sauce, goose, gander

A typically and blessedly thoughtful reflection from Noah Millman:

On both sides of the aisle, there is increasing acceptance of the idea that our political institutions are illegitimate, which while it isn’t in itself a call to violence effectively disarms the strongest argument against violence. This is most obvious on the Republican side, something the ongoing January 6th hearings have provided a powerful reminder of. A huge percentage of the GOP rank and file believe that the last election was stolen and therefore that the current government is illegitimate, and while only a tiny minority participated in violence in response on that fatal day, it’s difficult in practice to convincingly disavow that response without forcefully rejecting the premise that justified it. Not only has the party leadership mostly failed to do that, but a substantial fraction — most especially the former president — have done precisely the opposite.

But the rhetoric on the left side of the aisle with regards to the courts specifically has been extremely cavalier in suggesting that the Supreme Court in particular is no longer legitimate, and that certain decisions it might make would be in some sense inherently counter-democratic. And while I’m not going to nut-pick and compare the occasional lone wolf lunatic to a mass movement, there’s far more widespread acceptance of things like picketing Supreme Court Justices’ homes, which in and of itself undermines the legitimacy of their decisions by suggesting that they ought to be influenced by such protests in making their decisions, which, if they are to do their jobs properly, they should not. And that, in turn, makes it harder to refute the case for violence.

Let me add just one point: It’s become increasingly common, I think, for people to justify acts of intimidation, and sometimes actual violence, against their political enemies but not, of course, against their allies. (Threatening Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi is okay, but threatening Brett Kavanaugh is indefensible — or the other way around.) But when people whose politics differs from your own see you advocating intimidation against politicians or judges that you hate, they will definitely think they’re entitled to a piece of that action. You’re drawing up a set of instructions and handing it to them. So you can say that you want to allow the tactics of intimidation and threat and even violence only to those you believe to be right, but what you are actually doing, and can’t not do, is advocating a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man.”