Suren
Moodliar

 Author’s note: In the run-up to the US 2024 presidential election, I contributed a revised form of this article to an edited collection, “How We Win: Energizing Strategies, Voters, and Agendas.”1 The article was written before the two known assassination attempts on then candidate Donald Trump and the spate of mass shootings. The timing is relevant since events after publication could easily have vitiated one of the essay’s key points: political violence directed at people in the United States is largely the province of the political right. To the degree that the political left has engaged in violence, it is largely directed at property. The essay is reproduced here with a view to expanding the conversation about political violence as political conditions change and polarization expands.

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As Anthony King lay dying in his yard, his wife tearfully reported to a 911 operator that he had been shot – three bullets to his head – by Mr. Austin Combs, a neighbor in their small Ohio town. Mrs. King explained to the operator, Combs has “come over, like, four times con- fronting my husband because [Combs] thought [that her husband] was a Democrat.” Indeed Mr. King was actually a conservative white Republican, but died a suspected Democrat. The Kings’ tragic story opens a 2023 special report on political violence by the Reuters news agency.2 The story of the 10 African American shoppers killed by a white supremacist at their grocery store in Buffalo, NY, in May 2022, concludes a painful list of anecdotes shared in the report’s introduction.

Reuters’ widely cited and oft-quoted study has a simple thesis: political violence is on the rise in the United States with nearly a fifth of the electorate finding violence acceptable in the furtherance of political objectives. It is also presented as something characteristic of both right- and left-wing “extremes.” Their introduction also reflects a studied style of American political commentary: violence visited on white people, e.g. the Kings, merits individual attention and concern while that inflicted on black people can be retold via a simple statistic, 10 dead in Buffalo.

For progressives, intent on preserving and expanding such democratic openings as have been wrought from our old constitutional order, violence is a particularly challenging topic. We want to recognize both the deep history of violence in this settled continent and the new turns accompanying rising neofascism. At the same time, we also need to make careful distinctions about what counts for violence in a “post-truth” era. How, after all, are we to distinguish between mere rule breaking and destruction of property, which often accompanies civil disobedience and mass movements, from oppressive vio- lence, necessarily part of the neofascist project, aimed at thwarting the democratic will or denying civil rights. Fortunately, these are answerable questions. First, we must recognize the intellectual operations that mystify the analysis of political violence, and then we must understand and celebrate the lessons from the history of challenging state, racist and fascist violence. At the outset however, as we will show below, we need to recognize the relative novelty of direct, overt support for political violence from the political leadership of the Republican Party and its standard bearer, former president Donald J. Trump. Right-wing and often centrist discourse engage in three intellectual maneuvers that prevent fruitful conversa- tions about violence. First, activities or incidents are decontextualized and redefined, next they are relativized through false equivalences, and finally the blame is deflected onto a real or often conjured scapegoat.

Decontextualization: In the spring of 2024, while global public opinion was rankled by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, progressives watched in horror as Republican demagogues hauled university presidents before Congress. The pathetic responses of the academic leaders – at best equivocating or worse, capitulating on complex questions of political rhetoric and academic freedom – exemplifies the “decontextualization” operation.

Channeling Senator Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s, Representative Elise Stefanik,3 then a prospective Trump running mate, reduced normal campus debate about global issues to a simplified matter of hate speech and by extension, implied violence. As with McCarthy- era tragedies, the college presidents had an opportunity to rise to the occasion and reject Stefanik’s framing out of hand, much as people like Paul Robeson had done during the Cold War.4 Instead, we were treated to painful congressional spectacles in which college presidents were unable to effectively answer bullying politicians.

Stefanik defined the debate: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” she demanded of a flummoxed Claudine Gay, then President of Harvard University. “It can be, depending on the context,” the hapless Gay averred. Moving in for the kill, Stefanik cut off Gay and suggested that campus rhetoric about Israeli violence was equivalent to “committing genocide.” Stefanik’s browbeating of the presidents proceeded smoothly: campus rhetoric and debate were shorn of the underlying acts – the ongoing massacre of more than 30,000 Palestinians – and equated with Hamas’ military actions, which in turn, the media suggested, were a continuation of the Nazi genocide.

The complexity of the campus, the academic freedom to explore the history of occupation and resistance, the diversity of student responses to faraway events involving threatened and dying family and friends, real policy debates over failed “peace processes” or even global and regional rivalries were all rendered invisible by Stefanik’s simple question.5 Unlike Robeson who was accountable to a struggle and people’s movement, the flustered campus presidents were no match for the rapacious Stefanik. In a few hearings, the MAGA congressperson redefined the national debate over the Middle East. This set the stage for a violent Spring in which anti-violence, pro-Palestine student encampments were set up for violent repression from both counter protestors and the police.

False equivalences: The inability to either defend free speech or condemn structural violence in plain English left the college presidents appearing foolish. More consequentially, it surrendered the liberal mainstream conversation to right-wing abstractions about the “violence of the left” and of alleged “antisemites.”

Ironically, Stefanik’s politics and those of her movement con- dones real acts of violence by the MAGA base and leader. On January 6, 2021, at the urging of their national leader, Donald Trump, the MAGA base attacked Congress in a failed attempt to disrupt the constitutionally mandated transfer of executive power to the legitimate winner of the 2020 US presidential election.6 It resulted in several deaths and injury to hundreds of individuals, including 174 police personnel.7 Initial responses from Republican elites reflected the normal confusion associated with any breaking, disruptive event. However, one early theme, quickly dispelled but never fully eliminated, was the idea that the January 6 insurrection could be laid at the feet of “Antifa.”8 Ridiculous on its face, the attempt was not merely to deflect responsibility from the real authors but it was also an attempt to build on an elite construct, Antifa as a modern, coordinated, national, if not global, formation aimed at destroying US society. However, as Randy Blazak of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime notes, “They [the Right] used antifa as sort of a kind of simplification of the forces they face on the left. And it serves them well because it rallies people.”

Building on the political construction of the “antifa” however poorly grounded it may be in the real world, is necessary for the “both sideism” trope of centrist politics, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Indeed, witness the ultimate expression of this trope, the 2024 blockbuster movie, “Civil War”. It allows director Alex Garland to describe himself as “apolitical.”9 The movie turns on an ingenious device of ambivalence – “the Antifa massacre.” Was it a massacre of or by antifa? Equivalence through ambivalence.

The device and its uncertainty however are belied by a profound asymmetry: the modern source of violence is not one in which right and left are equally implicated. By and large, political violence finds its roots in right wing activity driven both by the US’s foundation myths as well as encouragement from above. Consider, for example, the paradigmatic case of the 2020 unrest in Portland, Oregon. Mainstream media suggested that the state was essentially riven between warring MAGA and antifa factions. This suggestion is no mere historical coincidence. It was one promoted by then President Trump. After raging against an imagined antifa for years, in June 2020, in response to the George Floyd mobilizations, Trump deployed federal police “to protect” national monuments and sites against antifa and “anarchists and assorted radicals” Upending conservative lore about “states’ rights,” this deployment took place regardless of the objections from states’ governors and cities’ mayors.

Democratic Party-leaning Oregon, however, produced the single national instance of someone who characterized himself as “antifa” and who acknowledged that he killed a member of the Patriotic Prayer, a far-right, pro-Trump faction. In this case, however, circumstances around both the initial killing of the far-rightist and the subsequent quasi-execution of the antifa follower are shrouded in uncertainties: was the initial act one of self-defense? Was the antifa follower merely executed, contrary to federal claims? Whatever the answers to these questions, what is certain is that the primary source of political violence involving people (as opposed to property) comes from the right. The Reuters study of recent political violence that they studied and that resulted in 39 deaths, the perpetrators came overwhelmingly from the right. Where they implicate the left in recent violence, it is in regard to destruction of property – usually ranging from graffiti to window breaking, i.e. acts of vandalism.

Right-wing violence is aimed at people; the altogether more minor actions on the left point to rule breaking deliberately not directed at people. According to Michael Loadenthal, who has studied more than 21,000 violent incidents from ecological activism between 1973 and 2010, 99.9 percent caused “zero injury.” Where four fatalities occurred, these involved individuals unconnected to the left.10 The much more recent Reuters study notes that of the 14 fatalities since the January 6 Insurrection (and August 2023), 13 perpetrators had clear right-wing affiliations and only one had left connections.11

No doubt there are many reasons for this asymmetry but what is plainly visible (and audible) is that right-wing anger and violence is consistently and carefully nurtured by right-wing elites using false narratives of victimhood. Victim-in-Chief, of course, is Donald Trump who routinely rails against left, “Antifa,” communist and, more rarely, “fascist,” persecution. More overtly, in the above noted Oregon tragedy, he exhorted federal officers “to get him” by which many rightly understood he meant to kill the antifa activist, someone who was known to be seeking a peaceful resolution.12 Violent rhetoric from Trump has only increased, reaching its current fever pitch in the context of his many criminal indictments and civil case loses. So, when Reuters complains about a new wave of violence, it should not engage in false equivalences and two side-ism. Political violence of the right exists because it is legitimated at the highest levels of the Republican elite.

One further problem with the Reuters study is that it declined to include police killings and other actions as evidence of political vio- lence. The ruthless suppression of student encampments by the Texas National Guard, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the New York Police Department, to name only a few high-profile recent cases escapes Reuters’ purview. While it is not in the scope of this essay to consider the obvious problems with their selective vision, it does point to the long-standing problem of official violence predating the American republic itself. In the earliest colonies, acting in the name of British crown, settlers imported total war-making strategies and tactics from Europe’s Eighty Years War.13 The extreme violence and attempts to annihilate “the enemy” shocked indigenous people whose own warmaking was altogether more restrained. This heritage, which elaborated itself over several centuries of policing aimed at enforcing an unjust racial and class order, may help explain the restricted lenses of centrist politics and the mainstream media. More pertinently, it also provides the rationale for current rightwing violence which sees itself as achieving political ends the way “our forefathers” did.

Given this inheritance and current neofascist rhetoric and organizing, how are progressives to respond? If our history is a guide, we must reject false binaries of electoral and movement politics and organize on all fronts – voting strategically in elections and building broad movements. If the right and some centrists have chosen to demonize “antifa,” this mystification must be challenged.

Deflection: As noted earlier, antifa and other real and imagined actors have been scapegoated and blamed for violence – this includes the astounding Trumpist claims about immigrant and about transgender communities.14 To be clear, vilification of immigrants and other communities is not confined to Trump, but includes state-level legislative attempts at excluding, for example, transgender and non-binary people from elected office, public restrooms, or even updating their drivers’ licenses.15 By casting these communities as responsible for “America’s decline” such legislation effectively legitimates violence against them and anyone who advocates for them.

If the tenor of this article is to associate recent political violence with the right and with an oppressive state, we must also be con- scious of the fact that a majority of US residents rejects violence. While this fact is reassuring, it will require an organized and united front drawn from this majority to thwart an oppressive and minoritarian regime of violence from coming to power. And the left has a rich history of coalition building against fascism, sometimes successful as in the global effort to defeat Hitler and Mussolini, sometimes less so as exemplified by the rise of those actors in the first place. That said, a turn to politics and organizing on the part of the left particularly as it organizes across a wide range of concerns that have majoritarian potential – from mitigating climate change to increasing working class power to rejecting warmaking in the Middle East and Ukraine – as well making connections with long standing resistance traditions in the United States, is the only promising avenue to fight violence. If there is hope, one of the places from which it comes is from the victims of violence themselves. Mark Talley, son of Geraldine C. Talley who was gunned down in Buffalo, has gone on to organize against violence, setting up an organization and campaign; he explains:

I am yet to tell you that no one deserves to experience this kind of tragedy, and that we must do something to end this cycle of violence. We can’t allow these weapons to be used in such a way, and we must take concrete steps to make sure this never happens again. America is suffering from a malady that manifests itself in racism, homophobia, xenophobia, an unhealthy fixation on guns, a refusal to acknowledge the most dangerous thing in the world is a young adult White male, and most significantly, socioeconomic inequality. Sadly America appears to be either too scared or too unwilling to seek medical attention for its affliction.16

And yet, Talley persists.

  1. Charles Derber et al., eds., How We Win: Energizing Strategies, Voters, and Agendas, Universalizing Resistance Series (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003544371.

  2. Ned Parker and Peter Eisler, “Political Violence in Polarized U.S. at Its Worst since 1970s,” Reuters, August 9, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special- report/usa-politics-violence/. At the time of writing, the latest available report on the consequences of the November 22 shooting, is that Austin Combs has not been deemed competent to stand trial. Lauren Pack, “New Evaluations for Local Man Accused of Killing Neighbor Because of Politics” [Butler County] Journal-News, March 18, 2024, https://www.journal-news.com/crime/new- evaluations-for-local-man-accused-of-killing-neighbor-because-of-politics/ EIHUUWRRQ5FJXHFGX5OLS2GWGU/.

  3. Nicholas Fandos, “Elise Stefanik Has Gained Widespread Attention in Antisemitism Hearings,” The New York Times, May 23, 2024,< sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/ 2024/05/23/us/elise-stefanik-republican-antisemitism-hearings.html.

  4. “June 12, 1956: Paul Robeson Testifies Before HUAC,” Zinn Education Project, accessed June 1, 2024, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/paul-robeson- testifies-before-huac/.

  5. Richard Pape’s allegedly “non-partisan” study of student attitudes suggests that both Jewish and Muslim students experience fear and a sense of persecution on US campuses. However, this approach is based on student and blurs the lines between perceptions and actual acts of violence. See Richard Pape, “Under- standing Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them” (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago, Chicago Project on Security and Threats, March 7, 2024), https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/CPOST_Understanding_ Campus_Fears_-_Report.pdf?mtime=1709832445.

  6.  While most accounts are highly contested, interested readers may explore the detailed “Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” GovInfo.gov, December 22, 2024, https:// www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-REPORT/html-submitted/index.html.A survey by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats found that: 5 percent of Amer- icans believed force was justified to restore Trump to the presidency. Today that number is the same, at 5 percent. In our new survey, we also asked those who neither agreed nor disagreed about their leaning, and found 12 percent of these or 4 million lean toward agreeing that force is justified to restore Trump. This suggests our previous surveys have underestimated the true level of force for Trump by effec- tively counting all the ambivalent as not agreeing. When we add these 4 million from the ambivalent to the explicit support for force to restore Trump, we now have a more accurate estimate of the size of the insurrectionist movement – as of April 2023, about 17 million. (see CPOST’S New “Political and Violent Dangers to Democracy Tracker” https://cpost.uchicago.edu/publications/april_2023_survey_report_ introducing_cposts_new_political_and_violent_dangers_to_democracy_tracker/)

  7. Even these numbers should be treated as complex, as they are by definitions and time frames. See Chris Cameron, “These Are the People Who Died in Connection With the Capitol Riot,” The New York Times, January 5, 2022, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html.

  8. Meg Anderson, “Antifa Didn’t Storm the Capitol. Just Ask the Rioters.,” NPR, March 2, 2021, sec. Investigations, https://www.npr.org/2021/03/02/972564176/antifa- didnt-storm-the-capitol-just-ask-the-rioters.

  9. Matt Zoller Seitz, “Civil War Movie Review and Film Summary,” RogerEbert.com, accessed June 1, 2024, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/civil-war-movie- review-2024.

  10. Loadenthal as cited in Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, Electronic Book, EPUB version (London & New York: Verso, 2021),  p. 89 

  11. Parker and Eisler (2023) “Political Violence.”

  12. For more context, see Jonathon Levinson, “Newly Un-Redacted Report Shows How Feds Politicized Response to 2020 Portland Protests,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, October 27, 2024, https://www.opb.org/article/2022/10/27/newly-un-redacted- report-shows-how-feds-politicized-response-to-2020-portland-protests/.

13. See John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607– 1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

14. Nathan J. Robinson, “Take Trump Seriously When He Vows To Build The Camps,” Current Affairs, November 13, 2023, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/ take-trump-seriously-when-he-vows-to-build-the-camps. Mariel E. Addis, “Terri- fied about What Trump Win Would Mean,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 8, 2024, https://www.gazettenet.com/Guest-columnist-Addis-53936258.

15. Orion Rummler, “More States Are Pushing to Stop Legally Recognizing Trans People in Public Life,” The 19th, January 24, 2024, https://19thnews.org/2024/ 01/transgender-state-bills-legal-recognition/. This is not a one way fight, one without resistance, see for examples: Quinn Yeargain, “Challenging Anti-Trans Legislation Under State Constitutions,” State Court Report, July 11, 2023, https:// statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/challenging-anti-trans- legislation-under-state-constitutions; “LGBTQ+ Advocacy & Government Affairs & Government Affairs – The Trevor Project,” accessed June 1, 2024, https://www. thetrevorproject.org/advocacy/.