It is exhausting to have to both assure folks that no, I don’t endorse the actions of James T. Hodgkinson last week, but also, Bernie Sanders’ statement and commitment to non-violence is bull crap.
As noted by several political commentators on social media, the Right has traditionally used incidents like the #Alexandria shooting in order to pull the center of political gravity towards Nazi-adjacent policies and discourse as a whole towards a “respectable center”. This kind of politicking serves the same ends as a false flag operation: to make their enemies appear to be the “radicals” and “terrorists” endangering the public at large, when in reality, the policies of the Republican Party enact structural violence on the most impoverished and marginalized among us through redlining, gentrification, poisoning public water, and so on.
Even hate speech, a form of rhetorical violence that incites material harm against minorities, is now considered to be a legitimate point of contention among liberals because conservatives have politicized tragedies in their favor under the guise of “free speech” as we saw with the liberal whining for Milo Yiannopolous and Richard Spencer. The system that we call capitalism under the leadership of White Supremacy in these United States is hell-bent on preserving itself and our political “representatives” are a part of that machine. Representative Steve Scalise himself has been in proximity to the Ku Klux Klan as recently as 2014, and yet liberals are all too easily swayed by “calls to unity” with a Congressional baseball game and fail to miss the point - we can say that Hodgkinson endangered the lives of innocents while also acknowledging that he was not radicalized with the intent of committing genocide, as in the case of White supremacist terror. Did we really all forget that House Majority Whip Scalise is one of the hundreds of politicians taking away health care from millions of people in the United States (when Obamacare itself was barely a band aid)?
Moreover, the tactics of lone gunmen are ineffectual for leftists anyway. “Arm the workers” is a plural slogan, a collective call to action for class warfare (and make no mistake, warfare is waged with both gun and bill, as we’ve noted that the GOP enacts violence through policy). We have no need of assassins who work outside of organization and camaraderie. The Black Panthers’ armed self-defense program was exactly that - a radical response to the imperialist and racist violence endorsed by the State against Black Americans. They were committed to their community above all else. That we would equate the actions of an alleged domestic abuser and Trump-Russia conspiracy theorist (and doesn’t that indict the narrativizing of the Democrats as well in this whole debacle? Another article, for another time) with that of radical left-wing liberation organizations and freedom fighters says more to me about how the media will jump at the chance to demonize the opponents of Nazis rather than Nazis themselves.
I imagine that Mr. Hodgkinson saw himself as some sort of John Brown figure. But John Brown put his own privilege and identity in jeopardy when he empowered the enslaved Black Americans with him to initiate a slave revolt. That was an instance of abolition, of true organization. Hodgkinson was no such man. He lashed out foolishly, and instead of putting a dent in the oppressive machinery of the GOP, he accidentally created an opportunity for Nazis to strengthen their already entrenched presence in our government and public discourse. We should recognize the nuances and the conditions that lead to this incident without punching Left. Our cause depends on it.