The attempted murder of several Congressmen and shooting of one marks another step in the progressive dissolution of the U.S. occurring before our eyes. That the shooter could have been either from the right or the left indicates how close we have come to widespread political violence.
Nations are held together despite having populations with very different views on many issues because they hold their common membership above the issues that divide them. This is a significant achievement, one not to be taken for granted. Laws alone do not do it. Many former European colonies adopted Western parliamentary systems upon achieving independence, but few of those institutions survived. The British once had a politics as violent as nay on earth, as readers of Shakespeare know, and even today have no written constitution despite maintaining a parliamentary democracy even under constant bombardment in WWI. These examples point to an important feature we are seeing wither away before our eyes.
A society maintains a common identity by customs as well as laws. Customs conducive to peaceful political action are actually more important than formal institutions and constitutions, as the above examples indicate. This is an insight rooted, ironically, in conservative thought. But customs are no more impervious to change and challenge than is a constitution.
Changing the Frame: the language of war
If future historians end up writing about the break up or collapse of the United States in the 21st century, they will likely name two people as particularly crucial in initiating the process: Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter. These people initiated a shift in mainstream political debate from people who differed on policies but ultimately supported the country to people who were at war with one another, as enemies. The left is not blameless. The most authoritarian leftists had been rendered silent and rejected by the crimes and then collapse of Communism in the 1980s. However, some left intellectuals endorsed the thinking of Nazi jurist Karl Schmitt because he opposed liberalism, and Schmitt also wrote of politics in terms of war. But in this country, happily, they were of negligible influence. At a national and public level the shift from the language of democratic politics to that of war was initiated and long pushed only by the right.
While several people were disproportionately responsible, two it seems to me carry more blame than others for initiating the process. These individuals legitimated and normalized ways of thinking that, before them, had been muttered only privately in John Birch Society meetings or Klan or Minuteman gatherings.
In 1999 Pat Buchanan wrote “In politics, conservatives have won more than they have lost, but in the culture, the left and its Woodstock values have triumphed. Divorce, dirty language, adultery, blasphemy, euthanasia, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, cohabitation and so on were not unknown in 1960. But today, they permeate our lives. . . We can no more walk away from the culture war than we can walk away from the Cold War. For the culture war is at its heart a religious war about whether God or man shall be exalted, whose moral beliefs shall be enshrined into law, and what children shall be taught to value and abhor . . .With those stakes, to walk away is to abandon your post in time of war.” Buchanan emphasized “If God is king, men have a duty to try, as best they can, to conform their lives to His will and shape society in accordance with His law. Defection and indifferentism are not options. We are commanded to fight.” He has continually emphasized this point.
This was new. Neither leading Republicans nor leading Democrats had talked that way before. But Buchanan was not alone.
In 2002, after the right wing terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, Ann Coulter startled people on all political sides by saying “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” She later clarified “Of course I regret [saying] it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.’” Later, regarding a young man who joined Iraqis against the American invasion “we need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too.” She spoke these words at the 2002 Conservative Action Conference in 2002. Later Coulter clarified her remarks: “when I said we should “execute” John Walker Lindh, I mis-spoke. What I meant to say was ‘We should burn John Walker Lindh alive and televise it on prime-time network TV’. My apologies for any misunderstanding that might have occurred.
Coulter also wrote a book arguing liberals are guilty of “treason,” and have been for decades. Treason is a capital crime and she advocated executing liberals for “treason.”
A frequent visitor to college campuses, and often invited by young right wingers, Coulter has played an important role in normalizing what were once abhorrent thoughts. I remember years ago reading that when asked about her violent rhetoric, one conservative student responded essentially “That’s why we like her. She says what we think.” That is just the point. We all have thoughts we regard as unworthy of us. And we stifle them. In doing so over time we often weaken their hold.
Advocating the unthinkable
The issue here isn’t honesty. Whether they are from the left or right, young people are famous in seeing issues in more black and white terms than most adults. This is not surprising, for the most idealistic of them have little life experience and are convinced they have a clear map showing the way to a better word. Life itself teaches us the limits of pure theory and idealism, but that takes time. When one is young and idealistic, customary restraint must serve that role when seeing a contradiction between what is and what should be. It substitutes for a wisdom that has not yet developed.
Social and political norms and customs are an important part of this process, and while sometimes they are themselves oppressive, they also serve an important role in keeping potentially violent or otherwise harmful actions safely in the realm of silent thoughts rather than public actions. When those norms are weakened or dissolved by respected people, those looking to them for guidance, be they young or old, dissolve them as well. it becomes legitimate to say what we think, whatever it may be, cultural barriers to the worst of what we think are lessened. We don’t question the legitimacy of our violent thoughts, we accept them.
As this rhetoric became normalized, it became easier to use such language oneself. In the U.S. this was mostly on the right, with increasing talk of “Second amendment solutions” and the like. As such talk became normalized it became easier for the fanatics on both sides to act on it. Here is a partial list, all by prominent Republicans:
· GOP House candidate Robert Lowry held a campaign event at a Florida gun range in October 2009, where he fired gunshots at a silhouette that had his opponent Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s printed on it.
· “You know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” – Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for the Senate from NV.
· “If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to ‘thin’ the herd.” -Brad Goehring, Republican seeking to be elected to the House.
· “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,” read an advertisement for the event called “Shoot a fully automatic M16 With Jesse Kelly.”
· “Don’t retreat, instead- RELOAD!” – Sarah Palin after circulating a map with crosshairs over lawmakers who supported the ACA
· “You know but other than me going over there with a gun and holding it to their head and maybe killing a couple of them, I don’t think they’re going to listen unless they get beat.” – Rep. John Sullivan, (R-OK)
Today this degeneration of civic norms is also happening on the left. For example, consider the academic thugs that seek to suppress more conservative and moderate students on campuses, with the aid of faculty members who should be looking for a job more in keeping with their qualifications. For they do not belong in universities and colleges. I am not blind to violent stupidity by leftists. Stupid and violent people can be found in all political positions, and they are kept in their place not only by law, but also by customs for what is and what is not legitimate political rhetoric. And as the rhetoric degenerates, so in time will the actions.
But the leftists who preach violence are bit players in various sects. The rightists who legitimate it include the President of the United States. No major candidate in our history has advocated jailing his opponent, let alone his opponent’s lawyers, except Donald Trump. No major candidate in our history stood silently by while a supporter advocated killing his opponent, except Trump. Trump again brought up Second Amendment solutions, another first. By contrast when he ran for the Presidency, John McCain defended Obama’s decency when he was attacked as an Arab by a crowd of his supporters. Trump lied about birth certificates and undermined the legitimacy of the presidency among his supporters.
Thoughts to words to action
The violent rhetoric today remains primarily on the right, as does the body count, and they initiated it. Much has been made by the fact that a Bernie supporter committed the shootings in Virginia. Those making much of this have been silent on the right-wing terrorist crimes just in the previous five days:
· A white man who liked ‘alt-right’ White supremacist and pro Trump information killed a Black soldier.
· A Portland right wing White supremacist and Nazi sympathizer killed two men and injured another when they came to the assistance of two women he was threatening,
· A Kansas man killed one Indian man and wounded two after yelling they should get out of the country, and was indicted for committing a hate crime.
· A White Californian yelled racial slurs and then seriously stabbed a Black man
· Not to mention other planned terrorist acts that were interrupted by the police such as a plan by three men to commit mass murder among Muslims.
Of course the victims up till June 14, real and planned, were not elected officials. They were plain Americans. But already some Democrats have withdrawn from political races because, the say, of death threats. The next step is political violence, and it was a toss-up as to who might be first.
The right wing, aided by the Republican Party, has done enormous damage to the customs of civility that kept talk of violence confined to the most extreme sects on all sides. They have mainstreamed the rhetoric of violence. As it is, violent acts will increasingly follow. Probably on both sides although based on past actions, it will be primarily by the right.
A society dissolves through many small steps.
Gus —
I apologize if this is not as coherent as I (and you would like). I have been through it several times, adding and deleting. I need one more major rewrite, but it is late, I have had wine and need to go to bed. I think the main lines of reasoning are here. I challenge your focus on Buchanan and Coulter, and more generally on rhetoric and statements as too narrow in the first case, and not deep enough in the latter. The deeper causes are social and cogsci, not cognitive and rhetorical. The changes begin much earlier and have both social and cogsci dimensions.
You focus is on the rhetoric and ideas as though these are the defining causal characteristics and identify Buchanan and Coulter as key figures. As a sociologist and cognitive-psychologist, I would suggest that the causes are deeper. Marx’s notion of consciousness and false consciousness suggests a deeper analysis that sociology and cogsci can elucidate. (I take Marx’s distinction to point to the fact that we often deceive ourselves about our true interests and motivations. I think cogsci elaborates on that, although not in a way Marx would necessarily recognize). We often rationalize or justify our circumstances or behaviour with little or no real knowledge of then causes of that (cogsci), I suggest that Buchanan and Coulter provide a kind of rationalization of changes that have already occurred (and not necessarily accurately — definitely not accurately).
Sociologically, we are deeply influenced by those with whom we interact. On the political level, the basis of social interaction between politicians was changed in the late 80s-early 90s by Newt Gingerich, who saw too much interaction between Democrats and Republicans and made various efforts to restrict that, including very actively discouraging wives and families from coming to Washington. He saw Republican family interactions with Democrats as moderating the ideological purity of the Republican cause. This, I suggest, established the basis for the polarization we see in current US politics, on the political level. This was much earlier than the Buchanan-Coulter material you mention. They were simply providing after-the-fact justification for the intermediate changes initiated by Gingerich to physically separate Democrats and Republicans in Congress, The deeper cause comes, I believe from Nixon and his Southern Strategy, paranoid style of American politics, etc., and this goes even deeper into American history, which I will not elaborate on here.
On the broader level, the US has been involved in a self-sorting for at least a generation (I would have to go to the research level to confirm the time basis). What this means is that Americans have been moving into communities of like-minded individuals for at least a generation, and possibly longer. (Whether this has been driven by economics, I need to examine. And there has also been a tendency for individuals in a given area to adopt the basic values of that area (I base this on Woodruff (?) The 11 Nations of North America, which is quite an insightful analysis. Would love to discuss this with you.) Both the self-sorting and the social conformity tend to suggest that we tend to adopt the values of our environment. [There are individual exceptions to which you and I stand as examples. However, we are looking at tendencies.
In one important sense, the seeds of the breakup of the American experiment can be traced, if one accepts Woodruff (not sure if right name), inn the very contradictory nature of the founding “nations’ of the U.S. Gingerich, Buchanan and Coulter are merely modern manifestations (and I am not sure why you didn’t select [lost the name — right wing TV host rather than Coulter. Far broader audience and earlier].
This is where I suggest that cogsci enters in, on several levels. Cogsci is concerned with how the mind works. On a simple level, the mind has two operative modes: 1) system 1 and system 2. System 1 is intuitive, emotional, quick to respond, and relies on patterns and heuristics; System 2 is analytical, rational, slow, and works through ideas, In familiar settings, we mostly rely on System 1. When challenged or threatened, we tend to revert to System 1. Faced with new situations, we can rely on System1 and make things fit prior beliefs or go to System 2 and think things through. System 1 is easy and tend to reassure us in our prior beliefs. System 2 is hard and can create uncertainty and ambiguity.
There is a lot here. Very briefly, individuals tend to respond to the external world and to justify new ideas un terms of pre-existing ideas. Much of what drives them is emotional and often connected to their social affiliation — we rarely challenge our social group. We have emotional responses and then seek justifications of those. Those justifications then tend to condition our later responses. I suggest that what Buchanan and Coulter were doing was providing “rational” justifications for preexisting System 1 dispositions that, in term, were based on emotions and social affiliation. Although Coulter and Buchanan may have articulated a language for the process, they neither created the process nor were originators of the language. Nor is the rhetoric the determining factor.
1. They did not initiate the process: I suggest that that causal factors are not rhetorical but social and cultural and have to do with the different cultures of the US and their inability to work together. (woodruff and historical and social analysis of the historical development of the US)
2. Rhetoric is rarely if ever a causal factor of social change; it may reflect that change, but it not itself a cause of that change (see cogsci materials and the 4) below).
3. Their rhetoric was not particularly new. Similar rhetoric can be found throughout US history. I haven’t argued this here
4. Rhetoric and language is influenced by the social structure. What made Buchanan’s and Coulter’s particularly salient were several factors: 1) Gingerich’s partitioning of Washington politics to inhibit nonofficial interaction between parties and 2) the assorting of America int different publics with less and less interaction between those publics and a progressive delegitimization of the “other” publics.
I have a whole analysis of the social and cultural dimensions of each of these. Briefly, closed, simple (in terms of complexity of division of labour), homogenous, and rural societies tend to favour System 1 thinking; open(diverse), complex (in terms of division of labour), diverse and urban societies tend to favour system 2 thinking (some exceptions). This is largely based on Durkheim. There are deep implications in this.
Putting these together, I would suggest the following — Buchanan and Coulter articulate a rhetoric of (religious — and this I thinks also critical) war between political parties. However, this is a verbalization (system 2 rationalization) of much deeper social and cultural differences that mediately, had begun in first, the late 1980s-early 1990s with Reagan and Gingerich, which were extensions of 2) Nixon’s Southern strategy and paranoia, which reflected the deepe-seated antagonisms and differences found among the 11 founding nations and their various alliances. In short, my argument is that while Buchanan and Coulter provided rationalizations for the differences, these were mere epiphenomena for preexisting social and psychological animosities.
I have been thinking about this a lot, as a rhetorician, sociologist, cognitive scientist. As a sociologist, one of my central concerns is what holds societies together and what tears them apart. I am still working on that. That is a whole other discussions
Jean-
I didn’t deal with Gingrich or Limbaugh because I wanted to focus narrowly on the issue of violence. But you are 100% correct regarding these human abominations and their impact on this country. In the modern context I think Coulter and Buchanan’s rhetoric was new. That is why everyone was initially shocked when they spoke and wrote this way as leading members of American conservatism.
I think rhetoric is very important. In Lakoff’s terms, it frames issues and how to approach them. Rhetoric and religion may not cause problems (or solve them) but they vastly encourage some responses and tone down others. This is one reason why custom is so important. It strengthens or weakens the styles of thinking you study.
I agree with your basic sociological points as well, but wanted to stick ‘closer to home’ in this piece. Everything always exists in a context, and you provide the context that empowered people like Coulter and Buchanan to do what they did.
My own analysis of the deeper causes for the break up are in my book “Faultlines: the Sixties, the Culture War, and the Return of the Divine Feminine.” I think they point to the same issues you identify, but within a different, NOT contradictory, framework.
In it I argue that the deepest division taking place today is between the habits of thought and institutions of old agricultural based civilizations and a new one arising based on technology. The former is intrinsically hierarchical, even in its more liberal forms, like Locke, concerned with maintaining boundaries, masculine and usually patriarchal, seeks to control nature, and rural based. The new one is far more equalitarian, blurs boundaries, endorses far more feminine values, sees nature as a source for renewal and growth, and is urban based. The tension is as deep as the transition between hunting and gathering and agriculture. In your terms the old order is system 1 based, the new much more system 2.
I would argue that the new civilization’s emergence first crystallized in the Northern US during the time when Transcendentalism arose, utopian communities were formed, new religions emerged, feminism first arose in the U.S., a large peace movement arose over the Mexican American War, abolitionism became powerful, and so on. But it was much more an elite phenomena than the later 60s-70s, which resembled it on a more mass level.
This shift is happening as the Enlightenment vision has run dry and traditional religion has degenerated into worshiping a God defined by power and will. In both cases a kind of nihilism has emerged. For various reasons Europe got the first brunt of this collapse of the moral foundations of the old order in the late 19th through early 20th centuries- resulting ultimately in right wing authoritarian and violent groups seeking power.
In the American context the NeoConfederate South exemplifies the first, the urban regions of the country generally exemplify the second. The NeoConfederate South is not the only rural area of course, but it is culturally the most alien to the new and this culture includes politics and religion. This is why, perhaps, when northern Republican conservatives adopted the Southern Strategy, they were quickly overwhelmed by Southern domination. American conservatism was always a little schizophrenic since it accepted the liberal principles of the American revolution, but also distrusted them. The South had no similar divisions. Kevin Phillips’ analysis in “American Theocracy” is important here.
So I’d modify your point about internal American nations (with which I broadly agree) to say they differ in compatibility, with the South being odd man out, and a magnet for anyone distressed by the feminizing/liberalizing/’tree hugging’/equalitarian trends otherwise taking place.
We are now seeing the emergence of violent right wing groups aided by the NeoConfederate Republican Party. Traditional American conservatism of the Goldwater variety is dead. Right wing tribalism is its replacement.
All this is made worse and manipulated by capitalist elites, but that’s the subject of the ms. I just completed: “Midas’ Curse: Capitalism’s Road to serfdom.”
An interesting insight arose as I was typing this. I have always been perplexed by the seeming inability of right wing spokespeople to be sensitive to context. Now I realize that when one lives in a world of rigid boundaries, context should not matter. It shapes boundaries in possibly unexpected ways, and so is to be denied whether the issue be Biblical interpretation, the meaning of the constitution, what constitutes marriage, or anything else these folks focus on-unless, as ultimate nihilists, context can be used to give them power and domination.
So, to summarize, I agree with your final summing up paragraph as providing a larger context than I wanted to in this piece- but a context with which I basically agree. I think that we got there through different disciplines and routes strengthens the case for the validity of our analyses. What do you think.
A very quick response. I tend to agree with most, if not all, of your post and your response. We may have a quibble around the relative importance of rhetoric, (I do like Lakoff and the work he has spawned) but I need to think about it a bit. One of the difficulties of complex problems is that different disciplines tend to bring their own expertise to bear and ignore or downplay the expertise and insights of other disciplines. It is only recently that we have begun to look at issues from both interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives and to realize that we need these to fully understand and deal with the issues. More soon.