The other day I spoke to a nice, progressive friend who told me she watches the PBS news hour because it’s calmer than cable. I didn’t know how to respond.
I certainly understand the desire not to get worked up over nothing, but imagining that we can banish real and present threats with nothing more than a good mental attitude strikes me as dangerously wrong. As middle class white Americans, subject to very few external dangers, we have grown used to seeing the outside world as a projection of our inner minds, and imagining that by calming our psyches, we can settle the larger world. It isn’t and we can’t.
Crying wolf gets you disliked, and disbelieved, but what is the opposite of crying wolf? Because whatever that state of oblivious denial might be, a large proportion of American progressives are in it.
The gallows outside the Capitol.
Don’t believe me? Let’s talk about the gallows outside the US capital on January 6th. You might have looked at it as a bit of impromptu political theater from some unhinged right wingers. The people who share their views didn’t see it that way.
The gallows were a reference to “The Day of the Rope,” which is a right extremist idea from a radical right novel called “The Turner Diaries.” It’s so pervasive that Google docs predictive text offered me the word “Rope” unbidden when I was typing this.
If, like most liberals, you are unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a great reckoning that will happen after white nationalists overthrow the US government—like they tried to do on January 6th and will try to do again. They tried, and came very close to succeeding. So naturally they intend to try again at the first opportunity. If you saw a lifelong dream on the verge of fulfillment, would you abandon it? Neither will they.
After a successful coup, the day of the rope would see mass lynching of progressive judges, teachers and ‘race mixers: you know, people like us. They have a plan and it involves our suppression, imprisonment and execution. And they mean to carry it out, regardless of how much it upsets us to hear this.
But surely they wouldn’t murder us, would they? I can’t predict the future, but I can recall the past. And the past tells us that most of the things that can’t happen here, already have happened at one time or another. Think: Tulsa burning in 1922. Think well attended public lynchings with box lunches during and postcards afterwards.
But surely that was all in the past and we have moved beyond hat sort of thing. Let’s take a moment to think about what we have moved past.
Two months back I might have been tempted to think we have moved past the kind of war atrocities we just saw in Ukraine. But some powerful people decided we weren’t, so they happened.
And once people who don’t commit atrocities become people who do, it’s very hard to stop.
When groups murder civilians. they wall themselves off from all the people who don’t. This makes it harder to rejoin the normal world and easier to justify the last atrocity and the next.
And given that this same dynamic took place in Klan murders, race riots and Vietnam war atrocities, what makes it so improbable at the very moment when a large number of Americans have been propagandized into seeing liberals as evil enemies?
Murder requires means, motive and opportunity. Right wing Americans have the means in the form of extravagant personal arsenals, They have the motive as evidenced by their frequently expressed desire to see us jailed or dead.
They are only missing the opportunity. And if we don’t act now, they will surely have it.