I confess to being, on occasion, jealous of Una Mullally of the Irish Times: She gets to write one piece a week, and one only. It comes out on Mondays. I never miss it, because it’s usually a lesson on how, the more time you have, the more likely you are to write the most convoluted argument possible.
Yesterday’s effort was on the topic of the great US culture war bunfight of the moment: Whether, in the context of the apparent assassination of a health insurance executive, it’s okay to shoot businesspeople if you consider their business to be immoral.
Anyway, here’s Una’s conclusion. See if you can figure out what she’s saying:
What the killing of Thompson also demonstrates is the dissonance between how large numbers of people feel – the social media commentary around this event, for example, is almost universal in its lack of empathy for one man’s death – and how the institutions that once framed what was important, especially mainstream media and the political sphere, tell the story.
Fundamentally, a sense of unfairness can lead to the construction of all kinds of rationales for consequences, however extreme. The blithe upshot being: what did people expect? One wonders when new forms of mass-cruelty kick in as the new Trump regime takes hold, what kind of wars will end up coming “home”? Perhaps they have already begun.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I detect a degree of equivocation there. That wonderful phrase “what did people expect?” gives the game away: Yes, we all regret the shooting to death of an innocent man, but what did people expect. And then we are treated to that wonderfully evocative final thought: The new “Trump regime” will be cruel. What do people expect?
There’s an irony here of course in that Una would never apply the “what did people expect” framing to much less violent acts of which she disapproves, here in Ireland. After all, what did people expect when they turned so many communities into migrant hosting facilities against their will, other than protests outside the private homes of politicians by a few desperate individuals?
I will not belabour the point: We all know, because we live in Ireland, that what did people expect is a framing device that is only ever employed when it serves the over-arching ideological goals of progressivism. Thus, protesting outside the homes of politicians is an absolute wrong while assassinating a businessman, depending on the context, may be a consequential wrong. Wrong, but understandable.
We saw a similar dynamic play out earlier this year, during the summer, when a ham-fisted assassin tried and failed to end the life of the now President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump. Nobody who watched or listened to the coverage of that event could have missed the tone of what did people expect from those who seemed more worried about the likely impact of the shooting on Trump’s poll ratings than they worried about the normalization of political violence full stop.
We also saw it during Brexit, when the Irish Government – with the full connivance of the Republican movement and of the mainstream Irish media – engaged in one of the worst and most blatant attempts to threaten violence for political ends on these islands in years. All those solemn statements about how a hard border on the island might “threaten hard won peace” – remember those? It was never quite stated who might threaten peace, or who the people might be who would pick up a gun and start shooting people. It was just enough to hint that if the British Government of Boris Johnson got its way, peace might be threatened. What did people expect?
The solution, in all cases, to violence of the what did people expect variety is, of course, to enact the kind of political changes that progressives want. Thus with the Trump shooting, this was all a terrible consequence of the coarsening of politics started by Trump himself, and the solution was to vote for Kamala Harris. With Brexit, the solution was to cancel it altogether, ideally, or at least for Ireland to get its way. With the health insurance executive, the solution is for health insurance companies to be nicer in the United States.
These are the ways, I’d argue, that the respectable and middle-class progressive can subconsciously rationalise away the use of force in their own cause. It’s the look-at-what-you-made-us do impulse: We would never, ever sanction violence, but the desperate people whose interests we represent might not be controllable if you don’t listen to us.
Of course, the same conduct, on the right, would be met with abject horror. If your correspondent were to speculate on these pages that the safety of Irish politicians might be at risk if they didn’t act to control migration, there would be those who would seek to have me prosecuted for incitement to violence. And to be frank, they’d have a point.
If we want a society free of political violence – and we should – then there should be a single answer to the question “what did people expect?”
That answer should be this: We expected people to express their grievances peacefully, and within the boundaries of the law, and to pursue their desired political changes through the political system.
That, Una, is what we expect. Nothing more, nothing less.