The Rhetoric of Violence

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I’ve been thinking about the rally on January 6th—the one before violence, the part where there were speakers and listeners, not trespassers and looters. I believe it’s clear, now, that some portion of the crowd at the rally on January 6th had come with the intent to violently overthrow the duly-elected government of our country. And it’s likely that some portion of the crowd had come to put political pressure on the duly-elected government of our country. I have no idea what the proportion was, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.

And the people who spoke, too: some of them presumably were aware that there were plans in place to assassinate the Vice-President and the Speaker, and some of them presumably were not. Some of them might have been briefed on security concerns, but evidently the people who decide what to brief people on were not really concerned, so people might not have been briefed at all, or might have been briefed in a way that downplayed the actual risk. Some people who spoke may have expected the crowd to chant and then disperse; some people presumably knew that was unlikely.

And the thing is… our political rhetoric is full of things that sound, in the context of a plan to murder legislators, like they are inciting violence. People talk loosely about fighting and resistance and even revolution. Tim Kaine, in his 2016 VP acceptance speech referred to “battles I've been fighting my whole life” and lauded “tough people” and hoped to “battle back against the dark forces of division.” He described Hillary Clinton as “battle-tested, rock-solid, up for anything, never backing down.” He used the word fight seven times, talking about himself, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He used the word battle five times, including saying that Hillary Clinton “battled Congressional Republicans”. I don’t mean to criticize Senator Kaine, who I don’t think has been particularly pugnacious; I chose his speech to typify mainstream political rhetoric because I think he’s pretty clearly plumb spang in the mainstream.

So when I see, f’r’ex, the Daily Show clip of Heroes of the Insurrection, it’s very difficult for me to assess whether the particular phrases in question are incitements to the violence that was being planned or not. If the speakers were encouraging the conspirators (meaning, here, those people who were planning the violent assault on the Capitol) to “take back our rights” and “take a stand” and “keep fighting”, that’s very different, it seems to me, than encouraging the ralliers (meaning those people who were planning to attend a rally and pressure their representatives politically). Which speakers were knowingly speaking to which audiences is not obvious to me, and may never be certain. Some of the language was absolutely intemperate anyway, of course, but some of it was in keeping with the mainstream of our political rhetoric, if only the audience was in that context, too.

Is the rhetoric of violence, in the context of ordinary politics, dangerous? I don’t think so. But is it ideal? Is there a better way?

I am writing this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a day when we as a nation talk about, and perhaps attempt to live up to, the principles of the man. We can argue about what precisely those principles were—we probably should argue about that, because it’s important. But one of them, clearly, was the principle of non-violence. The rejection of violence as a tool for good, or a weapon against evil. And it occurs to me that he largely rejects the rhetoric of violence, too—I’m sure I can find lots of exceptions, but I’ve read a lot of sermons where he manages to avoid talking about fights and battles in talking about the movement. When he says that they will overcome, he often says explicitly that the goal is not to vanquish their oppressors but to love them and live in community with them. That the great struggle is not the struggle against others but the struggle for righteousness.

I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll get rid of our taste for the rhetoric of violence. I don’t even notice it, most of the time, even when I’m using it myself. I am hoping, though, that I can commit myself to noticing it, and that perhaps I can even persuade other people to notice it, and to then think about alternatives. Things do change, you know. And it’s certainly not the most unlikely thing that Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

5 thoughts on “The Rhetoric of Violence

  1. Vardibidian Post author

    I wasn’t able to get this essay into coherent shape, but I’ve more or less decided, for now, to attempt to post these things as they come to me, rather than polishing them. I’m hoping y’all would just as soon have more frequent posts even if they aren’t very coherent. At least I don’t tweet.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply
  2. Chris Cobb

    You raise crucial matters about the function and power of rhetoric in this post. Thank you!

    These examinations of violent rhetoric might be pursued to further nuance by comparing, say, Tim Kaine’s rhetoric more closely to that of Trump and his cronies/toadies. Without being able to cite cases in a blog comment, I find in my memory that Trump’s use of violent rhetoric has often been excused by his spokespersons as jokes that shouldn’t be taken seriously. The insurrectionary actions of Jan. 6, 2021, along with the violence and threatened violence in several states, clearly demonstrate that his words should have been taken seriously because they were being taken seriously by the far right.

    To what extent is there a substantive difference between Trump’s use of violent rhetoric and Tim Kaine’s use of it? I would guess that an observable difference is how the rhetorical violence is directed. Trump often suggests human targets for violence; Kaine’s speech doesn’t. Although this difference matters, a key implication of your post is that when metaphorical uses of violence are an ordinary part of political rhetoric, the general public standards of discourse are desensitized to violence in a fashion that enables Trump and his ilk to use more violently coded rhetoric freely. Your suggestion that King understood this, and that his rhetoric was deliberately sensitive and transformational in this regard, reinforces this implication.

    I’ll add another idea in favor of seeking to abandon easy and standardized metaphors for violence. It is that these metaphors lead to an insufficient imagining of solutions to actual problems. The “fight” metaphor suggests that trouble ends when the opponent or enemy is vanquished, a condition in the enemy is either killed or accepts subordination as better than being further beaten or killed. That’s a simple ending that doesn’t lead to a healthy society, and it is deeply misleading with respect to an environmental problem like a pandemic or the climate crisis. Imagining the ending in an oversimplified, unhealthy way does not conduce to efficacious planning for dealing with the problem in the first place.

    I suspect that battle rhetoric also weakens the practice of democracy. Although I greatly support democracy as the only practical model so far developed for large scale participatory self-governance, I have been troubled by the way democracy threatens to reduce to warfare by other means. The winning side takes power, and the losing side accepts subordination, which is better under democracy, where everyone rises up from the field of battle to fight again in the next election, than it would be if the battles were being fought with firearms rather than with ballots. Still, democracy as “the tyranny of the majority” is highly imperfect, and if we placed more value on the ongoing practice of democratic and participatory governance, our elections could become less fraught and our governance between elections could become more effective in serving the needs of communities.

    Perhaps the farthest stretch of the implications of your post is that we might say that the United States is a violent society in a similar way to which it is a racist society (with the racism and the violence being mutually reinforcing), which includes having violence, like racism, coded into the structure of our rhetoric and institutions. Transformational change involves raising awareness of encoded elements of violence that people generally take for granted and don’t notice or think about as violent, so that elements of the system that perpetuate the deep dysfunctions of racism and other violence can be changed by reaching new understandings and agreements about how to treat one another.

    A change to more peaceable rhetoric of change undergirding approaches to problem-solving and self-governance more appropriate to civilized people living sustainably from the Earth would be worth pursuing.

    And yes, write more!

    Reply
    1. Vardibidian Post author

      I think your observation about violence, like racism, being coded into the structure of our rhetoric and institutions is a keen one. And I think, like with race-coded language, any attempt to utterly root it out will involve some silly-seeming semantical wiggling, and will draw a lot of backlash—but might also result in some thoughtfulness and care, and potentially, some change for the better.

      Thanks,
      -V.

      Reply
      1. Chris Cobb

        It looks like Trump’s lawyers tried to use the common recourse to the rhetoric of violence in our politics to muddy the waters around Trump’s use of such rhetoric to incite actual violence by presenting as many clips as they could find showing Democratic senators using the word “fight.” Their argument was terrible, of course–meaning is contextual–but nevertheless is does suggest that a shift away from figurative uses of violence to describe political action might leave attempts to conceal calls for actual violence behind a fig(uration) leaf more exposed for what they really are.

        Reply
        1. Vardibidian Post author

          Yes, the use of ‘fight’ language leaves my Party open to the charge of hypocrisy, despite the very different contexts. And to the extent that the Other Party seemingly wants to exploit low levels of political violence, it makes it an even better idea for my Party to be careful about such language even in contexts that make it very clear that it is being used metaphorically.

          Thanks,
          -V.

          Reply

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