Remember the days, not so long ago, when every time some issue vexed liberals, democracy advocates, or academics long enough, they’d complain that we should be having a “national conversation” about it? Well, thanks to social media, we’ve been having a non-stop national conversation about every disagreement for over a decade, and by now all those people who wanted more conversation should be embarrassed.
There were studies decades ago, if anyone cared to look, suggesting that getting people together in focus groups to discuss their disagreements calmly usually just led to them becoming more sharply divided in their opinions and more dogmatically committed to their own side, sometimes forming very hostile attitudes toward a rival faction in the focus group that they’d never even thought or cared about before.
People probably ought to just stop talking about politics, or at least stop seeking consensus. When no consensus arises, they get frustrated by their inability to persuade and may instead turn to violence, just as humiliatingly indecisive military conflicts may lead to multiple rounds of terrorism and reprisals.
The biggest danger, though—the worst kind of instability—occurs when there are no longer any clear boundaries between speech and violence, or between legal and non-legal violence, or between investigations and findings of guilt, or finally between political opposition and the assumption of a right to commit non-legal violence.
I hope liberals admit that when, say, someone dupes SWAT teams—eight times—into planning raids of conservative Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s home, he probably doesn’t see himself as behaving like a random violent criminal. He probably thinks he’s more like a member of an august parliament. Likely, MTG engaged in political speech he regarded as too right-wing, and he took it upon himself, on behalf of the left-wing portion of the population, to punish her accordingly.
Any SWAT raid risks killing innocents—possibly children during the holidays—but MTG had her say and now he would have his. It’s all just different modes of politics, at least in the mind of a sick enough individual.
But then, it’s no longer just the mentally sick who believe such things. The whole political populace thinks it’s good to punch the other guy before he spreads any more of his bad ideas. If he’s a “Nazi,” he deserves it, as liberals firmly established about seven years ago. If he’s a leftist, goes the juvenile and short-sighted response from the emerging populist right, you have to hit him before he concludes you’re too soft to use the same brutal tactics he does. If you’re tough enough, apparently, you don’t have to think about the downward spiral.
To her credit, for all her radicalism, MTG tends to respond to violence with calls for less of it, and even to calls for government action with calls for withdrawing support from government rather than for thinking up still more ways for it to be authoritarian. I don’t share her animosity toward immigration, but I like the fact she shows her disapproval by encouraging “tax revolts” in the states that excessively subsidize immigration, as with her call for California taxpayers to stop sending money to their state capitol while that state is using the money to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants.
She rightly denounced the current Republican Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson, for keeping the federal government’s bloated budget, Ukraine funding and all, in place through rubber-stamped “continuing resolutions” even though that change-avoiding practice is the ostensible reason the prior speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, was ousted. If her ire leads to more calls for national tax revolts—people withholding money from the federal government every time it funds something with which they disagree—that might logically lead to the federal government being disbanded altogether, and then it will truly be the U.S. that owes MTG.
Individuals could then move on to the saner business of deciding what to do with their own money without dragging 333 million other people into it. Trying to wrangle those third-of-a-billion people into seeing things your way on more than one or two minor points is foolhardy, after all. Best to let them go their own way when they disagree with you.
So, put down that gun you were thinking about using to coerce them. Put down that phone you were tempted to use to call in a SWAT team. And for maximum kindness, put aside that vote you were planning to cast for a politician who’d do all the violent dirty work on your behalf, taxing and regulating your neighbors through the constant threat of arrest while you sit around feeling smug for “improving” society. Crime and democratic government are so barbaric they make Twitter look civil. In time, we must figure out how to rise above all three forms of idiocy.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey