It is a mistake to limit your definition of “political violence” to riots and assassinations alone. It is indeed rare that our elected representatives are shot down in the street; it is decidedly less rare that our citizens are gunned down by armed agents of the state, with the unqualified support of the entire justice system (and a significant level of public support, too).
The founding myth of America is that the country was benevolently settled by morally righteous colonists; that the nation they founded constituted the leading light of democracy in the world, thanks to the timeless wisdom of our Founding Fathers. But bloodshed has been an essential component of the American experiment since day one.
America is a bloody place, and remains so even in an era of declining violent crime. Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by gun violence than people in other developed countries.
The shooting on Wednesday morning marked the 154th mass shooting in this year alone, and the sixth incident this week. Just hours after the Alexandria shooting, news broke of another shooting at a UPS facility in San Franscisco, which left three people dead and two injured.
In American politics, as in American life, violence is not the exception, but the norm. Our political system is organized in such a way that structural state violence against the poor or otherwise marginalized isn’t considered real violence, but that violence is nonethelesswoven into the fabric of American politics. As Chris Hooks wrote shortly before the election, politics is “the way we distribute pain”...
A congressman getting shot is an obvious, visceral example of political violence. It is an event that merits reflection and discussion. But there is another level of violence that those in power tend to ignore: The structural, often invisible violence of the state against our nation’s least fortunate. You can see it in the housing crisis, in the draconian cuts to welfare programs, and, yes, in Republicans’ plan to take away health care from one in 14 Americans.
Scalise’s home state of Louisiana has one of the highest rates of poor health in the country: Residents of the state, which has the nation’s fourth-lowest life expectancy, live nearly six years less on average than residents of the healthiest states, according to federal data. And Louisiana had among the highest uninsured rates.
Scalise once reportedly described himself “David Duke without the baggage.” Duke is the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I bring this up not to condone what happened to him, but to show that Scalise was a participant in this violence—as all Americans (all humans) are, in ways large and small—before he became a victim of it.
Fusion: America Is Violent
Emma Roller | 15 June 2017
