What struck me about the media reactions to the security breach at the White House correspondents’ dinner was how rote the media responses have been. They reminded me of the obituaries of elderly public figures, obviously written years before and taken from the file when needed.
The outlets that oppose Trump blame it on Trump. Those that support him blame it on those who oppose him. There are kernels of truth in both of those positions but mere kernels. What is most notable is the utter lack of self-awareness.
Consider the Washington Post report by Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck and Joe Heim. Superficially, it’s a dispassionate analysis. Pragmatically, it criticizes the Trump Administration members for attending the dinner and for inadequate security at the dinner. It was not officially a National Security Event.
White House correspondents’ dinners have never been officially deemed national security events. Unlike, for example, the State of the Union message they are private events and private events are rarely if ever designated as national security events. That is adequate to explain the security posture. In other words the report is another way of saying it’s Trump’s fault.
Rep. Ro Khanna has called for a federal commission on violence. That, too, is a completely predictable reaction to the events.
A particularly unhelpful response was the one offered by President Obama, that we do not fully understand the prospective assassin’s motives for his actions. We do not fully understand John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating President Lincoln and that was over 150 years ago. How often do we fully understand anything?
We do have the “gunman’s” manifesto. The manifesto is sufficient to establish a political motive consistent with widely circulating rhetoric. We do not need omniscience to act on that. The motives expressed in his manifesto were not unlike those expressed on the placards being carried by those protesting President Trump’s appearance at the dinner outside, including “Death to kings” and “Death to them all”.
My advice is stand down. Reduce the temperature. I have been warning about the risks of this for some time. The cognitive changes wrought by post-literacy encourage more agonistic modes of expression. Those are to be expected given the shift from linear, text-based reasoning to image-driven, affective cognition, something I have dubbed “visualcy”. In a country of more than 330 million people highly agonistic modes of expression inevitably motivate some to take violent action.
An alternative title for this post might have been “Round up the usual suspects”.
I was a little bit surprised by Trump’s initial White House press conference where he went in the direction the suspect was likely crazy. When its pretty clear the suspect wasn’t suffering mental issues as traditionally defined and had a clear political motive.
Its pretty grim. The trends say the situation is getting worse. In the past years, we’ve had Butler, Mar-a-lago, the Minnesota lawmakers assassinations, Charlie Kirk, WHCD. Then there was Shapiro’s arson attack, shooting of Israeli embassy staffers.
I would even consider the recent attempted arson and shooting outside Sam Altman’s house as part of the trend.
I feel its related to the continual loss of moral standards or constraints in our society – and this is everywhere in American society.
If the trend keeps going, the danger is we go from having a loss of restraint among individual actors — but that groups in society (or even the politicians) start endorsing using kinetic action on their perceived rivals to achieve their goals.
If you add plausible deniability to that, we’re already there.
I’m thinking that’s the point where conspiracies become a lot easier (as in a plot that involves multiple people).
Its much harder to defend against plots that involve a small group of people — and the damage they can do is a lot worse.
If things are to tone down, like most things it needs leadership from the top with Trump using the bully pulpit. That is not going to happen. While that would be a huge step I am not sure if it’s enough to counter the efforts both tribes go to in declaring the opposition evil.
Also, I guess we should note that we have long had a fairly steady number of politically motivated killings/shootings in the US. Note that between 1993-1994 11 people were shot at abortion clinics, 5 of them killed. We have lots of guns, they are easy to get and if you get mad you can act on that anger easily. My WAG would be that while we appear to be having a surge this is not the worst we have seen.
Steve
Steve
I tend to agree with you on that, steve. The only thing you omit is that Trump’s election to the presidency is an example of how irrational and emotion-laden our public discourse has become. He is not merely the cause of it—he is the symptom.
The WSJ had an article where they cited CSIS that political violence last year was the highest it’s been in at least 30 years (the chart didn’t extend before 1990). On a vibe basis, I think it’s approaching the worse of the 1960’s. It’s not a 1 year outlier either, it’s been continuously increasing since 2015.
The political violence feels worse to me than at other times in my life. While it is new to me, our country has survived it before. There was a lot of political violence from 1886-1920 from the anarchists which included the assassination of President William McKinley.
https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-anarchist-incidents
Despite the large number of politically-motivated bombings in the early 1970s, somehow the present situation feels worse. Maybe it’s social media’ Maybe it’s the vacuity of major media outlets but I was there and in the middle of it. This feels worse.
Maybe it’s because so much of the political unrest of the late 1960s-early 1970s was focused on the war in Vietnam. When that ended, so did the unrest.
I believe they actually said political violence against the government. Here is quote from WSJ…
“[D]omestic attacks and plots against the U.S. government are at their highest levels since at least 1994, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”
I think they are looking at violence more specific than just general violence that is politically motivated. Still concerning. What might be concerning is that it’s the first time in 40-50 years that violence is coming more from the left than the right. According to the WSJ piece a lot of that is related to ICE so I suspect it is likely transient (as during Vietnam) if ICE gives up its masks and its violence against citizens and treating people poorly.
Steve
This extends beyond violence against the government, and immigration enforcement.
The murder of Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, and the attacks on Sam Altman weren’t related to ICE and none of the 3 were part of the US government.
I would consider all 3 to be “political” violence in that they were violent acts to achieve political goals.
I’ll just throw in Peter Turchin’s analysis of 50 year cycles of political violence such as riots, lynchings and terrorism, which predicted a new peak in the 2020s. Note the second graph shows political violence increasing in the U.S. since 1960 (with a small peak in the late 60s)
https://peterturchin.substack.com/p/revisiting-a-2017-prediction
I’m pretty skeptical about cyclical theories, but perhaps there are categories of things, like violence, that may tend to increase naturally until stopped by something new.
If human beings were atomic particles or single-celled organisms such theories might be useful. Unlike atomic particles or single-celled organisms human actions are volitional.
Dave Schuler: If human beings were atomic particles or single-celled organisms such theories might be useful. Unlike atomic particles or single-celled organisms human actions are volitional.
While individual humans are volitional, in aggregate they often display quasi-predictable behavior. That’s how crowd and traffic control are devised.
On the other hand, degrees of political violence are probably chaotic, not periodic.
Political assassinations and other political violence are not crowd actions.
Dave Schuler: Political assassinations and other political violence are not crowd actions.
Is that so? If it’s political, then there’s an underlying cause, even if that cause is irrational. Most sociologists believe political violence is a type of crowd activity, often on the fringes of legitimate political movements (such as the anti-abortion movement).
In any case, even random events can exhibit apparent patterns. Relatively rare random events can appear clustered even though they are, well, random. Indeed, to appear evened out would generally require a non-random process. So, if we were to suppose that political violence were random, it would still tend to appear clustered.
On the other hand, if we suppose the occurrence of political violence to be chaotic, then it may exhibit actual persistent patterns, but not extended periodicity.
We may reasonably suppose there are positive and negative feedbacks to political violence. Positive feedbacks might include reinforcement through communication (The Social Network says, “I see you are interested in blowing stuff up. Would you like to meet others who also like to blow stuff up?”) or the success of previous efforts at capturing public attention. Negative feedbacks might involve adaptation of law enforcement (The Social Network says, “Turns out I am the police, sucker.”) and generational and cultural turnover. This can create a chaotic see-saw effect, which may exhibit periodicity over the short term but which breaks down over longer terms. As with randomness, the apparent periodicity within chaos may just be random clustering.
What this means with regards to Turchin’s hypothesis is that it is very difficult to discern persistent patterns within the chaos without a firm understanding of the causative mechanisms. However, just pointing out that people are volitional does not mean their actions don’t form patterns.
Dave Schuler: Political assassinations and other political violence are not crowd actions.
Neither is you driving to the grocery store. Nor someone else taking a shortcut when heading downtown for work. Or a family taking the ol’ Woodie on vacation. But, in aggregate, they make up traffic. And traffic exhibits patterns that can be used to devise better traffic system.
That is false. The crowd in Dallas did not assassinate John Kennedy. The crowd in Ford’s Theater did not assassinate Lincoln. The crowd at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station did not assassinate James Garfield. The crowd at the Lorraine Motel did not assassinate Martin Luther King.
You are making a category error. Your analogy, between “political violence” in the abstract or aggregate and individual acts of political violence, is inappropriate.
Also, you’re changing the subject. I never said that political assassination was rational. I said it was volitional. Those are not synonymous.
Dave Schuler: That is false.
What is false? That when you decide to drive to the grocery store, you are not, not what? Not acting on your own volition?