Thread by @tzimmer_history

It’s really hard to overstate how acutely dangerous this is: All strands of the Right - leading Republicans, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base, the donor class - are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence.

Not that more evidence was needed, but the mask has fully slipped in the reactions to the killing of Jordan Neely.

Here, for instance, is a rightwing “thinker”: Very difficult to construct a plausible version of who “these people” are supposed to be that’s not brutally racist.

This sends a clear message: It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.

The Right is defined by a political and social culture of white grievance, ethno-religious nationalism, gun fundamentalism, toxic masculinity, and glorified militancy - it is bound to produce many more Kyle Rittenhouses. Very hard to sustain democracy under such circumstances.

It’s crucial to emphasize how this open embrace of vigilante violence functions in the broader context of the political conflict - it serves a specific purpose as part of the reactionary counter-mobilization against multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

The Right’s political project goes well beyond Congress and state legislatures: It’s about restoring and entrenching traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth in the local community, in the public square, in the workplace, in the family.

The Right is fully committed to this anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic vision – which they understand is a minoritarian project: They are acutely aware that they don’t have numerical majorities, and they have a comprehensive strategy to put this vision into practice.

The voter suppression, the gerrymandering, the efforts to subvert elections up and down the country… Those are not disparate actions, but the manifestation of what is dogma on the Right: Only white conservatives are allowed to rule - opposition to this vision is illegitimate.

The Right understands that such blatant undermining of democracy might lead to a mobilization of civil society. That’s why Republicans are criminalizing protests, by defining them as “riots,” and by legally sanctioning physical attacks on “rioters.”

Beyond just functioning as a tool to upholding political power, white vigilante violence also serves as a way to enforce the underlying vision for a society in which some people - white men, in particular - have the absolute right to defend their place, status, and “comfort.”

America is built on a social order that gives some people – white men, specifically – the power to use whatever form of violence they deem necessary to “defend” themselves against all threats from “others,” real and perceived. The Right wants to preserve that order.

This order is predicated on an extremely expansive idea of what constitutes a “threat”: Black people, for instance, are seen as inherently threatening; and there is not much of a line separating what makes white people “uncomfortable” from what is defined as an acute threat.

According to the Right, conservative white Christians - by virtue of supposedly being the sole proponents of “real America” - shouldn’t ever have to deal with the kind of challenges and “discomfort” an egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic society entails.

In this view, it is the prerogative of conservative white Christians to dominate the public square, to have their own image reflected back at them at all times, to lash out against whoever and whatever challenges their dominant status or dares to make them “uncomfortable.”

This is what the Right’s political project has always been built on, its organizing principle, enforced through the threat of vigilante violence: The premise that some groups are worthy of protection and deserve privilege - while others are dangerous and need to be kept in check.

The fact that my responses are overflowing with racist aggression and fantasies of committing acts of anti-“Left” violence isn’t exactly providing much of a counter to my argument.

(I recommend blocking these two vile, deranged people who will direct that kind of extremism)

I wrote more about this in my latest newsletter:

Vigilante Violence Is Part of the Right’s Plan
 
The open embrace of violence plays a key role in the broader reactionary mobilization against democracy.
 
New Democracy Americana: thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/vigilante-vi…