More equal than others
George Orwell’s line in Animal Farm that all animals are equal, later on to receive the addendum that some are more equal than others is one of the most profound comments made within the world of a story on human politics, and while the novel specifically addresses the early hopes and eventual failures of the Russian Revolution, it also speaks to any political entity that forgets its obligation to be a commonwealth, rather than an opportunity for the empowerment of the few.
I say this while thinking about the attack on the Pelosi home that injured Paul Pelosi and was meant as essentially an act of political terrorism against the Speaker of the House. As much as I regard Nancy Pelosi as one of the Democratic Party’s architects of mediocrity, I find this assault to be both immoral and stupid—immoral because we still have a sufficiently functioning political and legal system to allow us to replace the oligarchs in Congress without resorting to violence and stupid because some schlub on a mission has a limited chance of accomplishing anything beyond making things worse.
But whenever someone who is politically or otherwise famous gets attacked, one reaction that I see—stated sometimes explicitly, but more often forming the undertone—is that these are the sorts of things that are not supposed to happen to our kind, our kind being the well off viewers of cable news who will write their elected representatives a tepidly worded e-mail message about the need to do something.
And what about the rest of us? What about the assembly line worker without a union who comes home wondering how to pay the rent? What about the college professor who sees all too many parallels in our current politics with Germany in the early 1930s? What about the nurse dealing with COVID patients who will not be able to pay for treatment? What about the college student facing endless debt as the cost of being allowed entry into the pleasant and highly paid jobs telling other people to labor, as Bertrand Russell put it?
There are two parts going on here, the personal and the systemic.
On the personal level, while it is true that violence against politicians is on the rise, it has a long way to go before reaching the endemic experience of millions of Americans, especially for those who do not live in neighborhoods patrolled by officers who see the residents as belonging there. For many in this country, the police are not here to help. If they are called, they are not going to make the situation better for the caller. And if they show up at all, they are half an hour or more away. These ordinary Americans certainly do not have the protection of the Secret Service or the U.S. Capitol Police.
This is a major reason that gun ownership is increasing among groups who are not white men—along, of course, with growing threats against such groups. That these are often the same groups who are the most burdened by gun control laws—laws that make guns themselves more expensive and that mandate licensing with expenses in time and money to acquire—is of little consequence to the people who write the laws, the people who are shocked whenever violence seeps into their private domains. Violence, in the latter’s view, is what is supposed to happen to other people—people who, according to the State of New York that is still defying the Supreme Court’s ruling, did not have sufficient cause to carry a handgun and who now lack a good moral character.
This is all personal, however, the level at which one individual interacts with another, and though it is individually significant, we have to look at the systemic causes of political violence if we want to find solutions that go beyond personal gun fights, as important as being equipped to survive those is for anyone who ends up in one.
The larger problem here is that of the degree to which politics in America today feels disconnected from ordinary lives. Yes, the Supreme Court’s decision to toss out federal protections for abortion has rightly been seen by many as a personal attack, but a lot of people are also going to have to fill up their gas tanks, pay for a doctor’s visit, or find a job in the pandemic’s interims between waves.
As long as politicians remain unresponsive to the needs of ordinary Americans, I expect to see violence against them continue to climb. They may dismiss this as being motivated by the racist and sexist fascism that Trump leads, and that is a part of what is going on, but there is also a large measure of desperation that deserves to be solved. Hiding behind the walls of a gated community while pushing further restrictions on the ability of the people outside to defend themselves will not do that.
And such hiding will not elicit sympathy when such politicians find themselves the target of violence.