Let us start with what is not new. Political violence is not new, either from those with power or from those without power. Indeed the earliest organised communities—“polities”—may have come into existence to regulate the capacity and propensity of our species to inflict lethal force on itself.
As long as we have recorded history there have been assassinations and executions, riots and rebellions. And as Lawrence Keeley avers in War Before Civilization, extreme violence was a theme of our prehistory too. Making and using tools as weapons to injure and kill our own kind is what our species does.
The recent spate of political violence in the United States, as well as elsewhere, is thereby not a novelty. Indeed, the only mild surprise is perhaps that there has not been more of it. In Europe, which has supposedly been peaceful since 1946, we have had bloody conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, a civil war in the United Kingdom (euphemistically called “the Troubles”) and significant terrorism elsewhere, as well as war in Ukraine and Russia.
And the murder and attempted murder of politicians is not new. Political assassinations and attempted assassinations were a feature of European and American history in the 19th and 20th century. Like the poor, the urge to kill those with power is always with us. Those with power, in turn, rarely shy away from using coercive force against the powerless.
But what is distinctive, if not altogether new, is what can be called “stochastic” violence or terrorism. This is the general and vague encouragement of hostile and lethal acts against groups and individuals by instigators using communications networks. Such promotion of harm is usually not precise enough to be caught by the laws against incitement of offences against the person. There is what one calls “plausible deniability”.
Those who then carry out the violence have no direct relationship with those who want the violence to occur. As such, this is different from the organised gangs and cells of the terrorists of previous generations, whose organisations often became susceptible (and undermined by) infiltration and surveillance. The perpetrators of violence are individuals who understand the signals and act accordingly. This can be in riots against hated groups and against particular hated individuals.
This appears to have been what happened in various recent acts of political violence in the US and the UK. The murders, and attempted murders and kidnappings, of politicians by radicalised individuals is part of what seems to be a turn in political discourse and culture. The names and incidents are depressingly familiar: Jo Cox, Gretchen Whitmer, Paul Pelosi, and now Minnesota politicians Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman.
In his groundbreaking book Homegrown, Jeffrey Toobin charts how in the days before widespread access to the internet Timothy McVeigh and other individuals were radicalised by loose networks of conferences and the sharing of illicit materials. With the rise of social media these networks became hardened and more complex. In this way, the bombing in Oklahoma in 1995, and not the organised terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001, can be seen as the start of the American 21st century.
And the law is almost powerless in the face of stochastic terrorism. Of course it can deal with the back-end products: the acts of violence themselves. But those politicians and pundits and social media users at the front end, encouraging this violence, are generally safe.
From time to time someone may be clumsy and too specific in what they say and, as with the recent case of Lucy Connolly, plead guilty when charged. But many who are saying much the same things will be bullish about “free speech” and “just asking questions”. And the promotion of violence is never specific enough to fit within the laws of incitement. A politician a century ago derided press barons for having media power without responsibility: now that media power is in the hands of the many and not the few.
One cause of this is the demise of the old gatekeepers. The rise of mass democracy was shaped by party organisations and broadcasters and newspapers where the flows of information were controlled. What people saw and heard and knew about public affairs was in the hands of a small group of individuals. Now those means of control are no longer really there.
And so politicians, pundits and social media users have no external limits or self-restraint. People can publish and broadcast what they want about who they want, and be as nasty and vile as possible. Public positions which were unthinkable only a few years ago, such as on migration, are now commonplace. Social media can often seem like a festival of cruelty, where all inhibitions of kindness and respect are lost.
Of course, at a low level, such stochastic violence is not an innovation. Henry II famously asked who would rid him of a turbulent priest. The problem now is that such an injunction would not be heard by just four knights, but by four billion internet users. The rise of the internet and social media, and the concurrent decline in formal political organisation and centralised media, can make everyone feel like an avenging knight, or a calculating king.
Like Narnia, where it was once always winter and never Christmas, modern political culture is now akin to a carnival which will never become Lent. And that people will get hurt seems neither here nor there in this frenzy. Law will not be enough to curb this. The solution requires civility, and not civil or criminal law.
