The TrumpRepublican Party's Culture of Violence
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October 23, 2023
The Republican Party’s Culture of Violence
October 23, 2023, 5:54 PM ET
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The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence
for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new
normal in the GOP.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed
The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of
the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of
Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least
for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential
election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to
certify the results.)
Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit
the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made
against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to
muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is
just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about
this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats.
Although Jordan repudiated these tactics, some of his colleagues blame him anyway, and Americans are now, as Blake wrote last week, in a “long-
overdue” conversation about the role of threats in public life, one that “should include a recognition that these threats and intimidation can
work, and probably have.”
That “conversation,” unfortunately, is unlikely to continue. Republicans
have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it
among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go
back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the
threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA
loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that
refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own
party.
Some of these threats can be dismissed as the result of technology: The frictional costs of threatening people are basically nonexistent. Angry
cranks once needed time and materials (envelopes and stamps, or at least a
call to an information line) to say awful things. Today, people are
surfing the internet with a smartphone—their personal secretary and
valet—right by their side, so the interval between having a repulsive
thought and expressing it to a target is now functionally zero.
But email and the internet, and political violence in the United States,
have been around for a while. Only in the age of Trump have threats become
a common part of daily American partisan politics. Almost anyone who is
even remotely a public figure now gets them over almost anything, and
Trump and his movement have gone quite far in killing any sense of shame
for saying terrible things to other people or their families over
political differences.
Not only does Trump expressly model this kind of behavior; he and his
media enablers provide rationalizations for such threats. Ironically, many
of these excuses were once associated with the violent far left a half-
century ago: The system is rigged; democracy is a mug’s game; anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy; those in power will never give it up
without being subjected to violence and intimidation. But much of it is
also out of the far-right, fascist playbook: The elites are plotting
against you; anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in on the plot;
the only salvation is if We the People engage in violence ordained by God himself.
We’ve seen these illiberal, populist attitudes and beliefs before. What we
have not seen in America until now is the capture of a major political
party by this kind of paranoia and violence.
The threats around Jordan’s attempt to gain the gavel are also different because the people making them are reaching down into granular, inside- baseball GOP politics. In recent years, some MAGA adherents have made
threats against their partisan opponents in order to defend Trump’s honor,
or because they were convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. Now,
however, the movement is turning on its own. Some people follow internal
House conferences as if they are members of the caucus, and treat the
election of a speaker—which is important, to be sure—as an existential
battle.
Amazingly, these people made threats in support of … Jim Jordan. They are actually menacing other human beings over the ambitions of a loudmouthed, ineffectual member of Congress.
After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who
becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee,
or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted
more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful
raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and
clearly, American society has plenty of both.
Many Republican legislators are scared, and they should be. Only 25
members of the House GOP conference voted against Jordan on the floor
during the last round of voting. Many more opposed making him speaker; in
a secret ballot, 112 of Jordan’s colleagues voted against him—which
suggests that more than 80 of them feared doing so in public.
It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to vote one way among themselves
and then cast a different vote on the floor, especially if the issue is
one where the national party is at odds with the voters in a member’s
district. Such political calculations, though sometimes distasteful, are common. But democracy cannot function if legislators feel that their
lives—and those of their families—are in danger from their fellow
citizens. No matter what happens with Trump and the MAGA cult, the
Republican Party cannot go on this way, and some of the legislators who
spoke up about threats during Jordan’s attempt to become speaker seem to
know it.
What they are willing to do about it is less clear. But I wonder if the
arrests and convictions for the January 6 insurrection are having their
effect: One caller to a representative, after a string of f-bombs and
barely veiled threats, made an effort to stipulate that he was speaking
only of nonviolent harassment. Perhaps holding such people legally
accountable for their actions—whether they intended violence or were just trying to throw a scare into others—might begin to reverse this trend.
Republican elected officials didn’t seem to care very much about such
rhetoric when it was aimed at their opponents, and they were only briefly shaken on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob made clear that there was
plenty of room reserved on the gibbet for Mike Pence and other Republican leaders. Perhaps they’ll take such threats more seriously now that their internal squabbles could lead to their wives having to sleep with a gun by
the bed, but I suspect that the hyper-partisanship and stunning cowardice
that brought the GOP to this moment will, as ever, win the day.
A while back, I said that I would occasionally use this space to revisit
some 1980s musical oddities. This week, I want to remind you how very
political music videos could be in the Decade of Excess. You’ve probably
seen the video for the 1986 Genesis hit “Land of Confusion,” which used Britain’s Spitting Image puppets to portray world leaders such as Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to trippy effect. Reagan made a lot of
appearances in words and images in those days, including in Sting’s
“Russians,” Men at Work’s “It’s a Mistake,” and others.
But for my money, the best video with a Reagan reference was made by
Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Better known for its huge dance hit “Relax,” in 1984, the band recorded “Two Tribes,” a song about nuclear war. (I wrote
about MTV’s nuclear genre here.) The video features two actors, one
obviously Reagan, and the other—and this is the cool trivia part—meant to
be the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The two of them beat each other
up until the world explodes. The end.
But wait—who? Exactly. Chernenko was leader of the U.S.S.R. for all of 13 months, mostly as a seat warmer in ill health. History has forgotten him,
but thanks to a video filmed at the right moment in time, he will live on, forever headbutting Reagan and biting the American president’s ear in an eternal arena match.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/10/republican-party-jordan- threats-violence/675742/
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