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Violence in Our Politics

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Trump has had this problem that everyone has foreseen for some time now.  While there certainly seem to be enough voters in the R electorate who are sufficiently fearful of the Other to respond to his nativist approach that he could win the R nomination, appealing to this mook wing of that party would seem to wreck his chances of appealing to the swing voters he will need to win the general election.

If Trump wants to avoid that doom, he somehow has to make more of the general electorate fearful of the Other.  He needs violent attacks on Americans.  Another 9/11 would be nice, if staged by Muslims or Mexicans or any other group of the Other that he has specifically targeted.  But Trump doesn’t control their actions.

It’s not as if he can just openly and directly hire thugs or encourage charity-ass thugs among his followers to commit acts of violence against the American people.  That would obviously be counter-productive.  The point is to make the electorate fearful of some Other, not the Trump campaign.  Trump and his campaign have to be the objects of violence, and he has to get voters to identify with him as the victim of supposed violent aggression, in order to make them fearful that they too are at risk from the Other du jour, that they need the protection of Trump and his take-no-prisoners, not bound by PC thinking approach to dealing with those who threaten Americans.  At some point Trump and his people have to use violence successfully, to make this point that only his way will protect us, but they have to be able to pose as the targets of violence at the hands of the Other to make this work for them.

So Trump encourages his followers to deal violently with people who attend his rallies to protest.  Violence begets violence, of course, and sooner or later there will be casualties on his side.  What he did up until Chicago was just to portray the protestors as people trying to take away his free speech, and suggest that a bit of violence in response was a right and just way to protect his and their right to conduct their p[political movement.  But that strategy had yet to produce tangible results.  Nobody carried away on stretchers yet, much less in body bags.  It really has to get to the point of deaths on both sides before the tribalism really kicks in.

So Trump has to turn the heat up a bit by cancelling a rally in Chicago out of pretended fear of mob violence by people he identifies as “thugs”.  Well, we all know the complexion he’s referring to with that choice of language.  The free speech of his followers, his and their safety from bodily harm, is threatened by these “thugs”.  Of course his followers need to step up their vigilance at future rallies, and back off their restraint at dealing with these thugs.  With any luck, they'll kill a thug in the near future, drawing Black Lives Matter protesters to his rallies, and the cycle escalates.  Sooner or later, his movement gets its Horst Wessel.

Among the ways for sane and rational people in general, and our side in particular, to deal with this intrusion of violence into our politics, I would not include this response from Clinton:

    “The divisive rhetoric we are seeing should be of grave concern to us all. We all have our differences, and we know many people across the country feel angry. We need to address that anger together. All of us, no matter what party we belong to or what views we hold, should not only say loudly and clearly that violence has no place in our politics, we should use our words and deeds to bring Americans together. Last year in Charleston, South Carolina an evil man walked into a church and murdered 9 people. The families of those victims came together and melted hearts in the statehouse and the confederate flag came down. That should be the model we strive for to overcome painful divisions in our country.”

​Okay, necessary disclaimer.  Yes, I support Sanders.  No, this episode is not what made me support Sanders, I was for him from the outset.  But up until this, I just thought that he would be the better candidate for our side, for a variety of reasons, not at all that Clinton would be a bad candidate.

​But this response of hers to the Chicago episode is just awful, positively destructive and dangerous, not just inept or not as good as what Sanders might do.  Hell, if the Sanders response is this bad, I will be the first to admit that this is not a reason to pick him over her.  Right now, I’m not ready to face the prospect that neither one of them has a clue, so I’m going to remain hopeful of Sanders until he proves me wrong. 

​Let’s go over step by step what’s wrong with this statement.  Again, one point is that Clinton is handling this in a completely foolish and destructive way.  But the larger point is that the pattern of that folly is not of her invention.  It’s the knee-jerk reaction our side has had for over a generation to the Rs.  It may have been short-term advantageous in the past.  Hewing to the center was not an obviously or immediately foolish strategy.  Now it’s just flat stupid, short term and long term.

Okay, sure, to you and me, “divisive rhetoric” is a pretty clear signal that she’s talking about Trump.  And when she throws in reference to people who feel angry, that’s the clincher.  But, please, please, this is not time to signal.  Plain speech is the only thing that will do here.  She does that, signal rather than just call out Trump, as a knee-jerk response.  But, failing to make the identifications clear, she ends up saying that, sure, people who are threatened with ethnic cleansing by Trump’s nativism, are angry.  Maybe she meant the KKK types who are angry at the non-white “threat”, but she just couldn't resist phrasing it in a way that blames both sides for being angry.  Bottom line, the implication is that it’s sad that those angry protesters got carried away by their anger and kept Trump from speaking in Chicago.  She’s endorsed the reality of the victimization Trump claims.

It gets worse.  “We need to address that anger together.”  Even people who imagine that she just means KKK types as the angry people she’s talking about, have just been told that these people have legitimate grievances entitled to a calm hearing by the rest of us, and then steps to meet their objections, I guess.  Maybe we could compromise on that controversial end of segregation thing that has made them so angry.  But in the next sentence she corrects the impression that it’s just KKK types that she identifies as these angry people who have to be appeased.  People in both parties have to speak out against violence, and people in both parties need to show by word and deed that they want to bring Americans together.  This duty is incumbent on both parties, because, obviously, Ds have been at least as angry and encouraging the resort to violence as the Rs.

​She then ends on the idea that the reaction to the Charleston shootings is the model we should look to, now that both sides have introduced violence into our politics.  Again, sure, the Charleston shootings were the act of a white supremacist, so sure, she expects that people on our side at least are going to get the point that white supremacist ideas have brought violence into our politics.  Not exactly a news flash, but sure, valid point.  But she just hadn’t been able to resist the urge, in everything that went before this concluding thought of hers, of saying that no, both sides do it.  A white supremacist mass murderer is not an example of the awfulness of white supremacy, but of the awfulness of either side becoming angry and violent.

​Again, it is quite possible that Sanders’ response will be just as bad as this, and it will be a wash in terms of which of them to support.  But this statement pretty much proves that Clinton is just not ready, has not been readied even by the decades of crap she has already taken from the other side, for just how real the crap has become since Trump entered the picture.  Trump’s incitements to violence at his own rallies, and now this pretense that he had to cancel a rally out of fear of violence from our side, brings in a reality she just can’t deal with.  She’s got a lot of company, admittedly.

​People can be toughened by attacks, become stronger by surviving adversity.  But strength isn’t the only way to survive abuse.  People can be traumatized, can learn bad habits that perhaps let them get by and survive, but never deal with the problem.  When a politician mindlessly reacts with a strategy that perhaps was once necessary to use just to survive, but is now just weak and destructive in its weakness, it’s time for her to leave the scene.  Sadly, the same applies to most of the party insiders who support her, so I suspect this will not be a matter on which many of them will reach the same conclusion I have come to. 

The defensive crouch is the only posture our party seems able to adopt.  Maybe it once allowed us to escape some beatings, but when the beatings transition from metaphorical to literal, as Trump is currently arranging, the defensive crouch becomes a fatal trap.


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