicans at an Alexandria baseball practice, say, with a bow and arrow or a hunting knife?
Then there is the fact that, compared to most European and many other national states, America has always had a relatively small social idea on account of the newness and diversity of its immigrant roots, inflected in turn by its sprawling geography and relatively high rates of spatial mobility. America is not like Belgium, for example, where communities are so deep and long rooted that, as legend at least has it, many people never wander farther than a few kilometers from the town in which they were born.
So the remote backdrop for American political violence and its affinity for guns is wired into the American DNA. But that’s obviously not enough to precipitate political violence, or else the sort of thing that happened yesterday in Alexandria would have been happening pretty much all the time for the past century or so—and it hasn’t. We have to go back to 2011, with the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tuscon, to come up with a rough analogue to Rep. Scalise’s wounding yesterday, and before that my memory comes up mostly blank all the way back to the Weathermen.
So if we can establish some reasonable remote causes of recent American political violence, what about the proximate causes? It is not hard to make a short list: the decline in confidence in American institutions to solve problems; the polarization of politics and the incivility of political discourse abetted by mainstream and social media; the spread of mind-gutting drug habits; and the coarsening of popular culture via the commercial television- and Hollywood-produced norming of violence. No, this latter phenomenon isn’t new: a whole lot of people got killed in those Westerns back in the 1950s, for example. But combined with the other items on the list, it’s a new brew many Americans imbibe.
Beyond the obvious, my list would also include the Gerbnerian “mean world syndrome” more generally, on which I have written before, and which has been gaining on us for about fifty years. It would include the hemorrhaging of social trust generally (for whatever reasons we can debate). It would include increasing social-media induced isolation, which mitigates the peer regulation of social conduct; it is almost a certainty nowadays that the post-atrocity biographies of violence perpetrators include phrases like “he was a loner,” “didn’t speak much to neighbors,” “lived alone in a van,” and so on.
It seems to me, too—though I can’t prove this and it might sound elitist—that the sharp polarization of American political discourse has something to do with the suddenly huge number of people who have been injected with ample doses of half-assed education. Mark Twain saw the phenomenon at an early stage: “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”1
What Mr. Clemens meant then, I think—or at any rate what I mean now—is that “higher” education induces the otherwise ignorant to think really for the first time in abstract terms, and abstractions are very shiny to the point of mesmerizing to those who are unaccustomed to working with them. The possession of mass-manufactured degrees from third-rate colleges leads some people to suppose that they understand more than they really do. Not that supposedly first-class universities don’t often produce similar results.
Half-assed abstractions taught and absorbed with smug assuredness can inspire the worst kind of self-confidence which, when married to a penchant for political activism, produces…well, it produces the kind of political class we have fairly recently acquired, and its concomitant inability to compromise regularly to get things done. If you have merely an interest or two, you can horse trade and logroll. But if you have mainly or only convictions—defined by Nietzsche as being “more dangerous enemies of truth than lies”—you can’t. And that is why, in this case, the old saw has it dead to rights: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.2
I don’t know what James T. Hodgkinson though he understood well enough to lead him to attempt mass murder. He seems to have been pretty cocksure about something. Until five minutes ago I didn’t know where the Belleville, Illinois, native went to school, what if any drugs he took, how much commercial television he watched, how much of a loner he was, or anything else about him. With the help of a little Googling, I now know that his Facebook profile (which has since been removed) told us, in part, “He went on to study at Belleville Area College, now called Southwestern Illinois College, and then transferred to Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. He studied aviation at Belleville Area College in 1969, before transferring in 1971 to Southwestern Illinois. The university told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Hodgkinson took just two classes at the school and did not complete a term.” We also know from his Facebook profile that he imbibed a steady diet of Cable TV liberal “lite” talk-news: MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, and more.
Generic explanations for a phenomenon like rising political violence in America should never be expected to dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s of any particular incident. The same goes for Islamist terrorist atrocities and the modal “terrorist personality” various experts have been trying to work out. If Mr. Hodgkinson fits the description I laid out above to one extent or another, it proves nothing. It only suggests.
Finally, as Morris Fiorina pointed out in these pages some time ago, the polarization of political activists need not and, according to some now slightly aged data, does not suggest that the nation as a whole holds politically edgy views. But it could well be that one of the consequences of the Trump campaign and early presidency is the acceleration of a trickle-down effect whereby what was once mainly elite polarization is now becoming a deluge of contempt and even hatred among the masses. If that’s true, then what happened yesterday may become a lot less rare than we would wish.
1From “The Facts Concerning My Recent Resignation.”
2The original whole, from Alexander Pope, goes like this: “A little learning is a dangerous thing;/ drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:/ there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/ and drinking largely sobers us again.”