The last sentence shouldn't have a question mark.
Sure, but should I say it in response to Paul Pelosi?
Oh. I'll look at my Chicago Manual and get back to you.
Well no, then I should have used a period. Damnit.
Attacking elderly people with hammers or fireplace pokers is morally wrong. Posting Internet tough guy bullshit making fun of an elderly person who, or whose spouse, was attacked with a hammer is stupid asshole depravity that in a decent society would get more than a few Internet tough guys invited to have their seconds called upon.
There don't actually seem to be very many political assassinations in the US these days. I'm struck by how few entries there are on this list -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_politicians
- really only two incidents in the last ten years, and you could make a case for neither of them being, strictly speaking, political assassinations at all. (One was a guy with a grudge over a burglary conviction, the other was a white supremacist who wanted to kill black people in church and one of them happened to be a state senator.) There have been attempts, of course, like January 6, but all unsuccessful.
Much more dangerous being an MP these days.
I didn't know about 6 but it isn't surprising...
I mean there's twice as many MPs as congresspeople, and it's a bit of a miracle that Giffords lived. So I don't think being an MP is meaningfully more dangerous.
I agree that there's surprisingly few assassination attempts, but the scary thing is that can change relatively quickly. There was an epidemic of political assassinations back around the 70s (plus a few years on either side), and there's usually a big copycat effect.
A PA state House candidate was attacked outside his own home yesterday. Fayette County, not very far away.
7 is surprising given the availability of guns and the politicization of gun culture. I don't have a feel for how many of them enjoy Secret Service protection. In the UK hardly any politicians have any specific security protection at all outside Parliament itself.
Interestingly we've had exactly as many in the same timeframe, both with explicitly and undeniably political goals (one extreme-right and one Islamist, one Labour and one Conservative target, one shooting and one stabbing).
I mean there's twice as many MPs as congresspeople, and it's a bit of a miracle that Giffords lived. So I don't think being an MP is meaningfully more dangerous.
There are 535 congresspeople (including senators) and 650 MPs. And the US list I cited includes state senators, attorneys-general, judges, mayors and all sorts of other elected officials - total must be in the thousands at least.
A judge died in the Giffords shooting, so the list is certainly not very complete.
Senators are different, they don't do the same kind of constituency meetings. (Though ultimately I guess this is the point. MPs are much more prominent than state representatives, but have lots of in-person meeting with random constituents. You have to pay to get that kind of facetime with US politicians outside of specific campaign events that have security.)
Non-incumbent candidates are different.
13: he's on the list. Judge John Roll, 2011.
Oh, more than 10 years ago. Wow time is weird.
7 was impressive to me too, even noting the caveats. I've taken for granted that America is a violent country for a long time, although maybe I should look for a more up-to-date version of that. And that our political system has been more broken for the past ~12 years than it was in the previous ~40. And yet, actual assassinations are rare, and rarer still for assassinations by domestic terrorists. Why? Are some of those assumptions wrong? (Maybe. "More broken" in particular is dubious and doing a lot of work.) Have the fascists or extremists in general decided that assassination is counterproductive? Are good guys with a gun actually pretty good about stopping bad guys with a gun if it's specifically in defense of rich and powerful people?
Violence goes downhill, socially and economically, in America. The people getting killed aren't the ones in office.
18 last: 8 years of Obama surviving as president convinced me that secret service protection now works. I did not expect that at all, as grim as that sounds. But not even a close call.
19 has it right.
Until very recently, there's been a gentlemen's agreement amongst the ruling class not to use violence against each other. Political division was confined to their day jobs, and in the evening they went to the same cocktail parties and intermarried. It was like that old Warner Bros. cartoon with the wolf and the sheep dog clocking in and fighting and then clocking out.
This level of ruling class solidarity was unusual, even among industrialized nations. Now it is breaking down. It's really a reversed *What's the Matter With Kansas*: the question isn't how Republicans got white working class folks to vote against their interests, but how Republicans got white ruling class folks to attack other white ruling class folks.
20: I was thinking of making the point that US politics is so focused on the president (with occasional exceptions, Pelosi being a major one) which might soak up a bunch of the crazed assassin energy into the one place where we can actually stop them.
The outcome of the Congressional baseball shooting (2017) suggests part of it might be improvements to trauma care, especially the level given to high-status people. (Scalise was in critical condition for three days, and stayed an inpatient for 43.)
18 is assuming that the US has unusually few political assassinations for a country of its size and overall violence, but maybe that isn't the case. The UK doesn't have many either (contra my 7, I think we're probably not statistically significantly more dangerous for elected officials than the US) nor I think does France or Germany.
Brazil and Mexico have a terrifying number and this article https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2021/07/13/why-are-political-assassinations-the-norm-in-brazil/ suggests that it's maybe because political office in those countries allows you to corruptly extract rents, and those rents are big enough to be worth killing for.
That leaves the US with two classes of political assassin; nutters, and terrorists (people who want to extract policy concessions through the threat of violence). And terrorists have a much easier time killing ordinary people than politicians, and, in a democracy, that might seem like a good way to exert pressure for concessions. The IRA killed a lot more Irish bricklayers and schoolkids than it did MPs, because they're easier to reach, and killing them is better as a demonstration of local power to allow you to extract protection money.
Until very recently, there's been a gentlemen's agreement amongst the ruling class not to use violence against each other.
Hello? I'm looking for a copy of "A List Of Duels Among American Politicians, 1776-1890". Yes, Volume III. Yes, I've got a forklift outside.
That's a good way to put it. We have more terrorists than nutters. Not that our terrorists are particularly sane.
25: I think it was broadly true from post WWII until recently.
Terrorists in non-democracies do, I think, tend to focus their efforts on politicians - killing Tsars and Archdukes and so on - which would back up 24.2.
Russian terrorists killed plenty of Jews. Until they moved here for their great-grandchildren to get killed by Trump-inspired terrorists at the Tree of Life.
29: the pogroms were sort of state-sponsored, weren't they, though? Or at least state-approved? Rather than non-state actors trying to alter Russian policy? Not my period.
Some of them were, but I don't think all.
25, 27.
Yeah, I was just focused on the post WWII period. The Civil War era, among other things, is a different matter.
25, 27.
Yeah, I was just focused on the post WWII period. The Civil War era, among other things, is a different matter.
8 years of Obama surviving as president convinced me that secret service protection now works. I did not expect that at all, as grim as that sounds.
100% co-sign.
I guess consistent with the idea that violence flows downhill:
Not included in the list of political assassinations are dead BLM leaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Seals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest for Deandre
The dough-faced kid with a military weapon who shot strangers in Kenosha, those weren't assassinations?
Also, pervasive threats that cause political change but not death are now a fact of US life-- Alex Jones' trial has a bunch of detail there. Blasey-Ford can't lead a normal life. stuff like this:
https://kslnewsradio.com/1953616/black-lives-matter-utah-chapter-leader-leaves-state-due-to-death-threats/
Or threats causing school board members to quit, I think there are 5 of these this year?
All of this before Trump would have made sense as American political news maybe in Mexico. Today, talking about it as a new normal is a sharply political stance, unacceptable on television.
Counting headline murder is a trailing indicator.
31,32 Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry describes the social setting, also Hasek's Bugulma stories.
A candidate recently dropped out of a California Assembly election on the Peninsula after advancing from primary to the general election due to all the personal attacks and threats - and that was a Dem-Dem race.
One noteworthy pattern, though I'm not sure what the make of it, is that the last two waves of political assassination in the US (ca. 1900 and ca. 1970) came during periods of relatively low political polarization overall. Sharp divisions on certain issues, of course, some of which were explicitly connected to the assassinations. But not times of hostile opposing camps like today.
Previous waves of political violence mostly took the form of mass riots or stochastic terrorism rather than targeted assassinations. Again, not sure what to make of it.
If we're counting serious attempts, Gretchen Whitmer's kidnapping should be in the mix somewhere.
42: I thought the kidnapping was actually proposed by the undercover FBI agent? That changes the picture for me.
42: I thought the kidnapping was actually proposed by the undercover FBI agent? That changes the picture for me.
They were already members of a right wing militia.
From what I can tell, this wasn't one of those stings where basically all of the action was driven by the undercover FBI. The militia guys were meeting and talking violent overthrow before any FBI agents were involved, and the main informant joined with no intent to undermine or infiltrate--he was a military vet who wanted to play with guns, then called a cop buddy when the group talked about killing cops. And they were absolutely talking about violence against Whitmer before any FBI were in the room.
It looks very much to me like the "we was framed" narrative is driven by rightwing media--if you look up "whitmer kidnapping FBI", the entire front page is rightwing publications.
Like, the first mention of direct, personal violence against Whitmer (citizen's arrest) was March 30, with various followups and increasing effort. The FBI didn't infiltrate the group until mid June.
I am sensitive to the entrapment issue, because know of cases where the FBI totally engaged in entrapment for left-wing groups. In one local case, the FBI identified fringe members of existing groups who were young and had poor judgement, pulled them into a separate cell of the FBI's own making and then got them to agree to plan a violent act. I'm not saying they should have agreed to it. Smarter, more experienced leftists wouldn't have been snared in that trap, but it was entrapment.
Admirably, you're sensitive to FBI entrapment and are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they deploy it symmetrically across the political spectrum. Which I'm less inclined to believe.
Yeah, I don't buy it as entrapment. But apparently a jury did.
Yeah, I was just focused on the post WWII period.
Ah, OK. So in 21 you're saying that, unusually for an industrialised nation, the US ruling class from 1945 until fairly recently had a strong sense of solidarity that stopped them using violence against each other.
Thus setting them apart from other industrialised nations which lack this sense of solidarity, and whose ruling class members therefore use violence against each other fairly often.
Are you sure about that?
37: the BLM guys may well be political assassinations but the initial discussion was about political assassinations of elected officials.
I think what worries me most is the dispersal of violence because of the internet - not just assassinations, but if you're paying attention to the situation in Ukraine, for instance, internationals on both sides are, eg, sponsoring drones and raising money for weapons. I think it's probably just a matter of time until the technology is such that, eg, I could pilot a drone to drop bombs on the Russians. It is extremely easy to participate financially and socially in overt violence - video and social media intensify this so that it's different from buying war bonds or getting a paper newsletter or watching TV. Meaning that civilians are getting socialized into seeing violence as everywhere, normal, something that civilians participate in either directly or through direct financial support.
Combine this with the extremely visible and obvious violence and corruption of the police force and the collapse of any pretense at judicial impartiality and the logical conclusion for a lot of people is that they'd better become violence-capable themselves now before things get worse, and that in fact this is normal and everybody's doing it.
A knock-on effect is that political self-defense intensifies - it's not like you can blame people for planning how to fight the Proud Boys or get on the ground to physically defend abortion clinics and queer spaces. That's not a fun, ideal course of action but the alternative is worse once there's enough violence in civilian life.
If anything, I expect more assassinations of politicians because I think the violence will boil upward.
~~~
As an anarchist, of course, I don't view violence as illegitimate but it's one of those "don't start it unless you think you can win" things because you can't draw back your hand. But then we - the left - didn't, uh, start the fire on this one.
It is really depressing to me to see how stupid and selfish so many people are (almost all white, virtually all men). They aren't going to like where this is headed once it really gets going and it's going to foreclose a lot of stuff for them and their families, but it makes them feel like big men to wave guns around and send the death threats, and they are just too dumb to weigh the alternatives.
When I was a kid, I thought I was smarter than my peers. I spent my late teens and early twenties training myself out of thinking this. It's been really grim to realize that while I'm certainly not nearly as smart as I thought I was when I was a kid, there actually are a ton of stupid, stupid people out there.
On another note, over the weekend I met a trans person who has been targeted by right-wing creep and violence facilitator A**y N*o. It was weird because while recent activist stuff has definitely shown me the internet made flesh - ie, I see stickers and posters and attend actions created by people from twitter - I had not hitherto encountered a lot of the far right internet. It did not make me too happy.
52
I mean I could compile a list of all the countries that have had violent regime changes during that period, sort them into industrialized and non-industrialized and then try to categorize them based on whether the violence was driven by conflicts between elite groups or whether it was a genuinely bottom up revolution.
But I don't actually care that much about this point. Should I? Do you?
OT: I get so many telephone polls that I'm afraid to read the news for fear it's just telling me that I said I was going to vote for Fetterman.
Are they still running attacks on Fetterman for being dependent on his parents financially into adulthood, or have they pivoted entirely to mocking him for having a stroke? (God, what an absurd election this is.)
I have no idea. I haven't turned on the TV since last year and fortunately there's not many radio ads.
I wonder if only nutballs are killing/trying to kill US public officials because of how clear it is that assassination just isn't going to work at all. What's killing a senator even going to do? Derail legislation? It's not going to advance anyone's cause.
If we had a decent media in the country, Republican politicians would be forced to stop with the jokes and issue earnest condemnations. Too bad about that.
I'm not sure that's the media's fault. I think the candidates know the votes they are chasing.
There's a movie from the 50s where Frank Sinatra plays a would be presidential assassin and he goes on a mini-speech about how the people who hired him are a bunch of suckers because he's going to get paid and the US is going to get a new president and there won't be any significant political change.
60 There's a slice of the red coalition that's in denial about that. And the few genuinely undecideds. It's not enough to swing a seat like the Eastern Montana district, but there are a few seats around the country where a few percent changes the result.
55: I don't think the ruling class in most postwar industrial nations have habitually used violence against each other, no.
I wonder if only nutballs are killing/trying to kill US public officials because of how clear it is that assassination just isn't going to work at all. What's killing a senator even going to do? Derail legislation? It's not going to advance anyone's cause.
This sounds plausible - because there are so many veto points and stages, to get almost anything done in the US political system means that you have to have assembled a big coalition of powerful supporters. So bumping off just one of those probably won't make much difference because there's lots more, plus the one you killed will probably be replaced by someone similar. It's not like "we want war with France but the Tsar wants peace with France, so let's kill him because the Tsarevich will take over and he wants war too."
An exception would be for people with motives related to areas of presidential discretion. Bobby Kennedy would have sent military aircraft to Israel, and it was plausible that no other candidate would have been quite as pro-Israel, so killing Kennedy might actually have changed US policy towards Israel.
Other exceptions: intimidation; if you kill one coalition member and publicise it, it might conceivably detach other coalition members. Publicity; it'll certainly get your cause into the media and might inspire copycats.