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Obviously, I have nothing but contempt for the introduction of violence in American politics — even brinkmanship.
But let’s review very carefully what is happening here:
(1) The American left has engaged in brinkmanship for the better part of a decade.
(2) Trump’s rallies bring people who have had enough.
(3) …and rather than leave them alone?
(4) The professional left is sending in agitators…
(5) …specifically to precipitate violent acts.
This isn’t new. This goes as far back as anti-war Democrats protesting in the streets and silencing dissent back in 2003. When it is cataloged [2]? They react with more brinkmanship [3].
Look at the way pro-labor goons react in Wisconsin [4]. Threatening to rape the daughters of their managers [5]. This has been going on since the Alinksy era, and for the last eight years has (sadly) been an indispensable feature of leftist politics in the United States.
The definition of terrorism is using violence or the threat of violence for political aims. This has long been a historical feature of socialism writ large, and though denuded by social democracy in theory, has never quite been expunged by social democrats in practice… simply put, the Marxist DNA of objectifying the other and reducing humanity to materialist norms is simply too great. Likewise on the political right, the temptation to authoritarian politics — to replace social struggle with national struggle — makes it very easy to objectify the enemies of the nation, be they domestic or foreign.
Trump’s rhetoric has clearly tapped into a subculture that has had enough of the brinkmanship from the left. Alarmingly, that brinkmanship is not being met with reason (because frankly, the leftists are neither paid to respect nor do they desire the rational) but rather with a brinkmanship of their own.
…and that’s dangerous. It’s deplorable. It is almost as deplorable as the utter unwillingness of the political left to simply allow Trump supporters to hold their rallies without raising the stakes. Yet they do so anyway, and expect — nay, hope — that someone takes things too far, because to the hardened Marxist, violence is indeed what sparks social struggle and engages social consciousness.
Jacques Maritain was a Jesuit priest who was in frequent conversation with professional agitator Saul Alinsky, of Chicago fame. Alinsky passed on a copy of his Rules for Radicals in one of their last letters. Maritain was shocked at its contents, though he remained a friend. In his September 1971 response to Alinsky, Maritain cautioned Alinsky:
Moral philosophy teaches us that — every human deed being an absolutely singular action accomplished by a given individual in given circumstances — the very circumstances may change the moral character and the moral essence of an action which, “materially” is taken, is in any case a same action and deserves the same name. For instance, killing a man. If John kills a man who is trying to kill him, or to kill his wife, or to kill his children, this action of John “formally” taken as a moral deed, is in no way that murder or assassination that is forbidden by Divine Law; on the moral level, self-defense is not murder or assassination, it’s an act of justice, which is morally good, and prescribed by moral law. (emphasis original)
Let’s stop momentarily and follow Maritain’s logic. Alinsky argues in Rules that if I were to do rip away your job, family, livelihood, life all at once, this would be a morally impermissible act. The seduction of his argument being that if one does this methodically over a period of time… what is the moral difference between stopping you from doing this now — in a moment or over time? Ergo, violence — or brinksmanship — is moral if the end result of a process (or series of processes) is to effect an immoral result.
Maritain continues in his critique:
It seems to me that in your book the philosophical truth in question, essential as it may be, is hardly emphasized or taken into consideration… (cf. p. 34, “From the beginning of time killing has always been regarded as justifiable if committed in self-defense” [quoting Alinsky]; yes, but not because it is “employed at the time of imminent defeat.” Truly speaking, because, given the circumstances, killing has become an intrinsically good moral action, preventing the committal of a blazing, imminent outrage to justice.
To an Alinskyite, I can harm you if the end result of a series of imagined or real consequences results in the jeopardization of my life. In materialist terms, this can simply equate the loss of things, and because of the role of speculation and the imaginative? Violence — to an Alinskyite logic — is perfectly acceptable at all times, a notion that Maritain rejects in his response.
There is a second point that Maritain emphasizes, and it is worth reflecting upon in full:
A truth of human experience: as a matter of fact, moral justifications and moral pretexts are, in an immense number of cases, but a mask used to hide merely egotistic motivations, most often the vilest motivations, lust for personal power, for success at any price, for exploiting and swindling poor people.
This second truth you see with such keenness, and you emphasize it so strongly that it seems sometimes to be the only one compatible with a realistic approach.
You are right in despising rhetorical and vain exhortations to mutual love. The fact is that nothing has ever been accomplished for justice in the world if not by men burning with real love.
This would be the last letter Maritain would ever write to Alinsky. Maritain’s warning to Alinsky was, though caged in the language of a priest and friend, quite direct: (1) violence is not a response, and (2) moral justifications for violence too often become the very monsters they seek to destroy. Only real love — in Maritain’s experience, the love and charity of Christ — conquers.
Obviously, those familiar with Maritain know that he was a staunch Thomist and a faithful Catholic [6] whose political leanings were staunchly revanchist earlier in his youth, and in his old age seriously questioned the propriety of the Second Vatican Council. In short, this was no wilting flower, nor was Maritain a secret sympathizer for socialism. Yet he was still able to empathize with Alinsky the radical, who despite Maritain’s counsel followed a far different path.
The revolutionary left has chosen a path already — Alinsky over Maritain. The violence they are instigating is calculating, cruel, vicious, and utterly deplorable. More than Trump, no honest observer can look back and say that the paid agent provocateurs of the left are not at work here, hoping the authoritarian right throws the first punch — and the harder the better.
Yet reactionaries on the right have a choice. Maritain’s advice still speaks from the grave — don’t become the monsters you seek to destroy.
Make the moral choice quickly. America is watching.
UPDATE: I am a little surprised at how quickly some friends on the left took offense here, as if pointing back to the root elements of the Trump phenomenon as a reaction rather than something independent or innate in the conservative movement catches them off their guard. “Surely that’s not the case — these people have always been the Republican Party as a whole! Things like MoveOn or Occupy certainly don’t represent political leftism — do they?!”
Well, yes they do — insofar as one believes Trumpism reflects the political right. Yet unlike our friends on the political left, conservatives have been very quick to call out and condemn calls instigating violence on the populist right. For 13 years, brinkmanship seems to have been the calling card of the political left — anti-war lunatics, MoveOn protesters, Occupiers, disruptions, blocking traffic, Femen, labor union goons in Wisconsin, you name it.
The list doesn’t quite end there: judicial activism in lieu of constitutional process? If folks on the left do not believe that this isn’t a massive fire under the populist right, they have blinders on. Much of the root cause of modern populism is embedded in the fact that the world has changed and they do not feel as if they had a say in the change: changing economies, moral values, the advent of politically correct speech and its enforcers, the loss of jobs, etc. One may disagree with the sentiment, and one may certainly disagree with their solutions (I do), but it takes a particularly hard heart to ignore why they are upset.
Hence the problem with brinkmanship and the incitement to violence — both parties. The difference here perhaps is that Trump is explicitly calling of folks to respond. The Democrats (perhaps) were smart enough to keep an implicit distance between their agent provocateurs and the candidate… and should this help folks sleep at night?
I think not.
UPDATE x2: More from Dylan Lloyd over at Pendelton Penn [7]:
Pleasantries out of the way, I would like to humbly remind our dear leader of how counter movements and demagogues are created. It’s quite simple, you create an environment of distrust. Then, once seeds of distrust have been planted via government corruption and broken promises, you drive a wedge. This wedge can have maximum efficacy if you first convince the voter you are a ‘uniter’ – for then, it must be the other sides fault if they oppose any of your divisive measures. Finally, you cement this wedge by foregoing the doldrums of actual consensus building for the crusade of constant campaigning; in which the job you once so enthusiastically sought merely exists as a platform to criticize the company to by which you are employed.
‘Tis a bit long winded, but it does go to show the sentiment that is out there. One could just as easily extend this to the Bush era of “constant campaigning” under the constant threat of terrorism, but the point goes to show that with a certain brew of 24/7 media followed by social media given to a society that has been trained for 20 years under mass media to chase appetites and buy things to appease the same? Very easy to blame “the other” when you don’t get your way… pick your poison. Obama chose class warfare (the 1%) and Trump chose nationalism (Mexicans, Muslims).
…but don’t think for a moment that one side doesn’t feed off the other.
UPDATE x3: Oh great! More good news [8] from over at RedState…
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Wonder how a bunch of armed Tea Party protesters in front of (or inside) a Bernie Sanders rally will turn out?
Probably best not to contemplate that.
UPDATE x4: D.C. McAllister over at Conservative Review (also a contributor for The Federalist) writes [10]:
I would posit that Trump isn’t a fascist, though he is touching on strains in the American electorate that could certainly move in a fascist direction (and we must guard against that). His rhetoric has probably encouraged some people to throw punches at protestors at his rallies as we saw one older man do recently. The anger of the American electorate is real, and he’s tapping into it.
But we shouldn’t exaggerate this, and it would be a grave mistake to think Trump is the problem here and that he is the cause of the violent protests in Chicago. It would also be a severe misstep to think that Trump is the real enemy who must be defeated.
The Chicago protest is an illuminating reminder of who the real enemy is and always has been. We’ve lost sight of that fact in this election. The real enemy is the subversive Unholy Left, the cultural Marxists who have been beating at the foundation of our Republic with their social justice hammers for years, cracking it into pieces until we topple.
One might readily disagree that Trump’s nationalism isn’t a very serious danger to American politics. Critics are right to be concerned with elements of nationalism as they are to be concerned with elements of socialism on the right — precisely because they are authoritarian forms of governance.
…but McAllister isn’t wrong about one strain of American politics (and a long standing one at that) on the left is now abrasively meeting a new strain on the right that is willing to pay the other side back in its own coin.
This shocks the political left. Which strikes me as rather obtuse in the face of a long tradition of brinkmanship and violent acts among leftist activists, acts that for too long have been passed over in silence by the professional, genteel left who benefits from the politics of confrontation.
UPDATE x5: A bit more introspection [11]from David Neiwert over at Crooks and Liars:
This is a very dangerous time, and progressives are going to have to be smart about how they confront this tactic, which is going to happen increasingly as the election year drags along. They are going to have to be incredibly disciplined, and incredibly committed to nonviolence when confronted with the viciousness of the budding Brownshirts on the other side.
Worth reading in its entirety, as Neiwert discusses from a historical perspective the draw of violence in politics — and its danger.
UPDATE x6: Meanwhile, if you want to see whether or not there are still racists within the Democratic Party, Jamelle Bouie over at Slate would like to remind you that all this is happening because white people hate Barack Obama [12]:
The Obama era didn’t herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status. For example, during a Marco Rubio rally before the New Hampshire primary in February, I spoke to a voter who, in her way, gave voice to this hyperawareness. “I think he’s divided this country in many ways,” said Lori, an older white woman, of Obama. “I know in a lot of places in America there’s a divide in color … like, when I walk up to someone in the stores”—she looked at me to emphasize what she means—“I feel that they’re wondering if I like them. … I didn’t feel that before. I was accepting of everyone, and I hate that he brought that.”
…which is what the Democrats are prayerfully hoping for. But if they are buying this narrative? They are no better than the Trump boosters who base their support for populism on the twin evils of nativism and racism.
There’s no question in my mind that nativism is fueling portions of the populist right — so let’s clear that off the table. But let’s be honest here: racialized politics has been a calling card of the Democratic Party since the 1960s. Utter tribalist nonsense… I have no truck for the idea that, quote, “White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.”
What utter nonsense. Populism has a great deal more to do with a changing America that many feel they had no say in the changing: from marriage to jobs, from the new economy to immigration, from America’s standing in the world to dead ambassadors in Libya. Are there nativists in that movement? Certainly… should they be expunged? Absolutely.
…but those arguing this is all about “white people bringing back Jim Crow” have lost the argument already.