In political violence, Americans see a future of order and control.
By Sam Adler-Bell, a frequent contributor to New York and co-host of the podcast “Know Your Enemy”
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. Photo: Warner Bros.
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. Photo: Warner Bros.
At a press conference on October 21, House Speaker Mike Johnson — appearing in his usual mien: bespectacled, boyishly coiffed, and vaguely offended, like a ninth-grader confronted with a pop quiz on picture day — confidently blamed the left for advancing an “assassination culture” that is endangering American public servants. “They call every Republican a fascist now,” he said. The comment itself was unremarkable. Since the September 10 m…
In political violence, Americans see a future of order and control.
By Sam Adler-Bell, a frequent contributor to New York and co-host of the podcast “Know Your Enemy”
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. Photo: Warner Bros.
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. Photo: Warner Bros.
At a press conference on October 21, House Speaker Mike Johnson — appearing in his usual mien: bespectacled, boyishly coiffed, and vaguely offended, like a ninth-grader confronted with a pop quiz on picture day — confidently blamed the left for advancing an “assassination culture” that is endangering American public servants. “They call every Republican a fascist now,” he said. The comment itself was unremarkable. Since the September 10 murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump and the GOP have labeled anti-fascist activists “domestic terrorists” and called on the FBI to investigate groups engaged in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
What was a bit surprising — galling, really — was the occasion for Johnson’s remark: A reporter had asked him about an upstate New York man charged with threatening the life of the Democratic House minority leader. “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC. I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” 34-year-old Christopher Moynihan allegedly texted an associate. “Even if I am hated he must be eliminated. I will kill him for the future.” It would not be Moynihan’s first hostile act toward an emblem of U.S. democracy. On January 6, 2021, he was one of the first rioters to break the police line and breach the Senate chamber; later, he was one of the more than 1,500 pardoned by Trump on his first day in office.
Pointing out MAGA hypocrisy is a chump’s game; likewise, looking for consistency, integrity, or the spark of human charity behind Speaker Johnson’s tortoiseshell frames. For sanity’s sake, I will state the plain facts: A man pardoned by the sitting president after engaging in a riot on his behalf was apprehended a second time, for allegedly threatening to kill a leading Democrat — and this, according to the Speaker of the House, is the fault of leftists. Here we have escaped the confines of syllogistic reason altogether; discerning the relationship of one event to another is merely a matter of whim and will.
But then a lot of fuzzy thinking and adventurous causality have characterized our new fixation on political violence. There is wide agreement that we are seeing something new — or at least something we haven’t seen since the 1960s, when assassinations were commonplace and propagandistic terror was a regular tactic in the arsenal of domestic radicals. The recent examples are well known: two assassination attempts against Trump, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO last December, the firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in April, the murder of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband in June, Kirk’s assassination, and an attack on an ICE facility in Dallas that killed two migrant detainees in late September.
In another era, we might expect the political promiscuousness of these targets to induce a détente between the factions (i.e., we won’t blame you guys if you don’t blame us). But that’s not how it’s worked out. Amid a syncopated cascade of assaults, partisans play a perverted game of hot potato: Whoever is holding the ball when the music stops is responsible. If the latest shooter is plausibly left wing, the right is faultless, and vice versa, until the next round begins. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but everybody plays. (And sometimes, of course, you cheat. In the Moynihan case, Johnson found himself holding the ball and threw it at his opponent’s chest.)
Despite the extreme hostility animating this game, Americans generally agree that politically motivated violence is on the rise — 85 percent in a recent Pew poll. This I find a bit strange. For one, by any reasonable measure, it remains incredibly rare. For another, our recent would-be assassins are far from the most legible ideologues. The politics of Kirk’s alleged shooter are ambiguous; messages on his bullet casings allude to online memes, gaming, and “furry” role-play. According to a transcript released by prosecutors, he complained, vaguely, about Kirk’s “hate.” Trump’s failed assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican who also donated $15 to ActBlue. In this way, the perpetrators are political normies; their outsider status is social. They are addicts, criminals, loners, and gamers. They tend to evince mental instability. Even Moynihan, who allegedly targeted Jeffries, was a drug-addicted drifter who seemed more politicized by participating in the Capitol riot — and perhaps by being pardoned — than he was inspired by any firm political conviction to attend in the first place. These men are a far cry from the white-nationalist militiamen or Marxist revolutionists who predominated previous eras of American political violence — closer to the profiles of school shooters than those of the Weather Underground.
In this light, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, in which Teyana Taylor, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Regina Hall play members of a fictional leftist terrorist organization, the French 75, is instructive and timely. Too timely, perhaps. Conservative critics complain it has romanticized political violence in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, while leftists, pilloried by pundits and politicians for their irreverent response to Kirk’s death, relish its favorable depiction of militancy. It is Anderson’s curious fortune to have conjured a fantasy of the American left — organized, disciplined, judiciously violent — that exists, today, only in the fevered imaginations of the MAGA faithful and the impotent daydreams of online radicals. Once again, thanks to cinema, Americans are dreaming the same dream.
But what dream is that? Perhaps what we are together wishing for — unconsciously and perversely — is that our recent paroxysms of public violence were more politically legible rather than less, ideologically articulate rather than mealymouthed, opaque, deranged, and deranging. In our America, unlike Anderson’s, the breakdown between violence and everyday life mostly occurs within individual psyches, fragile American-made minds, without need for revolutionary guidance. It was admittedly unmooring to watch the opening sequence of One Battle After Another, in which radicals invade an ICE detention center, just days after the attack, by gunfire, on the facility in Dallas. But the difference between fiction and reality is pitifully stark: In Anderson’s film, the French 75 free the detainees, imprison the guards, and escape in a hail of fireworks. In Dallas, the suspected shooter — who authorities say intended to hit ICE agents — acted alone, managed to shoot three detainees, killing two, and then shot himself. Like Kirk’s alleged killer, friends remember him as internet-obsessed and not particularly political. “He liked playing video games,” one has said. Of Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, the first detainee killed during the shooting, ICE said in a statement he “suffered a senseless and tragic fatal gunshot wound during a senseless sniper assault on the ICE Dallas Field Office.” Senseless. It’s an odd word to use — twice — about an event the administration says “lays bare the deadly consequences of Democrats’ unhinged crusade against our border enforcement.” Can violence be both senseless and entirely explicable?
And what about violence that does not count as political? The state remains unapologetically violent. At least 20 detainees have died in ICE custody this year, the most since 2005. More than 1,000 Americans have been killed by police. Overall, our citizens kill themselves and each other with guns at astronomical rates — an estimated average of 125 per day. White men most often commit suicide. Huge numbers of women are shot and killed by their intimate partners. And gun homicide remains the leading cause of death for young Black men. We treat these cases as the acceptable background noise of American life. They are not “political,” so they do not require us to examine our politics.
When it comes to violence, we are ambivalent about sense-making. On the one hand, we yearn for answers, for reasons, for satisfying culprits and mechanical explanations. But on the other, we are devoted to ignorance, worshipful and protective of our non-understanding, and entranced by the logic of sacrifice, in which certain especially tragic deaths (like those of children), in their senselessness, promise redemption: “a forfeiture that purifies,” as gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield has written. To explain, we fear, is to rationalize, and to rationalize is to justify. Or perhaps we have already rationalized a deathly social order and we don’t want to look at it closely. We do not know whether we want to know ourselves.
In 1966, Susan Sontag put her finger on a constitutive American contradiction: that we are simultaneously “an apocalyptic country and a valetudinarian” one. Americans are obsessed by visions of doom and catastrophic violence, and we are temperamentally timorous, oversensitive, health-conscious, and fearful of death to the point of neurosis and unreality. We are a nation of end-times preachers, political militants, and holy warriors who consult longevity influencers, count calories, and go to the gym every day; we can’t decide whether to make the country Great Again via millenarian nationalism or make it Healthy Again by regulating food dyes. “The average citizen may harbor the fantasies of John Wayne,” Sontag wrote, “but he as often has the temperament of Jane Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse.” In this respect, Donald Trump, a tetchy germophobe dazzled by visions of lethal order, is utterly average.
Under ideal circumstances, this tension — between, shall we say, enmity and enema — suits American interests just fine. Within our borders, fretful self-absorption prevails: safety, security, hypochondria, and hygiene, racial and otherwise. Our repressed barbarity provides the psychic energy for American “dynamism,” that enviable attribute, by which is meant voracious acquisitiveness and frantic, death-fleeing work. Meanwhile, we export our uninhibited fantasies abroad, where the American taste for earth-shattering violence is given free rein. These military adventures, in turn, guarantee (in principle) the security of the homeland, where well-showered Americans can go on buying things and worrying over the end of the world, blissfully unaware that the world ends — every single day — for people other than themselves.
It takes a great deal of effort, mental and martial, to keep these spheres separate. Despite our harried sublimation, Sontag writes, “naked violence keeps breaking through.” Naturally, this state of affairs raises the salience of the border, where hefty maneuvering is required to preserve psychic balance. The country’s best filmmakers have always understood this sleight of hand: how American brutality is transformed into salutary myths of moral cleanliness. In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the rugged John Wayne undertakes an act of extralegal violence that allows Jimmy Stewart — pure and meek — to survive and take credit for bringing peace to the frontier. The truth of this arrangement is then suppressed so that the legend can be printed in the paper as fact.
This is the essential American plot: Out of chaos, a new civilization is born, underwritten by an originary, ennobling crime. “Civilization,” in the American western, writes Garry Wills, “promises to replace death and the gun with law and life.” When the civilized order is imperiled, by external threat or internal decay, the frontier remains, in the American imagination, a potential theater for recuperative violence.
Later iterations of this myth would be less subtle and elegant than Ford’s. (Wayne’s 1968 effort, *The Green Berets, *which displaces the frontier to Vietnam’s 17th parallel, is a case in point.) Today, American film and television are lousy with special-forces units, police detectives, and secret agents who use illegal and inhumane means (often including torture) to restore order and protect the innocent. Sometimes these bad but necessary men, like Wayne in Liberty Valance, are consumed by guilt and drink — and, in a last feeble gesture of moral purgation, die alone in despair.
We Americans love these stories for their psychic parsimony: They redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess. They venerate and authorize the law while preserving a vital place for the exception. They elevate American innocence and barbarity — our chief vices — to foundational virtues.
I suspect our present fixation on assassination and political violence recapitulates this fantasy. Some do long for a lone vigilante martyr to right the wrongs of our civilization with one glorious act of violence. Of the recent contenders, only Luigi Mangione, who allegedly assassinated the UnitedHealthcare executive, has achieved anything approaching folk-hero status. But political esteem for Mangione has faded into camp, irony, and juvenilia. He is no John Wayne.
For the most part, something more subtle is going on. What seems to animate our discourse about political violence is not identification with the assailants but a sort of prefigurative identification with the forces of order, those capable of reasserting control. Political violence — everyone seems to agree — threatens the constitutional order; it is undeniable evidence of our unraveling. Its elimination, then, promises restoration, a new order born from the ashes of the old. For the right, this fantasy is straightforward. Donald Trump is the gunslinger who has come to slay the forces of chaos and break a few rules (habeas corpus, the First and Fourth Amendments) to establish an empire of rule-following.
For the liberals, MAGA represents the menacing bandit gang; Trump & Co., with their vulgarity and contempt for norms, have frayed the social fabric. Liberals await an avenging authority — a new kind of candidate, a sufficiently ballsy prosecutor, a judge or general — to come along and clean up the neighborhood. The authoritarian chaos of the past decade demands a renewal of the liberal order in a more muscular form. It isn’t clear in what guise this new sheriff will arrive, but the liberals are desperate to see him ride into town.
Our current stories of political violence index all these aspirations, allowing us to imagine that a new civilized order is in the offing, if only the right sort of force can be (temporarily) applied. The perennial American delusion is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness, our purity. And many people all over the world — surrogate bandits and Comanche — have suffered for it. As Sontag noted in her 1966 essay, it was once possible to “jeer, sometimes affectionately, at American barbarism and find American innocence somewhat endearing.” But that was before the American empire held the planet’s “historical future in its King Kong paws.” It is incredible that a country so idiotic and prone to neurotic excess has managed to keep the world in its meaty grasp for so long, fondling it like Lennie with his mouse. America has made the world pay for its priggish delusions of sanity. It will surely make the world pay for its nervous breakdown.
The Fantasy of Assassination Culture