The Shadow of Violence

Dark thoughts on the politics of a dark time

Sometimes, it seems like members of Congress are bystanders to the damage being done to the federal government. There’s certainly no shortage of ordinary political reasons why that might be the case—partisanship is still a hell of a drug. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the ordinary tools of political analysis (looking to the risk of primary challenges, donors’ wishes, and polling data) may not be fully sufficient right now. There may be a darker undercurrent at work.

For years, folks on social media and a smaller number of experts have discussed the possibility of political violence becoming a much more prominent part of U.S. political life. What if the prospect of violence is already shading how everyday politics are working?

Violence has decisively shaped national policy before, most notably with Lincoln’s assassination (a successful pro-Southern plot to set post-Civil War policy) but also any number of quarter-remembered incidents usually classed as “local” history but which, in sum, create a mosaic of pretty widespread violence buttressing social and political orders. Even more recently, I don’t think you can understand the mindset of senior U.S. officials from about 1967 to about 1975 without realizing just how many kidnappings, bombings, and other forms of violence were taking place. I am not excusing those folks, but I am simply reminding people of a semi-forgotten period in living memory. (And, of course, there’s since been much more spectacular eruptions of violence, notably the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.)

What I mean, however, is something more diffuse but also immediate than the political violence of recent decades that, liked the Oklahoma City bombings, sought to spark much broader movements. I mean something more about how the threat of violence, or even fear of the threat of violence, might be persistently biasing political calculations.

In late 2023, a then-colleague of mine, Alex Theodoridis, ran an important poll of former members of Congress. The survey found that about half of the former members surveyed reported receiving threats of violence at least somewhat frequently—and for minority and female respondents, the share was just under 70 percent.

Quite a lot of this has to be relatively undirected, like the 2017 congressional baseball shooting (at which 24 Republican members of Congress were present) or the attack on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and several others in 2011.

But…

January 6 ended the streak of peaceful transfers of power in the United States. The events of that day also constituted, at a minimum, an attempt to intimidate the legislature into acting in ways desired by the executive. The January 6 pardons cast a grim shadow over relations between the executive and the legislative branch. These were pardons for an obvious, violent, and targeted attack on Congress by an organized group carrying out the political directives of a leader. That is unprecedented. The pardons signal the explicit retroactive approval of the serving administration for the actions taken on that day.

The pardons of January 6 actors have, perhaps unintentionally, placed a more dangerous expectation on the table: that subsequent, similar actions would meet with similar expungements. This places, at a minimum, forceful and disruptive actions against the legislature on the table. It also raises the prospect that the line beyond which executive clemency has not been granted has not yet been demarcated. That ambiguity raises the prospect that some ambitious actor will decide to determine its limits.

That is why it matters that congressional leaders and even Vice President Vance were so adamant that violent J6 actors would not be pardoned—and that the pardons then trampled that distinction. Without an accompanying declaratory policy marking this as an exception, we are, at a minimum, approaching Henry II levels of potential unintended consequences—who will rid me of these meddlesome legislators?

I am not the first person to observe the implications of the message. I do think, however, that there’s a real reflex to assume that the harms of this or that policy or announcement will unfold only over months and years. But what if the message is sent and received much faster?

It’s certainly chilling to note that muted responses to the current administration would become more explicable when you view the harms as not being hypothetical but as taking place right now. The harrying and harassment of local election and health officials has demonstrably affected the willingness of people to serve in those roles; similar strains have been evident on the legislature. Is it really so far-fetched to imagine that, even in a diffuse way, members of the legislature—not a few of whom were in the building on January 6 themselves—might be indexing their reaction to the consequences of the pardons?

To be clear: you probably could explain what we’re seeing without recourse to these extraordinary factors. Yet to set aside the extraordinary events we have all witnessed and then act as if they are not influencing calculations seems to me to require heroic analytical assumptions. Further, look around: do the events of the past twelve days seem like politics as usual? Are you sure that there’s no room to admit for the gravitational pull of personal safety as inhibiting some action, even at the margins?

Even a little political violence is corrosive to a democratic system. When political actors stop being single-minded seekers of re-election and instead have grounds to worry about their physical safety, then the system has already succumbed. Again, we have already seen this—McKay Coppins reports two separate instances in which Republican members of Congress decided to vote against impeaching / convicting Trump after January 6 because of the risks to their personal safety.

These are grim conclusions. They suggest that, whether through fear or some other channel, there may be much less room for democratic resistance than Schoolhouse Rock would have you believe. And yet, even though many folks—Chris Hayes, for instance, and Joanne Freeman—have mused on these issues, I am not sure that Americans have taken them fully on board, nor have used these to grapple with the depths of what is happening—as opposed to what might happen or reverting to the reflex of talking about how the pardons/commutations are offensive to the police (which they are, but that’s a little limited in scope). To be clear: I am not much more prepared to deal with these issues myself, although my studies of Irish political development and, later, Southern politics did broaden my horizons, depressingly.

An enlightened White House could do much to relieve these pressures with firm, consistent, and insistent messaging about its policy regarding clemency. Those messages, to my knowledge, are not being sent publicly.

The stakes may be even higher than they appear for those in the arena. But they are in the arena for a reason. And if the stakes are that high, the situation must be faced bravely.