We Should Talk About The Morality of Political Violence

Advocating the moral propriety or even moral necessity of a resort to force and violence is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290, 298 (1961).

You know, for whatever that’s worth these days.

With that in mind: what are the best moral arguments against political violence in America?

By political violence, I mean violence aimed at stopping or changing a particular political circumstance, such as the rule of one group of persons over another, and not privileged by traditional legal norms like self-defense.

I mean to ask this question in a particular set of set of circumstances.

Typical Circumstances Discouraging Violence in America

Typically, America has enjoyed a set of circumstances discouraging political violence.¹ Those circumstances include:

• A reasonably broad consensus that everyone gets a voice in how society is run, even if we don’t agree with other people’s choices.

• People in power generally acknowledging that everyone gets a voice in how society is run, even if they aren’t always sincere.

• A consensus that a reasonably broad range of dissent is legitimate, even if foolish or misguided.

• Limits on using the mechanisms of government to punish political minorities.

• A legal system that puts at least some plausible limits on people with power and holds powerful people accountable, at least on occasion.

• A legal system that imposes consequences for sufficiently clear abuses of the rights of normal people, at least on occasion.

• People in power acknowledging and obeying the legal system’s rulings even when they disagree with them.

• People in power acknowledging laws as legitimate restrictions on their right to do things, and acknowledging they must be changed through the legal system or by new laws.

• Rights being broadly understood to apply to everyone regardless of political affiliation.

• Taboos against overt and conspicuous lying shared by people in power and a sufficiently broad portion of the populace.

• A factual understanding of realty shared by a sufficiently broad group of Americans, involving institutions viewed as reliable sources of information by a sufficiently broad group of Americans.

• A set of institutions — media, academic, or otherwise — willing and capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood and identifying the difference in a forthright manner.

• A sufficiently broad consensus that even people we dislike are human beings with rights.

• Political norms encouraging treating political opponents as human beings with different views of how to achieve shared goals.

A Set Of Circumstances Not Discouraging Violence In America

Now, if you possibly can, imagine a very different set of circumstances in America² :

• A widespread belief, voiced by leaders of a ruling party and shared by their followers, that political participation by the political minority is inherently illegitimate and should be investigated, officially discouraged, diluted, and otherwise suppressed by law.

• Leaders of a ruling party commonly asserting that the political minority should not only be outvoted, but should not have a voice in politics.

• A ruling party and its followers that treat dissent as presumptively illegitimate and as justification for official punishment, prosecution, and violence, such as by using the term “terrorist” to label persons monitoring government use of force.

• A ruling party and its followers that use the power of government to punish political minorities, such as through depriving states of federal funding if they do not vote for the ruling party.

• A legal system that is increasingly unwilling or unable to place limits on the ruling party or its leaders, in part because the ruling party has coopted the Supreme Court.

• A legal system that refuses to impose consequences for abuses of the rights of normal people, no matter how severe, because the ruling party will not prosecute those people and the ruling party’s supporters in the legal system obstruct any such prosecution, and because the ruling party will use the power of pardon to protect its supporters from consequences of abusing the rights of others.

• A ruling party that treats rulings against it as inherently illegitimate and grounds for impeachment or other punishment.

• A ruling party that treats laws, regulations, and other limits on its power as inherently illegitimate, supported by the most senior coopted members of the legal system, who prevent more junior members of the legal system from requiring the ruling party to abide by the rule of law.

• A ruling party and its supporters treating rights as contingent on political affiliation, where equivalent speech is either protected or criminal depending on the political affiliation of the speaker, and where carrying a firearm is either sacrosanct or grounds for the state to use immediately deadly force against you.

• A culture that celebrates overt and obvious lying as a sign of masculinity, authority, and patriotism, governed by a ruling party that openly brags that it tells despicable lies about ethnic groups to divert political discussion to its chosen topics.

• A complete lack of shared reality and a complete lack of institutions supported by a shared consensus of belief.

• A national media unable or unwilling to identify these circumstances clearly, and unable or unwilling to articulate what statements are true and what statements are false, crippled by a fatuous norm that requires treating both sides of any dispute as equally legitimate.

• A ruling party that identifies many categories of Americans as less than human, without human dignity and having no rights, supported in that view by a substantial portion of Americans.

• A ruling party that identifies anyone disagreeing as being less than human and as being devoted to destroying America as opposed to having different views of how to govern America, supported by a substantial portion of Americans who share that view.

That set of circumstances has a set of arguably predictable consequences:

• Members of groups hated by the ruling party and its supporters — including racial and religious groups, immigrants, and dissenters or critics — can be assaulted and even murdered with practical impunity, both by government actors and by private individuals favored by the ruling party.

• The ruling party can lie to justify said assaults and murders and no reliable institution can call the lies to account.

• The ruling party can expand the hated group without rights at will.

• The constitutional and statutory rights of the hated groups can be violated at will.

• Anyone objecting can be punished by violence or by abuse of government power.

• The populace is increasingly confused and uninformed because the institutions that should inform them are unable or unwilling to do so in a coherent manner.

Why Is Political Violence Immoral Under These Circumstances?

So, if we somehow bring ourselves to imagine those circumstances, what are the best moral arguments against resorting to political violence in an effort to resist or change them? Prudence and experience have shown one should consider, careful, the moral arguments about violence before using it, especially in political circumstances.

I’m not asking for practical arguments, like “because they’ll kill you.” I think there is a very good moral argument that is intertwined with practicality: if you try, the ruling party and its supporters will likely use even more unrestrained violence against not just you, but also innocent Americans who have not themselves made the moral choice to join you. In other words, your choice to use violence will likely result in more violence to others. A good criticism of people historically willing to use political violence is that they have been indifferent to that.

No. I am asking, under the set of circumstances I have asked you to imagine, in which the normal deterrents to violence have disappeared and the traditional alternatives to violence have been rendered increasingly futile, what are the best arguments that it would be morally wrong to engage in violence against the people creating this set of circumstances?

The question is probably too general as phrased. Different moral questions apply to different actors. For instance:

• Armed government agents in the course of using unlawful force against noncombatants, shielded by unlawful impunity for their acts by the ruling party, present the strongest moral argument for political violence.

• Government agents tasked to use unlawful force and benefiting from the ruling party’s unlawful impunity, but not at this moment using violence, present a different moral question.

• What about noncombatant government leaders who direct and promote unlawful violence and abuse? I have always had a soft spot for the argument that war would be better if we shot the politicians and generals rather than the privates. What’s the moral argument against that in this circumstance, when the normal political and legal systems for holding them accountable have collapsed?

• If an advocacy organization says that it is going to use state force to suppress and punish its foes, and says resistance will be met with violence, and the organization does indeed direct and encourage the government to engage in lawless violence, what is the moral argument against using political violence against members of that organization?

• Say we identify a group of people — perhaps non-citizens — and encourage the nation to view that group with hatred and suspicion, and permit the government to use unlawful violence against that group, and to treat them without regard to legal rights and without any legal procedure, and embark on a program of deliberately expelling those non-citizens to the worst places possible and in ways most likely to cause them harm, in order to discourage other non-citizens from coming to America, and as part of an expressly white nationalist policy. Say we direct particularly despicable violence and abuse towards the most helpless of them, young children. Now say someone wants to add many Americans to that group of non-citizens by dishonest means — say, by bad-faith and dishonest advocacy to eliminate birthright citizenship. The natural and probable consequence if that advocacy succeeds is death, suffering, and deprivation of rights, especially of children, and it may succeed without regard to merit because the ruling party has corrupted legal institutions. What’s the best moral argument against using political violence against the advocates making the bad-faith arguments, under this set of circumstances?

• Under traditional circumstances, if you call for me to be killed or assaulted or imprisoned without just cause, the chances of that happening are blunted by the set of norms and institutions I described. Under current circumstances, in the absence of those norms and given the impotence of those institutions, when you call for me to be killed or assaulted or imprisoned, what’s the best moral argument against me using violence against you?

No, Really, I’m Asking

These are obviously not new questions, even if the current set of circumstances are new, or seem new. The question of when it’s morally justified to break the law, and when it’s morally justified to use violence, are ancient. But perhaps we don’t ask them as often as we need to, as those before us did when it was their right, their duty, to do so.

I think I have been perfectly clear. However, for the benefit of people easily offended by implication over bluntness, I think there is a plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America. The arguments in favor are likely to grow.

1  That doesn’t mean those circumstances render political violence immoral, or impossible, or even that they prevent political violence altogether. It doesn’t mean that all Americans have been equally free from political violence, or that all Americans enjoy the benefit of those circumstances, or that some of those circumstances aren’t sometimes illusory. I mean that that set of circumstances makes Americans less open to the argument that political violence could be morally acceptable or even mandatory, because violence seems like an unnecessary and gratuitous.

2  Again, this list is not meant to imply that these circumstances, or ones quite like it, have not previously existed in America, at least for some Americans.