Political violence is especially bad when done in your name

Against "Everything is violence except actual violence, which is fine"

The Left has a sort of weird moral inversion when it comes to problem of violence. Specifically, the inversion comes in how the word ‘violence’ is actually defined - the Left has an exceptionally expansive conception of violence, one that restricts and condemns vast swaths of human behavior, while leaving a wide-open loophole for the physical destruction of other human beings for political purposes.

For the Left, ‘violence’ refers to all non-pleasant experiences had by a Leftist. It is violence when you want something and someone who has it doesn’t give it to you, it is violence when someone doesn’t perfectly and constantly affirm your self-image, it is violence when you have to exert any sort of self-control. The capitalist ethos - “you can have anything you want if you make it worth it for people to give it to you” - is violence, since there’s an “if” in that sentence. If you declare yourself to be a member of a marginalized ‘community’ and demand prioritization and accommodation and people don’t shut up and fall in line with your every desire, then that’s violence too. If you feel in any way anxious or sad or tired or distracted then - you guessed it - that’s also violence, an artifact of the cruel and exploitative system.

This extremely expansive definition of ‘violence’ serves to justify the gratifying use of retributive cruelty. All is permitted in the name of justice. Summary executions in the streets, as we saw with the United Health Care CEO. The destruction and confiscation of property, as we saw in the riots of 2020. Gulags in the Soviet Union, guillotines in Revolutionary France.

There is, of course, something to be said about justice and fairness and generally working to improve our political institutions. There is a lot of preventable pain in the world, and it’s perfectly warranted to feel frustrated that this preventable pain exists and persists.

That said, there is a lot of non-preventable pain in the world too. This includes the pain of death, the pain of physical decay, the pain of not knowing how to be with people and having to learn the hard way through heartbreak, the pain of other people being different than you and valuing different things than you and rejecting you for reasons you can’t understand. I’m not religious, but I find a lot of metaphorical value in the truth that we are not God - we are not infinite in our knowledge, our power, or our virtue, which means that suffering can be reduced but never fully eliminated. Learning to live with suffering and death is the great game of human life, facing these issues squarely without collapsing into despair and without collapsing into avoidant impulsivity and grandiosity.

It is very cheap and easy to fall into the trap of blaming other people for the inevitable suffering and death of the human condition. As I see it, the first task of the government is to *protect us from each other*, urged as we are towards righteous violence. We should be able to live our lives, express our views, and create what we create without fear of being tortured and butchered. We can, will, and often must reject each other, but we cannot be permitted to kill each other.

I see political violence as an instance of the *preventable* kind of suffering and death. Reducing political violence - from war to vigilante justice - should be the top priority of any political regime.

Relatedly, confronting our own contribution to the preventable suffering of the world is the first task of any moral being. It’s important to be profoundly, urgently skeptical of any impulse within us to destroy, any message or ideology that assures us that we get to torture and kill whoever we want and are actually *good* people for doing so.

If you think that the government should be used to improve people’s lives, the first thing you need to do is convince the people whose lives are to be rearranged that you don’t want to torture and kill them. You also need to convince people that the government *can* be used for good, and the first way you do this is by ensuring public peace and order.

If you vote Democrat and want Democrats to win future elections and govern well when they do, you need to consistently and loudly denounce Leftist political violence. Give fellow citizens the peer-to-peer understanding that the Democratic Party is not a gateway for erratic freaks to vent their dysregulated feelings by torturing whoever they feel like blaming today. Making the world a better place - reforming health insurance systems, for example - *begins* with this rejection of political violence.

Maybe I’m wrong - maybe we are just one rapturous bloodbath away from heaven on earth - maybe ‘human rights’ are an oppressive bourgeois construct - maybe a minority should be tortured to death if doing so would improve the lives of some majority, and self-identifying with that majority grants you the right to do the torturing. I know that being human means being condemned to some sort of error. But I’d prefer the errors of evolution over the errors of revolution. I’d rather things get better too slowly than things get worse quickly in the name of making them better after they get worse.