Senator Tom Cotton is calling for vigilante justice against peaceful protesters, and he desperately wants you to believe he’d do it himself. Cotton obviously would not do it himself. We know this because he hasn’t even though he has had plenty of opportunity. We know it because Cotton is a lanky chinless kermit-voiced dork who’s never engaged in anything resembling violence without a literal army at his back. And above all, we know this because Cotton is a well-off Senator with way too much to lose.
Cotton calling for vigilante justice has predictably sparked all kinds of horrified outrage from liberals and leftists who have understandably spotlit the danger he’s created. This is of course exactly what he wants. When reactionaries like Cotton and the goons cheering him on say this sort of thing, their fondest hope is that you will cry out in fear. At their strength, their indominatable will, and their complete disregard for the norms of civility.
But again, we all know that’s not what is really going on here. No matter what Cotton says, the overwhelming majority of future protests will not be met with vigilante violence. And when it does happen, it’ll just be because he gave an excuse to a guy who really is a violent right-wing sociopath — but who is also a statistically inevitable outlier. Not, that is, because the right is an unstoppable movement of dangerous killing machines that the rest of us need to cower from; it’s just because every political movement has a handful of psychos.
This is not a popular point to make in contemporary liberal-left discourse, which — particularly after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2001 — has settled on a rhetorical strategy of presenting the right as a monolithic movement of dangerous fascists. Nevermind that even that attack, the high-tide of fascism in America thus far, was overwhelmingly a mob of unarmed tourists who only made it as far as they did because of a pathetic police response that veered from inadequate to openly accomodating. Point out details like this and you’ll almost certainly be painted as naive or even treacherously sympathetic to the fascists; even respected scholars of the right like Corey Robin deal with this kind of reaction on a regular basis.
But perversely, few things empower fascism more than exaggerating its power. Fascism relies on projecting a violent, muscular image because its entire appeal lies in its promise to brute force a solution to the problems of liberal capitalism. Cotton’s threat isn’t just appealing to the right because of who it targets; it’s appealing because it proposes a dramatic, radical solution to the dull impotent procedures and institutions of liberal society. And fascists need everyone to believe that they are strong and brave enough to make it work. The last thing they want is for everyone to appreciate that despite all of their belligerent rhetoric, most contemporary fascists in the US are rebellious teenagers and angry grandpas who have been fully pacified by the luxury of being middle class Americans.
To see how this gap between the image and the reality plays out in practice, consider this recent example of contemporary American fascism spelled out by liberal historian Rick Perlstein:
In 2010, a man named Mike Vanderbough, best known in the self-described "patriot” movement for an essay explaining how enough patriots with a “cheap little pistol and the guts to use it” could bring down the United States Army, using the anti-Nazi resistance as his prooftext, wrote a blog post, shortly before forming the group the "Three Percent Nation” whose main activity was "open carrying” at Democratic political events and left-wing demonstrations, wrote a blog post when the Affordable Care Act was under consideration in the House advising “sons of liberty” to “break the windows of hundreds, thousands of Democrat Party headquarters” to persuade congressmen to vote against it. Many broken windows at Dem offices followed; also, a call to the chair of the House Rules Committee that snipers would “kill the children of members who voted yes.” Two reps received faxed nooses, another an envelope with white powder and this note: “It is apparent that it will take a few assassinations to stop Obamacare" and, finally, after blogger posted what he believed to be the home address of Rep. Tom Perriello inviting readers to “stop by” for a “face-to-face chat,” a gas line meant was severed in an attempt to burn his house down Vanderbough replied, “Glad to know people read my blog,” also noting “the muzzles of three million rifles who can be, if required, pointed directly at the heart of anyone who wants to be a tyrant in this country.”
Rick suggests that we simply did not call this fascism at the time1 because no assassinations actually took place, and because those assassinations never sparked a wave of broader violence. But doesn’t this just vindicate the analysis? If you can only qualify a political movement as fascist by ascribing to it behavior that did not actually take place then hasn’t your analysis of fascism become uncoupled from a real and coherent account of history?
This problem with Rick’s argument becomes even clearer when we consider why Vanderbough’s posts didn’t manage to overthrow the government. As it happens, I had my own encounter with Vanderbough and his militia back in 2014. Since I’ve recounted the story at length on Chapo Trap House I won’t run through it again here; but suffice to say that while his goons threatened to murder me on multiple occasions, nothing ever actually happened. An excerpt from one of Mike’s messages to me at the time:
Dear Comrade Carl,
Several of my friends forwarded to me your column…They tend to take such “resistance is futile” columns seriously, thus they were taking you seriously…it is not necessary for armed resistors to regime tyranny to kill indiscriminately as governments do. It is only necessary that they kill enough, well, people like you… My advice? If you can’t give up on Marxism, then at least try not to piss these people off… There always is that Law of Unintended Consequences, isn’t there?
This sort of rhetoric is only a few steps removed from Tom Cotton’s own call for vigilante justice; but just like Cotton is a fragile Ivy League dork who’d wet his pants if a protester looked at him the wrong way, turns out that Mike Vanderbough looked like this:
What Mike didn’t want you to know was that he was an elderly man whose body was completely breaking down; he would die of cancer just a few years later, and was evidently sending me threats from his deathbed. Vanderbough did not fail in his quest to overthrow the government by historical accident, or because he graciously stayed his hand. He failed because the contemporary United States, for all our failings, still hasn’t collapsed into the early twentieth century economic dystopias that left huge swaths of the population with a lot of anger and nothing to lose. That is the difference between a country threatened by a fascist movement and a country threatened by sporadic terrorism from random malcontents and sociopaths who have too easy access to weapons.
Tom Cotton wants to intimidate activists into submission, but if they are smart they’ll do exactly what I did with Mike: call his bluff. Somehow I doubt that white Urkel is going to climb out of his car and start throwing punches at a protester blocking the road or even grow enough of a spine to step on the gas. And it’s a lose-lose situation for him, because even if he does that’s the end of his political career. All reactionaries are paper tigers. Tom isn’t any different.
And this point really can’t be stressed enough: we absolutely did not call this fascism at the time. In fact, calling incidents like this expressions of fascism was considered the unserious and contrarian analysis during the Obama era, which is why most folks have never heard of the pundits who were doing it, like the folks at Stop The Spirit of Zossen. Back then, the two standard takes on right-wing political violence were that they expressed a regrettable turn towards incivility (see Obama’s commentary about the need to “disagree without being disagreeable”) or simple incidents of terrorism (which liberals pointed to with gleeful irony after Bush’s war on terror).