1. Republicans almost caught the natural consequences of their own policies last week. We don’t have to sigh in relief along with them. We can absolutely, without encouraging such selfishly stupid acts, mourn the narrow loss of an immediate future in which christofascism, shorn of its sole animating personality, receded.
2. Spare me the liberal condemnation of violence in all its forms. Must the slave willingly die under the lash? Must the prisoner accept without question the gas chamber? Must the child starve silently? Die quietly and without protest. Must we mistake resistance for oppression? When feasible alternatives have been exhausted, self defense and the defense of others is no vice.
3. Yes, we should strive for nonviolence—but not naïveté. Excising political violence from American society must mean more than eschewing assassination. Political violence founded this nation, not just at Yorktown and Gettysburg, but also at Mount Hope, on the Trail of Tears, and Wounded Knee (don’t even get me started on our overseas empire). Political violence constitutes this nation even today. Set aside police violence and the disparities in life expectancy, wealth, health, and maternal mortality that flow directly from racial chattel slavery through Jim Crow to the present. Look to any major intersection, underpass, or park. Homelessness is no quirk in our political economy, but a reminder of the slow death from hunger, thirst, extreme temperatures, or disease that await any who fail to economically justify their existence within our borders.
4. Make no mistake, from the militia movement, to glorified police violence, ritualized gun proliferation, and constant threats of civil war if they don’t get their way, the Right openly embraced political violence long ago. Of course, I neither need nor want Democrats to match Republican violence tit for tat. I don’t want some lone idiot to shoot Donald Trump; I don’t need some lone idiot to shoot Donald Trump. I need Joe Biden to wield his lawful monopoly of force to decisively quash the Right’s embrace of overt (read bourgeois cognizable) political violence before it escalates further. The state’s monopoly on the lawful use of force imposes upon it a concurrent duty to maintain that monopoly by preventing unlawful violence. Biden’s milquetoast reaction to the botched January 6 coup taught Republicans the opposite lesson: try again.
Grow up and play the ballgame you find yourself in—not the one you wished for.