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This is Fighting Words, a weekly newsletter about what got me steamed this week. Let’s dive in.

Item one: This isn’t “random” violence. It’s fascist violence.

 

Now that it has become permissible, since January 6, 2021, to speak openly of our country’s drift toward fascism, I’ve begun thinking that we have been mischaracterizing American gun violence for all these years. This isn’t random violence. It’s routinized violence. It’s accepted violence (by many, including, crucially, the people who have the power to help end it but refuse to do so). It is even, in a sense that I will explain below, state-sanctioned violence. In other words—it’s fascist violence.

 

These shootings started happening on something resembling a regular basis in the late 1970s or early 1980s. In those days, many were carried out in post offices by postal employees; hence the phrase “going postal.” But there were others: I remember one at a San Diego McDonald’s in 1984, which killed 21 people, that was deeply shocking at the time.

 

Back then, and more or less ever since, these were referred to as random acts of violence—and on the most obvious level, that’s what they were. No group was behind them, coordinating them. We spoke (at least most people thought at the time) in good faith about how they could be prevented. But they were just … one of those things.

 

All these years and bodies and dark changes to this country’s character later, I draw a different conclusion. This is no longer random at all. It is happening, over and over, because certain people who very obviously have the power to try to stop it are refusing to do so and letting it happen. That isn’t random. This is violence with a cause and an explanation.

Fascism, as an ideology, is built on what I would call five characteristics. The first is racial supremacy. Then there’s militarism. Then there’s religion, but a twisted and bastardized definition of religion that imputes to the leader certain divine characteristics (e.g., the idea that he is God’s instrument on earth); preaches types of intolerance and hatred that are entirely against the teachings of Jesus Christ and of all religions; and yokes religion to a specific terrestrial set of ideological and societal goals. Fourth, there’s culture—that is, getting the people to hate the godless, contemptuous elitists. And fifth, there’s violence.

 

Violence is integral to fascism. It needs it like fire needs oxygen. Violence keeps people guessing; on edge. As fascism is democracy’s opposite, and as democracy seeks at its best to give its people reassurance and consistency, fascism thrives on unpredictability—the police could show up at your door tomorrow. It keeps the citizen of a fascist state in a mindset of emotional worry, or indeed turmoil, which is no kind of citizenship at all, which is the point. A fascist government wants to dominate people, either in the “benevolent” sense of guiding them and telling them what to think, if they’re part of the favored majority, or in the malevolent sense of issuing them regular reminders of their secondary status if they are not.

 

The United States of America is not a fascist state. I’m not worried that someone is going to knock on my door to arrest me for writing this, or to peruse my bookshelves. At the same time, books are being banned, the smallest and politically weakest minorities like transgender people are being made scapegoats, and people—lots and lots and lots of people—are being killed.

 

In “classic” fascism, in Italy and Spain and Germany, the violence was state-orchestrated. Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Franco his Falangists, Hitler his Brownshirts (and his S.S. and Gestapo). We don’t have that, yet (but in a second Trump term, anything seems possible, and in any case, the violence of January 6 was certainly state-orchestrated). But we do have something that isn’t all that dissimilar—a constant stream of mass shootings, sometimes (as in Uvalde) motivated by who knows what but often motivated by racial hatred, as in last week’s Buffalo, New York, massacre, and the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, and El Paso, and more, that help make the United States by far more violent than other developed countries (it’s the day-to-day homicides that do most of that work, but their prevalence reflects the same twisted priorities that make guns so easily available).

 

So mass violence is now a constant in this, ahem, stable democracy in a way it simply is not in other stable democracies. It is tolerated by Republicans and the right wing. This tolerance of such high levels of violence makes it, in essence, sanctioned by the state, or perhaps in this case, the states. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs numerous laws weakening the regulation of guns—22 in the 2021 session alone—and goes on Twitter to whine that he’s disappointed that his state is only number two in the country in gun purchases, and then turns around after this shooting to accuse the other side of politicizing the issue at this sensitive time, his message is clear enough: I will sign laws that make this mayhem more likely, and when you challenge me at a moment of national anguish, I will shut you down.

 

The tolerance reveals their fascistic mindset. The violence, the piles of bodies, simply don’t bother them very much. We know this because if these things did bother them, they’d do something. They make different excuses at different points. They mostly speak in constitutional terms, as Ted Cruz did the other day, about Democrats wanting to curtail people’s rights. But the tell is that that’s not the only thing they say. They also say, as Lauren Boebert did, “You cannot legislate away evil.” They talk about mental health, how we’ve abandoned God, and other things. They grasp for anything, so long as it lets them wriggle away from having to confront the violence at hand.

 

Do we think they’d be talking about the inviolate nature of a constitutional amendment if it were an amendment they weren’t so crazy about? Would they be saying what Boebert said in the event, say, of a terrorist attack? And most of all, would they be letting this violence happen if a lot of these shooters were Black, going into supermarkets in white neighborhoods, disfiguring and killing 86-year-old white grandmas?

 

It seems unlikely. Which leaves us to conclude that they find this level and type of violence acceptable, and choose, over and over, not to do anything about it. And that is the fact that unites these otherwise unrelated acts of violence: The Republican Party makes excuses every time for why this or that act couldn’t have been prevented, and we must therefore do nothing. That makes the Republican Party responsible for this carnage.

 

They even celebrate the culture of carnage. The New York Times reported this week that so far this year, Republican candidates have aired more than 100 ads showing them shooting guns. You’ll recall that Marjorie Taylor Greene video in which she uses a high-powered rifle to blow up a “socialism” Prius. Well, she’s no outlier. Kay Ivey, the 77-year-old governor of Alabama who looks like the lady you might see at the next booth at Bob Evans, has an ad of her shooting her little Smith & Wesson. A woman who ran for governor in Georgia (she lost) had an ad professing to love “Jesus, guns, and babies.” In Ohio, Josh Mandel used the tagline “Pro-GOD, Pro-GUN, Pro-TRUMP.” If you can’t detect the whiff of fascism in a slogan like that, paying homage to religion, violence, and Dear Leader all at once, I can’t help you. And yes, Mandel lost—but he lost to the guy whose campaign was even more fascist than his.

 

Finally, there is the matter of the Republicans’ “solutions” to our mass murder crisis. Naturally, it’s more violence. More guns. More armed guards, armed teachers, and so on. In other words, more violence. The number of guns in circulation is America is up, but the percentage of households with guns is down. And the NRA can’t have that. In addition to the ideological fervor, there’s a massive profit motive at work here too. They need more guns in more Americans’ hands. Which inevitably will lead to more violence, not less.

 

Am I saying that individual Republicans want individual schoolchildren to die? Of course not. I am saying that these same Republicans in general venerate a level of violence in our society that the majority of us find intolerable and appalling, and they understand intuitively how that violence advances their agenda, by giving their rabid base something to rally around. Mass-shooting violence used to be random in this country. But at this point, with it happening so frequently, and with the fanatical veneration of guns and the violence they reap so deeply knitted into the American right’s worldview, this violence ceased to be random some years ago.

Quiz time

 

Last week’s quiz: “Out, damn’d spot!”—or brush up your Shakespeare. Because American politics is just feeling awfully Shakespearean to me these days.

 

This week’s quiz: Names around the world. I remember my surprise many years ago when I thumbed through an atlas of Europe that labeled each country in its native name—that is, its endonym. Gee, the Finns don’t call Finland Finland? Ever since, it’s been kind of a weird fascination of mine.

 

 

Interesting stuff, right? Answers next week.

 

I’d love your feedback. I think. Email me at  FightingWords@tnr.com.

 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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