A heavily armed California man was caught trying to storm the White House correspondents’ dinner Saturday with the apparent intent to kill the president.
It didn’t take long for Washington to start arguing. Democrats denounce violent rhetoric from the right, but the alleged assailant seemed to be inspired by his own rhetoric. President Trump, after initially offering some unifying remarks about defending free speech, soon started accusing the press of encouraging violence against him. Critics pounced on the hypocrisy.
The argument about hypocrisy isn’t about mere inconsistency. The point of the accusation is to say that condemnations of violence are insincere. “Your team says it’s against violence” or “your side says my side encourages violence” but just look at what your language inspired!
The hypocrisy is bipartisan.
Indeed, for two decades now, it seems that whenever political violence erupts, there’s a moment where partisans wait to learn the motives of the perpetrator so they can start blaming the other side for inciting it. Sometimes they don’t even wait. Jared Loughner, the man who shot former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others, was instantaneously labeled an agent of the tea parties and Sarah Palin. The truth is he was such a paranoid schizophrenic, a court found him incompetent to stand trial.
I don’t have the space to run through the dozens of examples — the congressional baseball shooting, the Charleston AME church slaughter, the El Paso Walmart massacre, the recent murder of Minnesota lawmakers, the Jan. 6 riot or the failed attack Saturday night. But in the wake of these bloody crimes, partisans of left and the right will scour the killer’s social media or read their “manifestos” and place the blame on the rhetoric of the team closest to the assailant’s ideology.
Now, my point isn’t to say that blaming the rhetoric of nonviolent people for the crimes of violent people is wrong. It is wrong, of course, particularly as a matter of law. If I quote Shakespeare and write, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” I am not responsible for someone who actually shoots a lawyer (nor is the Bard). But that doesn’t mean violent, extremist rhetoric is laudable, healthy or blameless for the sorry state of American politics or society or that it never plays a role in inspiring wrongdoing.
However such rhetoric might encourage violence, it certainly encourages the sense that something is broken in American life. More specifically, it fuels the idea that our political opponents are existential enemies.
“Outgroup homogeneity” is the term social psychologists use to describe the very human tendency to think the groups you belong to are diverse and complex, but the groups you don’t belong to aren’t. A non-Asian person might think all Asians are alike, but for Asians the differences between — or among! — Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian people are both obvious and significant.
American politics right now are almost defined by outgroup homogeneity. Many Democrats and progressives think all Republicans and conservatives are alike, and vice versa. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded by the fact that each side tends to think the consensus on the other side is defined by their worst actors and spokespeople. This is sometimes called “nutpicking.” You find the most extreme person on the other side and hold them up as representative of all Democrats or Republicans.
Partisan media amplifies this dynamic at scale. Pew finds that Republicans (who watch Fox News) are more familiar with the term “critical race theory” than Democrats, the supposed devotees of it. Democrats recognize the term “Christian nationalist” more than supposedly Christian nationalist Republicans do.
Consider the recent debates over Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, both prominent social media influencers, one far left the other far right, who say grotesque, indefensible and stupid things. The arguments within the two coalitions are not over whether they should be spokesmen for their respective sides, but whether their “voices” (and fans) should be welcome inside the broader Democratic or Republican tents. Few accommodationists endorse the worst rhetoric from Piker or Fuentes, but they oppose “purity tests.”
On the merits, I think both should be shunned and condemned. But even if the question is purely a political one, they should still be ostracized. Why? Because people outside the respective coalitions will — however fairly or unfairly — hold up the extremists on the fringe as representative of the whole. The only way for either party to prove it opposes extremism to people outside the tent is by opposing it inside their own tents first. Otherwise, their hypocrisy will continue to define them.
