Political Violence Shouldn't Be An Excuse for Political Demonization

Those who commit acts of political violence want us to hate eachother. Why give them what they want?

Photo by Wylly Suhendra on Unsplash

America has seen a number of high-profile acts of political violence over the past year.

From attempted assassinations of the U.S. president to the successful assassination of a health care CEO to attacks on Israeli Embassy staffers to riots in Los Angeles to the shootings of Democratic politicians, it seems like we’re living through a miniature wave of violence committed in the name of some kind of political cause.

The response from the political elite to these atrocities is by now so monotonous that it’s predictable: one “side” of the political aisle declares itself in solidarity with the victim while blaming the other “side” — which in this case can contain tens of millions of law-abiding, peaceful people — for inciting the violence.

The latest example comes after what appear to be attempted assassinations of two Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers. Not even a day passed before political personalities went to war about the political affiliation of the suspect, a man named Vance Boelter.

Some were quick to point out that he was appointed to a workforce development board by Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Waltz. Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee posted a photo of Boelter alongside the bizarre label “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” he also then referred to him as a “Marxist.”

Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno also tried to associate Boelter with the political left.

“The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying,” he said of the shooting.

Both these men are U.S. Senators. They have at their fingertips legions of staff and access to advanced intelligence gathering, should they choose to utilize it. In this case, it appeared to be more important to label the suspected shooter as a left-wing activist.

It’s now starting to appear clear that he was actually the opposite. Boelter apparently had wanted to target a range of Democratic politicians and organizations that were involved in supporting abortion rights.

But when a right-wing reporter, Liz Collins from the Minnesota-based Alpha News, tried to tell this to her readers, she was pilloried with claims from right-wing Twitter users that she must be lying and that none of this could be true.

All of this contortion is the unfortunate outcome of viewing acts of political violence — which are extremely rare in the United States — as representative of millions of people who believe in causes that are not inherently violent and who have broken no law at all.

Can you oppose abortion without being violent? Sure you can. That applies to 99.99% of people who hold that point of view.

Can you oppose President Trump or his immigration policies without being violence? Sure you can. That also applied to 99.99% of people who hold that view.

But as long as we continue to imply that the rare person who holds an ordinary political point of view but also an extraordinary desire to impose it with violence is representative of peaceful people as well, we will all continue to contort ourselves to deny basic facts about the news that we consume every day.

When every fact on the news has to be enlisted in part of a larger war against our political Others, of course many conservatives can’t admit that every sign points to Minnesota shooting suspect as a disgruntled right-winger. If they admit that, we are conceding a fact to the progressives, and all of reality has to be subsumed by the mission of demonizing the other side.

This is a sickness that is preventing us from doing what we actually should be doing after these acts of political violence: coming together as a country and rejecting the notion of violence as politics by other means.

From far left to far right, nobody holds any responsibility for acts of political violence unless they committed an act of political violence themselves; peacefully advocating for your point of view, no matter what it is, is your right as an American.

Acknowledging these basic facts will allow us to confront this brutal violence and work on depolarizing the country instead of doing the very thing the people committing these dreadful acts want: for us to hate each other and view our common political others as potential terrorists rather than our friends and countrymen. Our country’s involved in enough senseless violence overseas. We don’t need anymore here at home.