The left’s reactions to the latest attempted Trump shooting are predictably awful, but we should have enough space in our brains to be appalled at the left and at the same time worried about how the right will react to this event.
Tallying up the left’s errors would involve, at a minimum, asking how the maniac who shot at Trump on Saturday night managed to get a Teacher of the Month award before all this, how he could write a frothing anti-Trump manifesto and still end up causing Obama to write blandly that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” and how the unbearable Robert Reich could react by blaming Trump’s hostile tone for it all and reminiscing about his own tuxedo-wearing jaunts to such events back in the Bill Clinton era—when things were, to Reich’s mind, civil.
Some of us were always appalled by the spectacle of the political elite of both major parties chuckling and celebrating each other at those events. We foresaw that conviviality yielding something like a Trumper reaction sooner or later. (It wasn’t just me or just non-liberals who saw it that way, either: New York Times’ Mark Leibovich wrote wittily about the stomach-turning insularity of it all.)
Reich’s right that norms of civility matter, wrong to think the elite being chummy with each other, politicians sipping champagne alongside their major-media reporter buddies, is the kind of display that maintains the civility of the masses and their chosen tribunes in the long run. On the contrary, it’s the kind of display that inspires revolutionary violence from both extremes of the political spectrum. If I were tempted to blame the victim here, I’d start by blaming the White House Correspondents Dinner.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I trust the right (or government in general) to respond rationally to this or any other eruption of violence. Trump may not have sounded crass seizing the opportunity to plead for a more modern, secure White House Ballroom, but keep in mind that “ballroom” in this context—despite Trump noting 150 years of the Secret Service thinking a more secure ballroom could be useful—sounds as if it’s likely to mean a huge, high-tech, data-centralizing, partly subterranean facility constructed with money from major A.I. companies and input from Israeli security advisors.
Not that I’m jumping on the anti-Israeli bandwagon, and they have good reason to have become expert in this sort of thing, but it’s a reminder that behind the bow ties, the political class will seize any opportunity to treat a project like a major military operation. You should’ve seen how quickly every previously-casual event in Manhattan was festooned with cordons and cameras after 9/11, often with some ostensibly budget-cutting Republican or veteran of the military industrial complex getting a fee for consulting in the process.
Real conservatives are supposed to value civility, as Reich apparently does, and I remember thinking back in those post-9/11 days (Giuliani/Bloomberg days) that a stretch of 10th Ave. in the W. 20s should’ve been regarded by traditional conservatives as a little glimpse of Hell, or at least a very localized dystopia: Several bars in that area produced drunken fights or loud hooliganism often enough to warrant sawhorses being brought out every weekend night, along with a few extra police eyeballs, to herd the young drunkards back toward civilization. No big deal in the grand scheme of things, not a war zone, but also not the formula that either urbane liberals or thoughtful conservatives are supposed to want from their cities: Everybody get drunk and let the cops clean up the mess.
That’s the worst of both worlds by the standards of someone who wants voluntary, conservative self-restraint and a minimal government footprint. The nicer the populace, the less you need strongarm tactics. It would be healthy to spend more time asking how to foster a nice populace and a bit less refining the strongarm tactics and surveillance methods. Instead, both right and left in recent years warn their constituents that we mustn’t let our guard down lest the other side destroy us, and the familiar cycle of distrust, radicalism, and opportunistic authoritarianism follows.
I assume, unlike some on the left, that the attack on Trump wasn’t staged, but in the environment of attacks and retaliatory policing I’ve described, it makes perfect sense to be on guard against faked or exaggerated crimes that can be repackaged as excuses to expand police powers. As a veteran of professional wrestling broadcasts, Trump knows how to use “kayfabe” (not to be confused with “covfefe”) theatrics to make the latest scuffle seem like a natural extension of his character and current message—and a logical time to do whatever it is the state had usually already been planning to do for years.
And remember that the would-be shooter’s manifesto wasn’t the only one in the news this past week and will not likely be the most influential one in the long run: Palantir, exactly the sort of tech company underwriting the planned ballroom’s construction, was in the news with its new online summary of a company manifesto its executives wrote a couple of years ago. The online summary takes the form of a wish list, and apparently Palantir doesn’t just want the sort of obvious, direct subsidies of computers and surveillance tech that you might expect from a selfish company of its sort. The wish list also includes things like upgrades of the military and mandatory public service/the draft, things Palantir and the tech elite in general know damn well mean more chances for them to suck at the taxpayer’s teat by getting subsidies for surveillance systems and robots.
The next president could well be self-proclaimed paleoconservative (that is, past-respecting, rural-life-honoring, traditional-civility-seeking) author and current V.P. JD Vance, and one needn’t be a communist celebrant this May Day to suspect that his brand of paleoconservatism will somehow, just like Trump’s populism, prove malleable enough to make room for high-tech drones, monitoring of all our online activities, and other military/police profit opportunities. That’s not cozy village life, and we shouldn’t let them seize every possible opportunity to pretend it’s the next best thing in a fallen world.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey