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Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
OK, antifa can smash some windows, break some jaws, maybe even kill a trivial number of people. But, uh, the non-federal government groups who've demonstrated the ability to support an army in the field are all conservative aligned. If the Cajun navy(and supporting sustained search and rescue operations is a very similar task to supplying a field army, that's why it's what peacetime militaries do with their time) was backing a militia army it would wreak much more damage than any non-governmental group the left can throw. Operation Lonestar, likewise, was an impressive demonstration of capabilities in 'can support a field army'.
The democrats of actual importance know this. They know if there was a civil war they'd lose badly, and they also know that the history of left wing victories in civil wars is all about the revolutionary leftists immediately killing off their suit-wearing allies. So they will not start one. Antifa and the john brown gun club will be cut off to face the consequences for their actions, on their own. Americans are fat and comfortable and they don't want to lose that.
You are correct that the violence is currently sporadic and unlikely to escalate. What you are missing is that a precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum. That is when things will go sideways.
I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?
I think you are being a little unfair here. I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval. Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged. And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends. Sure, TikTok was full of people screaming in dismay that the shooter missed, but do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?
I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.
Indeed not. The general social thread between wishing Crooks hadn't missed / donating to Luigi / donating to Anthony / winking and nodding at attacks on Tesla owners and dealers has no representatives here that I'm aware of. And likewise, many and perhaps even most Americans don't approve of it. That doesn't stop that social thread from being both notable and significant, though, or from it having knock-on effects.
There's a fundamental disconnect here. It does not appear to me that you or indeed other blues here failed to express sufficient horror over the attempted assassination or these other events. What horror you express or don't express is entirely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.
The assassination attempt is bad. The evident social approval from broad segments of the population is worse. I understand that you are not part of that approving population, but you disapproving doesn't make them stop existing, and it doesn't undo the effects of them existing.
I do. I have family whose serious opinion seems to be that it's a tragedy Crooks missed, and who think Elon probably needs to die as well. I joined an artists' discord recently, and within the first ten minutes on the group chat someone dropped a "man, it's gonna be great when someone finally kills those guys..."
But we don't need to rely on anecdotes. The riots and their handling were a national barometer. The Tesla attacks and the reaction to them are a national barometer. Donations to murderers and the reaction to them are a barometer. And in the same way, treatment of the J6 perps, on both sides, is likewise a barometer. The readings are not good, and do not seem to be getting better. Fatally, this is a trend lasting at least a decade, and in that decade nothing productive has been accomplished to combat it in any significant way.
The number of Americans who think lawless political violence is bad is much less important than the number of Americans willing and able to enforce norms against support for political violence. I am arguing that the latter number is too low, and has been for more than a decade. This is not a problem you or I or Trace or even the whole Motte collectively can fix, but it is a problem we should be able to recognize. Neither moderate blues, nor indeed moderate reds, have found a way to reign in the excesses of extremist blues. The best they've managed is to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. The problem is that they are not going to be willing to do this when extremist Reds start playing tit for tat, and worse, the mechanisms to coordinate an actual response won't be there either, because the toleration of extremist blue misdeeds in the past will have destroyed any willingness to coordinate against extremist red misdeeds in the present. We've seen this dynamic play out many, many times. We're going to keep seeing it in the future, because there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. It's hard to argue that we should even try, if the only way to get consensus on norm enforcement is when the enforcement is aimed exclusively at Reds. That is not a social structure worth defending.
We had the dueling fundraisers recently: blues donated to a kid who murdered another kid, and Reds responded by donating to a lady who got videoed called a kid the N-word. We had a lively debate about that. What happens when Reds donate millions to the red version of a Luigi or a Carmello Anthony? What are the predictable social consequences of that sort of statement? That's the question I was trying to communicate. None of this is a demand for action. None of this is a claim you or anyone else could have or should have done other than as you have. It is not a criticism of you. Nor is it support for Kulak or Kulakism; unlike Kulak, I renounce hatred and am committed to working against it. Kulak wants blood and chaos as a terminal value, I want peace and plenty very badly, badly enough to accept significant amounts of injustice aimed at me and mine. But we have gone from tacit support for thugs beating protesters to nationwide riots to dozens of millions of Americans openly supporting political murder as a solution to their perceived problems. What we have here is the creation of common knowledge.
Right now, no one is trying to enforce a norm against political violence. But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone. This is not obvious because no one is yanking on the lever, but I am warning you that the lever is in fact broken, and it will be obvious that it is broken the next time someone yanks on it. It's conceivable that we could rebuild the mechanisms that lever connects to before we actually need to yank on it, but it's very obvious that no one is actually doing that.
One thing I will note here is that Australia is not as far gone; we have two major parties, and both are hardline anti-riot regardless of valence. I think part of it is that the SJ rioters are in the Greens, not the centre-left Labour Party which is one of our "two parties", and as such the latter is totally fine with cracking down on SJ riots. I think another part is that social media mostly riles people up against US targets rather than Australian ones. There's a notable constituency for "it'd be nice if Trump got shot", but obviously that doesn't mean a great deal with the Pacific in the way and it mostly doesn't extend to Australian rightists.
The arrangement of politics in Australia is different and so support of political violence usually takes the form of supporting political violence by the state against dissidents. Why would the Australian blue tribe want to take matters into their own hands when the police will do it for them?
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