By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, June 15, 2017
This is why the standard liberal
motto — that violence is never legitimate, even though it may sometimes be
necessary to resort to it — is insufficient. From a radical emancipatory
perspective, this formula should be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always
legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are
exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy
whether or not use violence against the enemy).
Slavoj Žižek, On Violence and Democracy
It did not take very long to get from “Punch a Nazi!” to
“assassinate a congressman.”
A great deal of spittle has been deployed in the debate
over whether or to what extent the Left’s recent indulgence of its penchant for
violent rhetoric can be linked to the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise
and other members of a Republican congressional baseball team by an angry
Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders partisan. But the relevant question here
is not violent rhetoric but violence
itself. The violence at Berkeley and Middlebury did not lead to the
shooting in Alexandria — they are part of the same phenomenon: The American
Left has embraced political violence.
More precisely, the Left has embraced “anarcho-tyranny.”
(Yes, I know what kind of man Sam Francis became; his phrase remains useful.)
The anarcho part: Progressives including mainstream Democrats have embraced the
sort of violence that has been directed against the likes of Charles Murray as
an instrument of liberationist politics. Representative Val Demings, a
Democratic congressman from Florida, shared her view that the riots greeting
Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley were “a beautiful sight.” After a physical attack
on white nationalist Richard Spencer, Jeremy Binckes of Salon wrote: “Maybe the question shouldn’t be, ‘Is it okay to punch
a Nazi?’ but, ‘If you don’t want to be punched in the face, maybe you shouldn’t
preach Nazi values to the public?’” A lively debate about the ethics of using
violence to suppress certain political views ensued. Short version: Free speech
did not experience a runaway victory.
Things are worse on campus. The editorial board of the Daily Californian defended blackshirt
violence on the grounds that, without it, “neo-Nazis would be free to roam the
streets of Berkeley.” The argument that people who hold unpopular political
opinions should be physically unsafe — that they should be subject not to
social exclusion or criticism but to violence, afraid to roam the streets — is
textbook totalitarianism.
California’s political leaders did almost nothing in
response to the violence at Berkeley, but when the Trump administration
threatened to sanction California, they leapt to action. Nancy Pelosi claimed,
with no evidence, that the violence in Berkeley was the result of peaceful
protests being “infiltrated,” and insisted “the protesters have a right to free
speech as well.” But what greeted Yiannopoulos in Berkeley was not free speech:
It was political violence organized to
suppress free speech. Representative Barbara Lee complained that the Trump
administration’s insistence that Berkeley protect the safety and civil rights
of its students and visitors was an attempt to “bully our university into
silence” — but it was Yiannopoulos who had literally
been bullied into silence — with firebombs and truncheons — along with
Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, and others. A Middlebury professor had to be
briefly hospitalized after being physically attacked for having invited Charles
Murray to campus. That is not free speech. That is violence, and Democrats,
judging by their non-response to these episodes, have more or less made their
peace with it.
That’s the anarcho
part. The tyranny part is that while
the Left’s blackshirts are permitted to inflict actual physical violence on
people who have political opinions they don’t like, the Left’s whiteshirts — respectable
Democratic officeholders and media figures — are working feverishly to inflict
civil and criminal penalties on individuals and institutions that hold and
communicate unpopular political opinions: “Arrest climate deniers!” Adam
Weinstein and Robert Kennedy Jr. demanded, and, soon enough, Democrats were
cooking up fraud cases against oil companies that had criticized climate-change
proposals, and then used subpoenas
and other measures to harass conservative and free-market political groups
affiliated with them. Every Democrat in the Senate voted with Harry Reid to
repeal the First Amendment and allow Congress to regulate political speech. The
Obama administration saw to it that no one in the IRS ever faced any real
punishment for that agency’s targeting of conservative groups for persecution
and harassment.
So, on the one hand, we have the modern answer to the
beer-hall brawlers of the 1930s, and on the other hand, we have powerful
political figures working to criminalize dissent. The same people who have
spent the past 30 years cooking up ever-battier campus speech codes want to do
the same thing for society at large in the form of so-called hate-speech
regulation.
They do this partly because they intend to win and to
rule. They also do it because they have convinced themselves that we are in a
state of national crisis, and that the dark shadow of fascism in descending on
the United States. In reality, the only thing resembling a genuine totalitarian
movement in American politics is the progressive camp from which emerged the
man who shot Steve Scalise.
Once you’ve accepted political violence as a legitimate
tool in the context of American democracy — once you have concluded that the
decision to use violence is only a matter of strategy, as Slavoj Žižek insists
— then progress from pepper spray and bicycle locks to rifles and bombs is
neither very long nor very difficult to anticipate.
And here we are.
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