What do they think is going to happen?

A few years ago, I was part of an event commemorating Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Obviously, I was brought in to represent the “against” position (and you can read a version of my keynote here). I didn’t get along well with my fellow speaker, who seemed to view every interaction as a competition, and that perhaps contributed to a tirade I launched during our joint Q&A session. We had been talking about the many and growing number of ways that the will of the people has been thwarted — gerrymandering, the Senate fillibuster, the Electoral College, the unaccountable power of the Supreme Court, all of which were being exacerbated and entrenched and promised to become moreso if Donald Trump ever regained office. Inevitably, a student asked, if all the legitimate democratic means for creating change are cut off, what are we supposed to do? Are you advocating violence?

I responded that I was not advocating violence, but I was pointing out that the Republicans are creating a situation in which the vast majority of people have no non-violent ways of creating the kind of society they want to live in. And so I asked, with an increasingly preacherly cadence, “What do they think is going to happen?”

To pick the biggest example, climate change is an existential challenge that may wind up killing millions — and the Republicans want to shut down any legal means to address it. What do they think is going to happen in that case? Obviously someone is going to do the math on the trolley problem and realize that the life of a Supreme Court justice or three is worth less than the lives of millions. People are going to die because of the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions — people presumably already have died. What do they think is going to happen? A crazed maniac with a demon-like sway over his followers has a good chance of being granted unlimited unaccountable power, and he plans, among other things, to carry out a forced population transfer that would make Stalin blush. Surely someone is going to do the math and realize the only way to remove that threat is for that man to be dead.

Those thoughts probably seemed pretty far-fetched back in 2021. But over the last few days, even before the immunity decision was handed down, I’ve seen nice centrist liberals joking — and more than joking — that if Joe Biden has just been handed unlimited power, he had better use it to take care of Donald Trump once and for all, and maybe pick off a couple Supreme Court justices while he’s at it. We have fun, right?

Personally, I think it’s a pretty scary place for society to be that even nice centrist liberals are indulging in those kind of fantasies — and it’s even more scary that their fantasies have some foundation in reality. The Republicans really have engineered a situation where the only way to be sure that constitutional democracy will endure is if certain named individuals were dead and buried. Obviously persuading them to behave differently is impossible — we don’t even joke about that, because it doesn’t occur to us. The idea that Joe Biden would launch a drone strike against Mar-a-Lago is more plausible, more imaginable, than Alito or Thomas having a change of heart. And obviously our system is so rigged and gummed up that there are no legitimate institutional means to remove them, or even water down their power by expanding the Supreme Court.

Under those circumstances, the Supreme Court’s decision is not just a travesty, not just an injustice. It is a threat. And it is a revelation that the situation is already virtually one of violence, because the vast majority of Americans are being forced to live under laws and systems that they did not and would not choose. The vast majority of Americans have had their rights severely curtailed and have seen the ability of the government to protect their health and safety severely undercut, and there is no plausible path to reverse those trends — or even to stop things from getting even worse — within our institutional structure. In other words, the Republicans and their hand-picked Supreme Court are ruling over us without our consent and laying out their plans to make it increasingly difficult to counter or dislodge them.

None of that is direct interpersonal violence, but their ability to do what they’re doing depends on their control of state institutions, which is backed, in the last analysis, by the threat of violence. Why do we care what the Supreme Court says at all? Because, in the last analysis, the people with the guns listen to what the Supreme Court says. Why do we care if some guys in robes say you can’t arrest the president no matter what he does? Because the people with the guns won’t stick out their necks to arrest him if the Supreme Court says they can’t. Why did we have to go along with allowing Trump to assume office against the popular will in the first place? Because the people with the guns are only going to submit to a president who has entered office according to the set procedures.

We don’t usually view the threat of state violence as “violent” in the proper sense, because we tend to believe that it serves the laws we have all democratically agreed to. It serves to make sure that the majority will is carried out. Obviously that viewpoint is naive. The US was never very democratic. The Constitution only allows the people enough input to serve as a release valve for popular discontent, not to give us any real influence over public policy. That release valve has been sufficient, though, so that most of the people, most of the time, can talk themselves into going along with the law. Now Republicans have seriously impeded the functioning of that release valve and are proposing to get rid of it altogether. And what do they think is going to happen?

Presumably what they think is that we’ll all roll over and take it because liberals are wimps who don’t have guns. And it’s true! I’m a coward, personally! But not having guns is an increasingly fixable problem in the America the Supreme Court is creating, and not everyone who’s frustrated by this situation is a college professor with a steady job and a nice apartment. When discussing Trump’s vague incitement of violence, we tend to characterize it as “stochastic violence.” He’s generally not telling some named individual to drive his car into the crowd of protestors, but his rhetoric disinhibits enough people that, statistically speaking, makes it more likely that someone will step up and actually act on it.

The threshold for political discontent to generate stochastic violence on the left is, for many different reasons, a lot higher than for the right in contemporary America. But surely there is a limit! And once that limit is breached, everything we know about our malevolent overlords tells us that they will increase the overt violence to the point where a lot more people will be above the threshold. That’s when the virtual civil war they’ve been waging becomes a real civil war — and then a generation or more is wasted, at the exact moment when we most desperately need to work collaboratively to sustain the conditions of human survivability on earth.

I don’t think that’s very funny, nor do I think that accelerating the coming civil war by “giving them something to cry about” and using his newly granted powers would be a very reasonable or responsible act on Joe Biden’s part. (Notice, by the way, how the Republicans claim Joe Biden is a tyrant and a dictator, yet they explicitly grant him dictatorial powers, confident that he will not use them!) I don’t know what to do other than to hope the Democrat wins this election and that somehow breaks the spell for enough of Trump’s followers that he is no longer a threat — and no matter what, that almost certainly won’t open up a space to change the composition of the Supreme Court. We need to take advantage of the remaining leverage that we have, but we also need to be clear that we’re getting painted further and further into a corner — and to be clear on what that means. The collapse of democracy means the reign of violence, and no amount of poetic justice will make that okay.