In their quest for power at any price, Republicans know poisonous talk is cheap
With the US midterms fast approaching, the recent attack on Paul Pelosi marked the all-too-predictable escalation of the violence that appears to be increasingly normalised within US politics. It also highlighted the impossible task of protecting America’s politicians and their families in a climate of heightened sectarianism.
None of it surprises, even if the shock is rarely diminished. In Carol Lennig’s recent (and highly recommended) history of the Secret Service, Zero Fail, she makes the point that “the Secret Service [fulfils] its Zero Fail mission based not on its skills, people, training, or technology, but on dumb luck.” It is nigh on impossible to protect America’s leaders. When presidents are not safe, the threats are compounded with every step we take away from the presidency.
The one consolation politicians have ever had is that these events happen so rarely. Perpetrators require a unique combination of means, motive, and opportunity, of which motive is perhaps the most critical. It requires somebody to internalise a political antagonism to such a degree that they are willing to give up either their freedom or their life in the pursuit of their goal. Such individuals are rare and rarer still are those with the means and opportunity to act on their motives.
Yet act they occasionally do, and when that happens, politicians of all denominations are forced to recognise that words expressed in the public square have consequences. Politicians who play with extremist tropes feed a capricious beast. Too many treat provocative language as if they’re merely riling the crowd in some wrestling arena, where the rules of the pantomime are well understood. They tell themselves that nobody takes any of this nonsense too seriously… until that is, somebody does.
Protection begins, then, with measuring the temperature of the debate. Yet in recent years we have seen quite the opposite. Politics across the globe have been transformed by the language of populism: provocative antagonism, performative retribution, and pure unfiltered hatred. Presidents now don’t concede elections and home secretaries casually speak about “invasions”. They are all part of the same phenomenon. So too when Nancy Pelosi claimed she’d be happy to punch the President and face jail time. Joe Biden too, despite his appeals for cooler rhetoric, has in the past engaged in the same kind of seriocomic playacting that he’d take Trump out the back of the gym and “beat the hell” out of him.
Yet if sectarianism is the newest spectator sport, the showman-in-chief has been Donald Trump, who forced his way into the political space and made room for language that was as cheap as it was effective. If it’s hard to get an audience excited by tax cuts, it is easy to rile them with talk of beating up liberals.
The attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives was not, then, much of a shock. It emerged fully formed with a narrative arc as predictable as it is chilling: loner radicalised by online hate, 4Chan, the Big Lie. The intruder, David DePape, was said to have asked “where’s Nancy?”, the same words were said by those searching for the Speaker in the halls of Congress on 6th January 2021. He was also wielding a hammer. Was it “merely” a weapon or the symbol of Pelosi’s office? Remember that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had promised to regain the Speaker’s gavel and professed that it would be “hard not to hit” Pelosi over the head with it.
Republicans will and do blame the Democrats for their part of this polarisation, but this is part of the gaslighting that also befouls the atmosphere around US politics. They know what they’re doing. Historically the Democrats are not immune from their own worst instincts and the Far Left have enough of a history of violence in that respect. But Antifa of today is not the Weather Underground of the 1960s and they are certainly not the armed hard-right militias that lurk outside voting stations and have occupied government buildings. Those are symptoms of that part of the Republican demographic that few politicians seem willing or able to control.
They are also unwilling to condemn the attempted murder of Peter Pelosi. Pelosi was attacked on Friday and nearly a week has passed in a state of often rancorous, mealy-mouthed sympathising. Some Republicans tried to equivocate, damning Democrats for their response when Steve Scalise was shot. “A Bernie Sanders supporter shot Steve Scalise,” said Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. “I never heard you or anyone else in the media trying to blame Democrats for what happened.”
Except the equivalency is false. Politics back then were much less fraught and the sympathy towards Scalise was consistent with a relatively functioning democracy. Democrats did pray for Scalise, Pelosi herself was close to tears when speaking of his shooting, and – to Emmer’s point – Bernie Sanders, for all his faults, had never called for the summary execution of Scalise. This is not true today. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is in line to become the next Speaker of the House if Republicans prevail in Tuesday’s midterms. She has described Nancy Pelosi as “guilty of treason” for which she has reminded her supporters, the punishment is death.
This is the new normal in Republican politics. In one ad, Greene is seen firing a high-powered Barrett M82A1 sniper rifle from the back of a flatbed truck. She promises to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.” She later raffled off the .50mm weapon to supporters. It’s the way to easy headlines and for an unknown politician to make their name. Shock, shock, and then shock again. The violent language even extends to rivalries inside the party. Eric Greitens made a notorious video as part of his campaign to become the nominee for Missouri’s Senate seat. “Get a RINO [Republican in name only] hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Trump, meanwhile, chose to remain silent on Pelosi’s attack, leaving it to his son, Donald Trump Jr, to take to social media where he retweeted a joke about a “Paul Pelosi Halloween costume” consisting of a pair of underpants and a hammer. This about a man who underwent brain surgery over the weekend and who remains closer to death than he is to a full recovery.
When the former president did address the attack, he said: “With Paul Pelosi, that’s a terrible thing, with all of them it’s a terrible thing”. He then proceeded to describe lawlessness in American cities as “far worse than Afghanistan”. The message was clear. Democrats did this to themselves. Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Republican candidate for governor went further. Kari Lake told a loyal crowd that “It is not impossible to protect our kids at school, they act like it is. Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in DC, apparently, her house doesn’t have a lot of protection…” The crowd laughed.
There is no quick way of changing any of this. Democrats have again proved themselves too inefficient at pushing home their advantage, even one as profound as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe V Wade. The Republicans, meanwhile, will feel emboldened and perhaps rightly so if the only metric is electoral success. Their tactics seem to be working, of maintaining a maximum press on the Democrats and conceding no ground even in the face of a horrific, brutal assault. Just a month ago, the Dems were enjoying a bounce but now it appears that they peaked too soon. Republicans are seeing their polling surge. They now looking likely to take the House, and perhaps even the Senate. As if they didn’t know it already, they are learning that the cheap politics of sectarianism works and it is people like Paul Pelosi who are left to pay the price.
Follow David Waywell on Twitter @DavidWaywell
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