There’s a media ritual that we’re forced to endure every time there is a flare-up in political violence, where media types insist that, for all the violence endemic to this country, this particular type crosses a critical line.
After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, we saw breathless pieces from different corners of the media. The Washington Post published a piece saying that “political violence is intolerable in every instance.” The editors at The Free Press published one titled “The American Way Is Under Fire.” Then they published another titled “The Culture that Bred Cole Allen,” where they argue that we must have “zero tolerance for those who justify or excuse bloodshed.”
But they don’t really mean that. The Free Press is happy to publish advocacy for bloodshed of all types. They publish apologia for war in Iran and genocide in Gaza with regularity. They famously published an attempt to retcon the murder of George Floyd, arguing that his death was more likely an overdose (this account was somewhat famously debunked by Radley Balko, with no corrections or retractions ever made).
What they mean when they talk about “political violence” is violence directed at political figures by members of the public. Violence that goes in the other direction does not count. That’s important, because “political violence” as they define it makes up just a tiny fraction of the political violence we all experience. When Trump deploys federal agents to cities he doesn’t like, and some of those agents murder civilians, and investigations into the incidents are blocked, that’s not political violence. Blowing up schools and targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran isn’t political violence. Nor is cutting funding for cancer research or foreign aid. That’s all just politics.
(This reminds me, by the way, of how politicians and the media deploy the term “terrorism,” a word with an amorphous meaning that, in practice, tends to refer exclusively to violence committed by Muslims and never to violence by anyone else.)
This disconnect may be why the media’s framing of political violence doesn’t seem to resonate with the public. A recent survey asked participants what acts they thought qualified as "political violence.” Here are the results:
The story here, to me, is that while the media’s discussions of political violence fixate almost entirely on the targeting of public figures, most of the public folds that into a broader narrative about violence flowing both to and from the state. And that makes coverage like what we see from The Free Press ring hollow: they deem violence against political figures to be more noteworthy and disconcerting than violence against the rest of us.
The worst iteration of this came after the murder of Charlie Kirk, whose death was treated as a seminal event by the press despite him personally being more than a bit of a scumbag. The lives of certain elites just seem to weigh more in the media’s mind.
The common argument is that violence directed at political figures is particularly corrosive because it doubles as an attack on our democracy. The popular term is the “assassin’s veto” – the idea that threats of assassination could inhibit politicians from enacting their preferred policies. The Free Press went a step further, saying that an attempt to kill Donald Trump was an attack on the First Amendment, because it stifled the speech of the people who voted for him (not sure that would hold up legally, but I can appreciate the spirit of it).
I don’t entirely disagree with any of that. But it’s hard not to notice the types of violence that we have digested into our body politic and are expected to allow to loom over us indefinitely. It’s difficult, in a world where children dying in school shootings is accepted as a given, to believe that attempts on the life of Donald Trump reflect some sort of crisis point.
A New York Times piece by national political correspondent Lisa Lerer catalogued the individuals at the WHCD whose lives had been “upended” by political violence. They included RFK Jr., “whose father was assassinated after leaving a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles in 1968 in an earlier era of political violence.” But RFK Jr. will have, by the time he leaves office, killed more people than any gunman possibly could. He’s overseeing funding cuts to research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, and mRNA vaccines, to name a few. His primary connection to political violence isn’t his father, it’s that he is committing it.
Last week the Times published an interview with leftist streamer Hasan Piker and journalist Jia Tolentino about the idea of shoplifting as a form of protest. The segment got the vaguely provocative title “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’” and mostly consisted of Piker and Tolentino opining on morality of petty theft, and the extent to which shoplifting might serve as either a form of protest or an outgrowth of inequality.
The interview triggered multiple pearl-clutching responses. The Atlantic alone published two of them, including one from Thomas Chatterton Williams titled “Theft Is Now Progressive Chic” (at no point in either the original interview or any of the response pieces did anyone try to quantify how many people are actually engaging in shoplifting as a form of protest.)
But why? The topic is straight out of freshman year philosophy – property is theft and all that. The discussion revolved mostly around the fact that in many cases average people are held to a higher standard than the elite, and the double standard erodes our the social contract.
I think the reflexive response from some media types stems from the fact that everyone knows those things are true. Everyone knows that elites can act with impunity while the rest of us cannot. Everyone knows that corporations engage in wage theft on a massive scale with few repercussions, but the average person could have their life upended by a larceny charge. Everyone knows that a single murder is unspeakably evil, but if you scale it up enough it’s just public policy. But the truth makes them uncomfortable, because the imbalance can only be resolved by ending elite impunity or granting it to everyone else, and they can’t stand the thought of either.
