And while we are being prompted to panic over the prospect of war in Ukraine, we are also being prompted to panic over the prospect of war at home.
On Jan 22, The COVID States Project released the results of asking 23,000 people across the country whether it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" Note that the word "ever" was emphasized in the polling.
Nearly a quarter - 23% - of Americans say it's sometimes OK to use violence against the government - and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified "right now."
Now, this was an online poll, so it was nonprobability no error bar, no margin of error. However, there have been other, more scientific, polls in recent months that have found much the same answer.
A post-election University of Chicago poll found almost 1 in 10 Americans believed the use of force was justified to restore Tweetie-pie to the presidency. And this December, the Washington Post and University of Maryland together found that one in three Americans think violence against the government is sometimes justified.
In response to this latest poll, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expressed concern over the fact that the number of Americans who express support for the idea of violent political protests has doubled over the last decade.
Well, Listen Up, people: There are at least two good reasons to think such results are meaningless and the panic they generate is more dangerous than the results themselves.
One was raised by COVID States Project co-director David Lazer, who said the same thing I thought whenever one of these polls appeared. Quoting him: "We began with the American Revolution and so we are, in a sense, taught from grade school that it is at some points in history justifiable to engage in violent protest," he said.
In fact, I can't see how any good old-fashioned patriotic American can read the Declaration of Independence and still say it is never okay to use violence against the established government, the established order.
Indeed, shortly after Shays' Rebellion was quashed in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. ... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
The other question is even more fundamental: What constitutes violence? What constitutes "against the government?" What do those term mean in this context?
Consider the Plowshares Movement. These people are Christian pacifists who engage in direct action to promote the vision behind idea of beating swords into plowshares. One time, they boldly walked into a factory making nosecones for nuclear missiles, found where some were stored, took our hammers, and beat on them until they were to make unusable. Here's the question: Was this a violent demonstration? They used hammers; in fact something they were charged with was possession of lethal weapons: the hammers. And they damaged government property. So was this violent?
Suppose there was a nighttime march with some folks carrying tiki torches to light it. One gets dropped and a fire starts. Maybe a storefront gets damaged; maybe a car burns. Is the action violent? There was property destruction, but it was an accident.
Suppose there is a BLM protest and people are facing off with a line of cops. Someone in the crowd throws a plastic water bottle and hits a cop. Is this now a violent demonstration? A crime has been committed, assaulting a cop. Does that constitute violence against the government?
What does the term "the government" mean in this context? Ask the Plowshares people they'll say it's not about the government, it's about government policy. Ask a BLM protester if they're protesting the government, they likely would say they are protesting police violence, that it's about racism, about conditions.
The point isn't that there is any right answer to these and similar questions, it's that how you answer them will determine how you answer the question on the poll. Which means those percentages don't tell us anything; they provide no useful information.
In fact, Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, is working on a paper that tries to correct for the errors in measurement that exist when people are questioned about a vague concept like political violence, errors that he feels tend to overstate American support for - and thus the prospect of - such violence.
Bottom line is that while because of the changes in the percentages over the last decade that Rachel Kleinfeld cited, we can reasonably say that the overall approval of political violence however defined has increased, we honestly don't know how much the actual potential for it has, especially when we consider that for all our talk about looming civil war, there is far less political violence in the US today than there was in the 1970s.
From the late 60s to the late 70s, nearly a dozen radical underground groups such as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN set off hundreds of bombs.
The first bombing campaign ran between August and November 1969 and involved attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan.
Bombings by the Weather Underground began in early 1970 and by June, then-president Tricky Dick Nixon was saying “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.
As late as 1976, after a series of attacks in San Francisco, an FBI representative called the city “the Belfast of North America.”
My point here is not that we should be unconcerned, January 6 - which was an attack on the government, on the process of elections and so the structure of government - disproved that. It's rather that first, in terms of political violence we have been here before and more and second and more important, that is not the real threat we face. The real threat can be found in the words of James Madison, who in June 1778 said "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation."
The threat we face is not that of violent insurrection, but that of "silent" and indeed not-so-silent but overt "encroachment" on our right to vote, on the process of conducting elections, on the process of counting votes; threats to our right of public protest, to the free press; there is more threat to our future as a reasonably free political society in restrictions on mail-in voting than in a whole string of Nazi parades and Florida Gov. Ron DeSandTick is far more of a danger than that QAnon Shaman guy from the Capitol insurrection could hope to be.
No, of course this doesn't mean ignore the violence or tolerate the violence or excuse the violence. It means keep your cool, don't let the violence panic you, like the old song says "carry it on," and always remember the difference between the puppets and the puppet masters, between the useful idiots and the users.
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