A point by philosopher Hannah Arendt makes it plain that de-escalation should be our watchword at present
Since yesterday’s very public murder of a major American conservative activist, still under investigation as of this writing, there has been a torrent of reactions from around the US. Many people are just shocked and saddened, whatever their politics—which is completely understandable.
But strong partisans of the left and the right were extremely fast to start mudslinging within moments of the fatal gunshot. Left-wingers gloating from a position of relative political weakness. Right-wingers fuming from a position of significant political strength.
People are (fortunately) still free to say what they’re going to say on the social media and beyond, but as someone on the political left I think it’s always important to recognize that the balance of forces does not currently favor our camp.
So I’m writing this to encourage fellow left-wingers to dial back your schadenfreude a couple of notches in your day-to-day public pronouncements. Because we don’t have much political power in this country.
But the right-wing has quite a lot of political power. And many of their leaders are not exactly big fans of democracy. And a funny thing happens when people that don’t believe in democracy get power … they use that power to shape reality to suit their beliefs, however far-fetched.
Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt put this idea best in her seminal work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” back in 1951: “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. […] In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.”
Meaning when President Donald Trump starts saying the “radical left” is effectively to blame for yesterday’s violence, leftists should sit up and take notice. He and his allies have a lot of power. And they tell a lot of lies. As with other things they are doing in the US—demonizing all undocumented immigrants as criminals and giving vast funding to ICE to hunt them down, perhaps foremost among them—they have growing power to change the world to suit those lies. While their partisans are chomping at the bit to help them.
It seems best to me, then, for the American left to do everything we can to de-escalate this and similar situations as they occur and focus on trying to get more political power in the coming years at the local, state, and federal levels. Or more to the point, make sure it remains possible for us to get political power using the normal tools of democracy: free speech and (more or less) free elections.
What does that mean on a practical level? Left-wingers should remember that scoring points in the heat of the moment on the Internet is definitely not worth it if the result is that the people with their hands on the levers of power start telling us to FAFO (“fuck around and find out”).
Because I don’t think we want to “find out” how far the American right is capable of going to make their flights of fancy a reality.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
