Bulwark: Trump Fueled a Culture of Political Violence for More than a Decade. Now, It's Broken Containment.
From the start, those who support liberal democracy warned about the dangers of Trumpism, understanding that what he was saying and doing would have terrible unintended consequences.
By Jonathan V. Last /The Bulwark
All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
That is Dickens describing the origins of the French Revolution. He regards the guillotine as a horror—an abomination—but believed that French society had become so dysfunctional, so disordered, that the abomination became inevitable.
Not justified, but inevitable.
I think about that passage often.
Trump mainstreamed violence. The heart of the Trump project has been mainstreaming political violence. It began in 2016 with Trump imploring his supporters to punch people they disliked. It continued with excusing the “very fine people” who rioted in Charlottesville. It morphed into explicit calls for a mob he called into assembly—and which he knew was armed—to march on the Capitol and “take back our country back” and “show strength” and “be strong.”
He later pardoned the members of this mob who had been convicted of violent crimes and even appointed one of them to a position in his administration. He ordered extralegal killings off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has referred to American citizens murdered by his regime as “domestic terrorists.” He has called his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies of the people” and said they are guilty of “treason.” He celebrates physical assaults on—and the deaths of—people he does not like. He has publicly said he might attempt to strip certain Americans of their citizenship so as to render them stateless.
He threatened genocide against a foreign population.
And then, when the culture of political violence he has willed into being comes for him, Trump is incredulous and aggrieved. As if people were not supposed to notice what he has been doing for a decade. As if violence is supposed to be a one-way street.
It reminds me a bit of the sputtering anger Trump and his supporters voiced after the pope condemned the war in Iran.
Trump and his administration had made a great show of not caring about woke rules of engagement and being alpha lethal warriors who killed without remorse. They published snuff films celebrating death and promised to commit war crimes. Again: The president himself threatened the Iranian people with genocide.
And then, when the Holy Father noticed these words and deeds and said, No bueno, Trump and his supporters were outraged.
How dare the pope notice all of the bad things he had said and done!
Violence is wrong. Full stop. It is bad that Cole Tomas Allen attempted to harm people at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It is bad that Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Trump. It is bad that Ryan Wesley Routh planned to assault Trump.
What happened on Saturday wasn’t random or wanton or unexpected. It’s what follows from a world in which political violence is condoned and even encouraged. It will, eventually, break containment.
This is precisely why liberals warned about the dangers of Trumpism from the very start.
Because we understood that saying what Trump has said and doing what Trump has done would have terrible, unpredictable consequences.
Not a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn.
Why do we abjure political violence? It is a conditional rejection, not an absolute. The American Revolution was an exercise in political violence; so was the Civil War.
A liberal society rejects political violence because it views violence as an admission of the failure of liberalism.
Which is exactly why the forces of illiberalism revel in it. They understand that the spread of violence is an assault on the liberal order.
He hasn’t won yet. Liberalism has not failed completely in America. Not yet. The authoritarian attempt is still in the attempt phase; it has not overthrown the liberal order completely.
We are in a phase of asymmetric struggle in which Trump and his confederates will dole out—or celebrate—political violence, while the forces of liberalism must reject it not only because doing so is morally correct, but because that is the best path to political power.
To give in to political violence is to stipulate that we are in a place like the Revolution or the Civil War. That is not, as of this moment, correct. Pray we never arrive in such a place.
Jonathan V. Last is Editor of The Bulwark and writes The Triad newsletter. Subscribe here.
Image: Rioters seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election lay siege to the U.S. Capitol (AP).