There is an argument raging on the blogs and elsewhere as to what caused Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage. It is starting to settle down to the an argument about political speech, the Left pointing to the legion of violent and eliminationist statements form the Right and the Right throwing anything they can up to prove that Loughner was really a Lefty who flipped out.
The problem with this, as with all arguments with those on the Right is it becomes a pie fight with simple answers offered to a complex problem. You get idiocy like that from David Frum who insists this whole thing hinges on Loughner being a pot head. Which gets traction even though the usual stereotype of stoners is they can’t get off the couch, let alone plan to assassinate a sitting Representative.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
I am going to make a more complex case that a portion of the blame for this and the other shooting rampages belongs squarely in the Republican and Conservative camp, but it will take a little time. I hope you’ll stick with me as I lay it out.
All of the recent rampages including Arizona seem to be people who have snapped. They have reached the breaking point and start to act out against society. What causes these kinds of outburst? Well, feelings of isolation, feelings of despair and feelings of worthlessness of ones own life. These combined with an external group or object to blame and access to the means to strike at that external object are all the swamp from which violent rampages rise.
As sad as it is for me to write, we can trace most of these back to the rhetoric and policies of the Republican Party as it is has been shoved to the radical right by its fringe elements.
Isolation:
For the last 30 years or longer the Republican Party has divided the people of the nation with the meme of utter self-reliance. It was has been the argument against all the of the social safety net programs. They have said that you should not think of yourself as part of a society that helps those down on their luck with welfare or unemployment. They constantly talk about the iconic ideal we can do everything for ourselves, all of us can be Horatio Alger and go from rags to riches all on our own.
It is, of course a complete fallacy. It goes against our very success as a species. Humans alone do not do very well. When we lived on the savanna, just a troop of Great Apes, a lone human was soon a dead human. A single human is a good meal for a large predator like a lion or a tiger, but a group of humans is a flat disaster for them. Sure you can kill some but they come in a group and they don’t forget and sooner rather than later that top predator is nice warm cloak.
We are given the example of the cowboy, the man who did it all with the steely determination and heroics. That makes for nice cinema but in reality the cowboy didn’t own the cows, couldn’t make his gun, and sometimes didn’t even own his horse. He was out there alone because someone was paying him to be away from the comforts of town, where people working together had all the comforts that cooperation and specialization provide.
The idea that we must all be completely self-reliant and are weak or losers if we don't isolates us. It prevents us from finding common cause for common good. This meme has been part of what has destroyed the Labor movement in this nation. The idea of unity and coming together for everyone's benefit has been replaced with "what's in it for me" this leaves people separated and isolated, both economically and socially.
Isolation itself is becoming recognized as a form of torture. To keep a person from human contact is damaging to the mind and degrades the ability to interact with others when there is a chance for contact. Yet one of the memes that are fostered by Republicans is that we should all do everything for ourselves.
This leads the next link in the chain despair.
Despair:
People tend to despair when there are no opportunities. When it looks as though no matter what ones does it will not change the situation. I tend to think that this is particularly bad in the United States with our national predilection to optimism.
When things are good in an economy there is a feeling of possibility. Even if you lose a job, there is a feeling that there is work out there the nation is going forward and you can be part of that. It is just a matter of time.
The collapse we are experiencing has changed that. It is without a doubt the result of the "all regulation is bad" and "the markets are god" policies of the Republicans. If we had not dismantled the Glass-Steagall Act which prevented banks from using their deposits for direct investments we would not have seen the Wild West attitude on Wall St. Even then if we had regulatory bodies that would and could look at the riskiness of the trades and vehicles for investment we might have been able to head off this collapse.
Instead we were told that lowering taxes, was what was needed and that by doing so we would have more prosperity. The old trickle down, voo-doo economics. It did not work and 14 trillion in wealth was wiped out. This has left 8 million people who had steady jobs and could be optimistic about the future adrift. It has flooded the market for entry level positions and robbed many young people of the opportunity to get started in their working lives. It has left another 7 million working jobs that are not full time and most often don’t take into account their years of education and experience.
By pushing a set of policies that favor management over labor the Republicans have systematically taken the workingman and workingwoman’s best chance to balance power apart. Organized Labor used to be bulwark against abuses that come from looking just at the bottom line and not the human cost, but the days when Unions could swing that power may be gone for good.
All this leads to massive loss of opportunity for long periods of time. Work has value that is measured in more than just a pay check. Being able to end a day saying "I accomplished X" is an important measure of personal value in this nation and far too many of us can not point to concrete things at the end of the day.
Worthlessness:
The long term unemployment crisis has become a political football and once again we see the Republican party making things worse by their rhetoric. The claim that the people who are on the insurance program they have paid into their entire working lives are called lazy. They are scolded by the children of privilege like Sen. Rand Paul and told to recognize that they might have to take a job that will not provide for their families, that is so menial that it was once considered the work of teenagers or losers.
We have seen time and again Republicans make aspersions on the unemployed suggesting that they are living fat and happy wreathed in a cloud of bong smoke and kicking back on the couch. The abject failure to recognize that the average benefits of just under $300 a week is not enough to keep up with house payments, health insurance payments, car payments and putting food on the table. Those are all things that the middle class jobs which were lost in the economic collapse provided.
When you have reached the middle of your life you expect you have things well in hand. You have a career, not just a job, you have long term plans, and most importantly you identify yourself with your job. One of the first questions that people ask when they meet someone new is "What do you do?". When the answer is "I’m unemployed" there is a level of shame. There is an implied lack of value in you, the thought even if it is not said is "What’s wrong with this guy?". This kind of thing eats away at self-worth and the longer it goes on the worse the damage is as bills mount, and there is no way to pay them.
External Blame Focus:
Now we finally get to the rhetoric of violence that has been the stock and trade of the Right for years. For all the quote mining the Right has been engaging in over the last three days the reality is that you can hear an aggressively anti-government and anti-Democrat or Liberal screed all day everyday on Rightwing radio and T.V.
It does not always have to be explicitly violent and this is where Republicans are trying to distract us but it is there. Comparing Democrats and the President to Nazis and Stalinist Communists day after day is in itself violent. It is an implied violence, because what do we do with vile people like Nazis and Communists? Why we kill them or we threaten them with nuclear immolation. Worse the comparisons always include the list of heinous acts the Nazis and Communists committed with the implication that if Democrats and Liberals are allowed to continue, they will do the same. The call of "they are coming for you!" is echoed again and again.
Then there are the actual eliminationist fantasies, which are often presented as humor but are anything but funny. Anne Coulter suggested that someone should poison the coffee of liberal Supreme Court Justices and that the New York Times building should have been Timothy McVeigh’s target. Glenn Beck mused about walking up to Michael Moore and killing him and looking in his eyes while doing it.
They can say that "only a psycho would take this literally" all they want, but it ignores the well known fact there are violent psychos in our society.
Then there are the actual Republicans who say things like "We might need Second Amendment remedies" and in the same sentence "Harry Reid needs to be taken out". People like Representative Allen West who told his constituents that they needed to "make his opponent afraid to leave his house". These a veiled and not so veiled threats of violence and they are heard by the same people that listen to Beck and Coulter.
All of this aggressive blame for the plight of the country is heard over and over and over again by those on the Right, Left and Middle.
Means To Strike:
We have a bizarre relationship with weapons in this country. It is true there is a right to carry arm in our Constitution and that right is currently interpreted to be an individual right. This with the aggressive push of Rightwing groups like the NRA to water down and prevent even the most common sense of gun control laws has made it possible for people to not only be armed but to be heavily armed.
The 30 round clip of Loughner’s gun is a major reason this tragedy is so large. Without the ability to fire 31 shots without reloading it is certain that some of the injured an perhaps some of the dead would not be that way today. It was only when he stopped to reload that he was tackled and stopped.
This type of clip combined with slow walking of data entry and the gunshow loophole make it far to easy for someone with something other than home or self protection on their minds to be well armed enough to do incredible amounts of damage if they decide to strike.
The myth that we should have more guns to make us safer is another Republican meme that does not hold water but ups the danger to us all. The killing spree in Arizona nearly had a tragic caveat as a business owner who heard the shots grabbed his gun, clicked off the safety and heroically rushed out to do something about it. He drew down on a man holding a gun and insisted that he drop it. Little did he know that it was one of the people who had subdued Loughner and not the shooter. If this shop owner had been a little less responsible he could have wounded or killed one of the other heroes of the day.
Carrying a gun does not make you safer. It will not protect you from a bullet, if it did then police officers would not die on a regular basis in this country. All carrying a gun does is increase the chance that you will wound or kill someone. Yet we see Republicans in states like Arizona trying to make it easier and easier for people to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
Conclusion:
When we put all these factors together we can see that there really is a level of blame that Republican policies over the years have in the climate of violence., People without hope, who feel that their lives have no worth hear a constant drumbeat of blame and vilification of government and have the ability to gain accesses to the weapons that will let them strike out. They are told that we need to "take our nation back" and seek the validation of violent acts and the approval of the noise machine that pointed them towards the "ones" who are making life so hard.
It does not matter what party they are registered to or what books they read, the fact is that the political expediency of the Republican party in helping the wealthy while telling the less well off that it is all there fault and they are the losers is what is setting the stage for these violent acts. It is the constant vilification of Democrats in comparison to the worst murders in history, it is the delegitimization of the President by questioning his citizenship and not squashing that insanity, it is the rhetoric of "Don’t Retreat, Reload" and "I want a hunting season for liberals, the herd needs to be thinned" that is pointing the target at liberals and government officials.
So yes there is blame to be had by the Republicans for these tragedies. It is not a blame that can easily be put on a single member. Things like Palin’s targets are just one symptom of the whole syndrome, but the failure by the leadership that party to push back on any of the parts of that combine to make these killing sprees more and more common is one that they must all share.
Tragically all this is complex and one thing the Right does not like or even acknowledge is that there are no simple answers to complex questions.
The floor is yours