Americans Are Right to Fear Political Violence

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 09, 2024

 

CBS News/YouGov’s first survey of the new year found that most Americans are overcome with apprehension heading into the presidential election cycle.

 

Seven in ten Americans believe “democracy and the rule of law” is either “somewhat” or “greatly threatened.” While they surely disagree on the sources of that threat, the vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats agree that the pillars of the American civic compact are under attack. Americans are split almost down the middle on whether they expect “the losing side” in future elections to react to the public’s verdict with violence. While a narrow majority of both Republicans and Democrats “expect peace,” a substantial minority (and a majority of independent voters) foresee political violence in the near future.

 

We can reasonably deduce that the vast majority of the respondents who are consumed with fear of how their neighbors will react to this November’s election results would never engage in political violence themselves. Blood lust is an acquired taste. Although they receive outsize coverage, which can contribute to an inflated sense of their relative influence, the protests that have devolved into violence in recent years are sparsely attended relative to the political movements they claim to represent. But the Americans who are beset with trepidation over the prospect of political violence aren’t blinkered ideologues or mindless cattle who have been goaded into adopting a conclusion preferred by catastrophes in the press. They are guilty only of paying attention to the more irresponsible members of the political class.

 

There has been an increasing level of street violence in response to political events in recent years, and voters rarely hear their political representatives condemn those actions unless they are perpetrated by their political rivals. The loudest Republicans rush to the defense of the January 6 rioters. They are victims — indeed “hostages” — of a tyrannical government that has “weaponized” the law to entrap and persecute otherwise unassuming U.S. citizens. Interestingly, the CBS News/YouGov poll indicates that, for all their cynical priming by the GOP’s more reckless agitators, an overwhelming number of Republicans still “disapprove” of the January 6 rioters. But they do share the view that the rioters are the victims of a retributive response to their actions by their government.

 

Democrats, too, are playing with fire. From the president on down, talk that elides the distinctions between the radicalized and violent and average Republican voters is common. “You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American,” Joe Biden said in a speech last week in which he savaged Donald Trump for refusing to “denounce political violence.” But while the president has condemned leftwing violence in the past, he has responded tepidly (as has most of his party) to a campaign of intimidation, disruption, and street violence prosecuted by the far-Left radicals who oppose his administration’s support for Israel.

 

Even when those agitators descend on the Democratic Party’s headquarters and engage in scuffles with police amid their effort to terrorize lawmakers loyal to the president’s party, the vandals have been treated with kid gloves by the president’s party. His Justice Department certainly doesn’t regard the threat posed by violent Leftists as equivalent to the one represented by the Right’s miscreants. What else explains Democrats’ hesitation but that they don’t want to risk aggravating what they must assume is a crucial pro-violence constituency in their ranks?

 

The efforts by activist attorneys general and state-level supreme courts to deprive residents of the option to vote for Trump in November betrays a suspicious fear of the voters’ capacity for rational thought and lawful conduct. State-level Republican officials who are toying with the idea of keeping Joe Biden off their ballots, not in deference to a debatable legal theory but in pursuit of reciprocity alone, have adopted a similarly cavalier approach to the execution of their duties. You don’t have to go searching too hard to find Americans who will sincerely entertain the notion that resistance — not the pink-hatted sort, but the real thing — is the only proper remedy to subversion of this magnitude. The failure of elected officials to even entertain the imprudence of their actions, given the delicacy of this moment, is sufficient to justify Americans’ fears.

 

Every actor in this drama can convince him or herself that they’re only playing the narrow roles into which they have been cast. They are behaving mechanically to exogenous stimuli — floating along with events someone else set in motion. So, we drift lazily toward a series of foreseeable and preventable cataclysms. No wonder voters are terrified. They should be.