And as political strategy
“[T]he American right wing is trying to create a Hobbesian state of nature where violence and fear of death is everywhere and the rule of law is increasingly meaningless,” writes Chauncey DeVega, Salon’s senior politics writer. Who needs random squads of brownshirts when everyone, everywhere is armed, anxious, and primed to go to guns at the slightest provocation? That’s “primed” in the psychological sense. As a political tactic.
DeVega walks readers through how German legal philosopher and political theorist Carl Schmidt’s views of “sovereign authority.” Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Legal norms, Schmitt argues, cannot be applied to a chaos.” Thus the need for a sovereign. In post-Weimar Germany, read “dictator,” who might rule this “state of exception.”
That’s not unlike the book of Revelation’s return of Jesus at Armageddon. It’s something that makes Christian nationalists and a self-described “Leninist” like Steve Bannon shiver with antici … pation. Exception justifies all those guns stockpiled by coup plotters in preparation for the reign of Donald Trump. As I’ve written time and again, they are at heart royalists not small-d democrats. They hunger for a strongman to guarantee their dominion over perceived enemies. Chaos paves his way:
Social psychologists have repeatedly shown that the political decision-making of conservative-authoritarians is largely motivated by fear and death anxieties. The Republican Party’s opposition to effective gun control is a strategic decision because they know that more death and more killing from guns and other causes (such as COVID) enhances their power and control over their public – including support for a fascist leader or other demagogue such as Donald Trump.
The Republican Party’s and “conservative” movement’s policies are deeply unpopular with the American people. Thus, the Republican fascists and larger white right and “conservative” movement have increasingly concluded that violence is a necessary and required (and legitimate) way for them to impose their will on the American people in the name of “defending traditional values” and “real America” (which is not subtle code for “White America” and “White Christianity”).
To that end, the Republican fascists and “conservatives” and the larger white right possess a deep attraction to and affinity for vigilante and other extra-legal and illegal violence as committed most recently by the likes of Daniel Penny (who choked a mentally ill homeless black man to death on a New York subway), Kyle Rittenhouse aka “the Kenosha Kid”, George Zimmerman (who killed a black teenager Trayvon Martin for the “crime” of walking home and refusing to comply with a wannabe cop’s orders) and too many others. Police officers who kill unarmed and otherwise vulnerable Black and brown people are also valorized by the American right wing.
Conservative stands in quotes because there is nothing traditionally conservative about a reactionary right movement that, DeVega argues, wants Americans “sick and terminally ill with such violence and all the misery and death it causes.” That chaos is the “pathway to unlimited power for all time and their dream-nightmare of a new American plutocracy.”
Or white-Christian-nationalist “dominion.” Same thing.
Bill Lueders, editor-at-large of The Progressive, writes at The Bulwark that bloodlust is an animating feature of the extremist right. Men like who kill the “Other,” like Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Perry (convicted for the shooting death of a 28-year-old Black Lives Matter protester in Austin, Texas shooter), are treated as heroes. Reactionary figures such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have lavished praise on Penny. He was a Good Samaritan, says DeSantis. “This is what a hero looks like. The world needs more men like Daniel Penny,” said Greene.
Lueders offers a sampling of comments from just one hour of the GiveSendGo fundraiser for Penny (The Bulwark):
Thank you for doing what is right, protecting victims.
Thank you for you’re selfless act!
Doing the right thing is not a crime.
God Bless U S A and God Bless Daniel Penny
Daniel Penny you did the right thing. The city on NYC should be sued.
A hero who wanted to help protect lives on the train when the city of NY does nothing to keep criminals off trains and tranist riders safe.
I hope you turn around and sue the city and DA for what they’ve done. The are culpable and to blame for making citizens the ones that have to protect the people.
AFTER THIS IS OVER YOU SHOULD LEAVE NEW YORK CITY, The city doesnt deserve to have citizens like you: its a sewer.
The Left is destroying this country; your inditement is just another example.
One of the commenters at the Sgt. Daniel Perry Legal Defense Fund writes:
Looks like there is no justice system anymore. Thanks for teaching me to NEVER GET CAPTURED, NO MERCY ON ENEMY COMBATANTS (every single person blocking your car) in the future. God bless!
That is: chaos, exception. Bring on the sovereign!
“Leading hopefuls in the Republican presidential primary,” Lueders notes, endorse extrajudicial killings by vigilantes.
I mentioned this trend last week:
Stephen Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” weighed in on the killing of homeless Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, declaring, “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely, by the way, not of their own volition, you’ve put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.”
In essence: When in doubt, take them out.
Lueders concludes:
This is pure rot. Neely did not attack anyone. No one was forced to choose between killing and being killed. That Penny’s decision to put Neely in a chokehold for so long that it killed him is being cheered on by people who long for opportunities to administer lethal retribution—and who believe that the election of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis may bring the glory days where this can be exacted on the notice of a “second”—should frighten us all.
Perhaps it is time to view the spread of “stand your ground” laws and open carry in state after state as more than a result of heavy lobbying by the gun industry. The Republican Party’s policies are, as DeVega notes, “deeply unpopular with the American people” and unlikely to prevail in a pluralistic democracy. Democracies fail. Sometimes all it requires is a little push. Reactionaries convinced democracy has failed them are open to much darker alternatives.