Political violence is as American as apple pie

How could we have possibly known

There has never been a point in American history, or even pre-American history, where political violence - that is, violence consciously intended to effect a political end - has not been the preoccupation of the American people. America was in a large part founded via a general race-war, where every colonist understood they lived in a metaphorical and literal dark forest, which they were slowly beating into civilization while in incredible danger. Approximately their first political action on the continent was to build a fort and form a militia - that is, an organization for deploying violence on behalf of their community. The American Revolution was distinguished from Old World conflicts largely by the pretense that it was undertaken on behalf of “the People”, which justified, again, the violence they were about to enact against both representatives of the British government, and locals who refused to get with the program. In all cases these were basically farmers and merchants, not some local “sovereign” - it was well understood that if you pissed off or threatened a sufficient number of them, it was within their rights to band together as a polity and just flatly kill you.

I could go through two hundred and fifty years of American political history, from the Indian Wars, the institution of slavery and the political organizations set up to suppress slave rebellions, Bleeding Kansas, the Wide-Awakes, the Civil War, Reconstruction, suppression of German-American organizations, internment of Axis nationals, the (half-assed) suppression of communist organizations, the revolutionary and racial violence of the 60s and 70s, the wave of assassinations of politicians between the 60s and 80s, and so on. Most of those were done on a freelance basis, with some faction of the polity of the country engaging in coordinated political violence outside the formal direction of the state - although many of them were retroactively blessed with their approval.

So it is disingenuous in the extreme that, having labeled Trump as Hitler, Caesar, et al, and begging some rando to rid the body politic of this turbulent racist, Democrats are now clutching their pearls about the unacceptability of political violence. It was plenty acceptable to them in 2020, when the country was lit on fire, complete with attempted coup at the White House, in an event they still refer to as a “racial reckoning”. That word, “reckoning” - that is, settling accounts - again, using political violence to advance a political agenda.

The only distinction with Saturday’s events is that it did not, in this case, work. Trump evidently is capped out at a 20 Luck stat, immune to small arms, and cannot contract Covid. He is a machine for turning cheeseburgers into holes-in-one. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. I kind of believe him.

So when an assassin was allowed, yes allowed, on the only fucking building possible to send rifle fire from, an elevated, stable position, a mere 150 yards away, point-blank range, while locals pointed out “Hey cops, there’s a guy climbing up to the roof with a rifle”, and managed to light off eight rounds, killing one and critically wounding another two - a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and missed splattering his brains over the crowd in live 4K by about two millimeters. Instead of being killed on the spot, the man raised a fist to the crowd in possibly the most iconic presidential photo of all time, which happened to be perfectly framed by a past and future Pulitzer prize winning photographer, and escaped basically unharmed.

You couldn’t possibly write this as fiction without being a hack. This is, from the perspective of the establishment uniparty, when you raise the cross and the supersoaker full of holy water to the vampire and he grins and bares his teeth because we’re Subverting Tropes. It’s divine intervention that seems to indicate a level of concrete mandate-of-heaven usually only posited as some kind of Daoist metaphor. It should frankly send you to church.

Thus we get the spectacle of the Gay Communist Race War party sighing “thank God Hitler was only wounded! We’re all, uh, Americans here, the good kind that comes together for disgusting barbeques or whatever and not the kind that lives on Stolen Land and needs total extirpation.” These are completely transparent crocodile tears. If it had worked, as all parts were arranged to, they would be making mouth-noises about how sad they are that it came to this and they would have rather won the election but this just shows the inevitable consequences of Trump’s hate, so ironic when you think about it, do you get it? Btw, health issues, and let’s raise a glass to our first Canadian President, Kamala.

They are sad in the exact sense that a child is sad when he misses a pinata. “I’ll never get it! I feel dizzy and sick! Violence never solves anything!” In reality, he’s going to get a pep talk and another swing, for as long as it takes. If you are a pinata-American, so to speak, the continual punching bag of the uniparty, you need to understand that we are not “all coming together to denounce violence because the one thing we can agree on is etc.”, we are taking a brief breather for an optics check because Timmy got too enthusiastic and whacked another partygoer with a stick.

To his credit, Trump appears to understand this and is not at this time pulling a Romneyesque conciliatory concession. “Defiant in the face of evil” is a much better play. Because the only way that this stops is not by some nebulous and temporary “temperature lowering”, but by dismantling the concrete infrastructure that made it possible. Political violence is not going away. It never went away, and it will unfortunately be back. The only question is whether it will be legitimate violence, with a popular mandate and for the benefit of the American people, directed against those who consciously place themselves in opposition to the American polity, at a level as minimal as required to get the job done - or a never ending stream of thugs and terrorists attacking the avatars of the American people until they can start slaughtering the people themselves.