Sorry, Associated Press, There’s No Such Thing as ‘Policy Violence’

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 27, 2023

 

The Democratic Party’s effort to scandalize the nation over the guidelines for Florida’s public-school history curriculum isn’t working. You’re just not angry enough. That’s the only conclusion we can draw from the Associated Press’s contrived attempt to pump up the outrage:

That’s right: “policy violence.” That’s how NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson characterized Florida’s guidelines based on his reading of one out of over 190 references to American slavery. That one reference makes note of the scholastically sound notion that some enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

 

Johnson went on to indict the DeSantis administration’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.” He was not, however, incensed by the College Board’s pilot AP African-American Studies course, which includes a line almost identical to the one in the Florida guidelines that he has decried. Democrats and their allies devoted all their energies to defending that proposed course against the charge that it violated Florida’s legislative proscription on teaching children that colorblindness is tantamount to racial bigotry. When it comes to the practice of “policy violence,” we must conclude, Democrats are pacifists.

 

The effort to use the word “violence” to describe things other than violence — mostly “bad outcomes,” defined subjectively — is an expression of personal insecurity. It exposes the extent to which the activist class doesn’t trust you to reach their preferred conclusions unless you are blackmailed into it. After all, you wouldn’t want to be on the side of the “policy violent,” would you?

 

But just because this rhetorical gesture is a tired trope, that doesn’t render it harmless. The blurring of the distinctions between lawful and unlawful activities provides psychological license to those who see violence as a remedy to exercises of the First Amendment with which they take issue.

 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. As City Journal’s Sol Stern observed, Paulo Freire’s influential 1970 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved “near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs.” Summarizing Freire’s thesis, the author Bruce Bawer noted that its foremost contribution was to popularize the idea that some forms of expression are indistinguishable from acts of violence.

 

From Bawer’s 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution:

 

[Freire] defends violence and terror by redefining them: oppression itself, he argues, is violence and terror; for the oppressed to resist it actively, in however bloody a manner, does not constitute violence or terror, for ‘[v]iolence is initiated by those who oppress” and “[i]t is not the helpless . . . who initiate terror” but the oppressors.

 

In other words, those who drink deep of the Marxian dialectic define violence entirely within the context of power dynamics. The powerful beget violence, therefore, violence is attributable to the powerful. In this framework, those of fewer means or who do not occupy public office cannot engage in violence, by definition.

 

This thesis has practical utility to anyone invested in stripping the violent of their agency. The murder of cartoonists in the French offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, for example, was deemed a natural expression of hostility toward a society that “valorizes free speech for its own sake.” At least their murderers “had a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow,” then–secretary of state John Kerry mused.

 

The riotous violence into which the country was plunged in the summer of 2020 was similarly dismissed as the last legitimate act of protest reserved to the powerless. “It felt wrong to say we’re with you until you start looting,” agonized Minneapolis resident Meredith Webb said in a profile in the Washington Post on the conundrum with which good white liberals were confronted. To her neighbor, the torching of a Target outlet was “a perfectly warranted and justified response” — indeed, “an expression of righteous rage” against the prevailing power structures. “I am trying to push myself to understand looting,” Webb confessed, “and understand that we have to go outside the law sometimes to make things happen.”

 

“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned in the Atlantic in September 2015. Nearly a decade hence, their prophetic warnings remain unheeded. The reckless activist class continues to broaden the definition of violence to include an ever-expanding number of conditions they don’t like.

 

The legitimate policies enacted by legislatures and lawful acts of elected executives do not constitute acts of “violence” by any stretch of the imagination. A sane society would laugh off the cranks and obsessives for whom hyperbole is no vice. In ours, they get glowing writeups in the Associated Press.