The New Anarchy
America is facing a type of extremist violence it doesn’t know how to stop, wrote Adrienne LaFrance in the April 2023 issue.
Adrienne LaFrance acknowledges that political violence can have a legitimate place in a democratic society, noting that “America was born in revolution.” But if the excesses imposed by King George in the 1760s and 70s presented a just cause for rebellion against the state, why not the more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings of American citizens by the police in 2022? If we want to treat political violence as the serious problem it is, we need to know when, if ever, it is legitimate.
Keaton Powers
Laredo, Texas
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LaFrance is right to identify universal access to guns, a fragmented media environment, and the refusal of extreme MAGA Republicans to accept electoral defeat as new challenges to the American social fabric. But these factors exist in the larger context of a shift in the racial and ethnic makeup of the United States, and thus a shift in the country’s power relations. The best point of reference for understanding the rise of violence in the US today is not the anarchist movement or Italy’s lead years, but the much deeper crisis of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this historical transformation, the balance of power between the races shifted and the country witnessed much worse violence than what we face today.
The current wave of Trumpist backlash is rooted, I believe, in an incipient fear of a demographic shift that will turn whites into a minority. The Trump movement is a defensive last gasp of a dying culture of white supremacy.
Mark Robert Schneider
Weymouth, Mass.
The dark shadow of Trumpism and its violence mars LaFrance’s article. However, LaFrance deliberately chooses not to frame his discussion around the specific threat posed by far-right groups or MAGA Republicans and their attacks on democracy. While he is right to identify an “action-reaction dynamic” between right-wing and left-wing extremists, his bipartisanship goes too far.
LaFrance concludes that ending political violence will require “confronting those who use the language of democracy to undermine democratic systems.” It is obvious that in American politics today there is only one movement and one party that these words describe: MAGA Republicanism. The clear implication of “The New Anarchy” is that ending political violence now means decisively defeating the Republican Party. I wish LaFrance had said it directly.
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Bloomington, Ind.
Adrienne LaFrance replies:
Thanks to everyone who read my story. I chose the periods of violence I examined not because they offer easy solutions to get out of these dangerous times, if only!, but because they carry serious warnings that I think Americans need to heed. It would be too easy to say that the perpetrators of violence should be held accountable, of course they are. But history shows again and again that in periods of political violence, too much government is a serious danger. Palmer’s unconstitutional raids may have suppressed anarchist violence in the 1920s, for example, but at a cost that is too high to ever be repeated. I am deeply concerned about what will happen to Americans’ civil liberties if political violence continues to worsen.
As I have written, there is no doubt that Trumpism is a cauldron for the far right, which is the main driver of political violence in America today. Even more alarming is the GOP’s continued obsequiousness to Donald Trump: in essence, political violence is now explicitly state-endorsed. But it is not enough to point out this threat, say who is responsible and hope that doing so will go away. That’s why I focused on how right-wing extremists have managed to provoke violent reactions from their political enemies. This is an extraordinarily dangerous dynamic that fuels propaganda and disinformation, masks who is primarily responsible, exacerbates state violence, and accelerates decivilization and democratic backsliding. Finally, Mark Robert Schneider is absolutely right to point out the underlying racism that animates so many right-wing extremists. That is why I mentioned the post-Reconstruction campaign known perversely as Redemption and called it an urgent warning: sometimes political violence ends not because it has been defeated, but because it has achieved its goals.
The moral case against euphemism
Banning words won’t make the world fairer, argued George Packer in the April 2023 issue.
I think George Packer overestimates the influence of institutional language, which is intended to be as broad, inoffensive and inclusive as possible to appeal to a wide and varied audience and, by extension, attract more donors, shareholders and investors. No one is insisting that you stop calling yourself “pregnant woman” if you think that applies to you: colloquial and everyday language will always be different from professional or institutional language.
However, there are ongoing, state-backed attempts to censor words and even entire academic disciplines, but Packer neglects them. Compared to the horrifying power of censorship at the legislative level, Packer’s complaints about institutional style guides pale into insignificance.
Cristina Tavella
Boston, Massachusetts.
As a civil rights lawyer, I question the kind of performative progressivism at the heart of the equity conversation. Fairness language often functions as a way for progressives to get their discomfort with their own privilege out without doing anything substantive about it.
But cultural changes in language are not always insidious or performative, and can sometimes be legitimately beneficial. Packer’s passing mention of gender inclusive language fails to note that it is quite easy to implement and very meaningful for trans and gender non-conforming people. I am a cisgender woman, but present more androgynously. When I see pronouns included in people’s email signatures or gender-neutral language (as opposed to he/she) used in official documents, I feel like I can express myself honestly in my workplace . I am more engaged, more outgoing and more passionate when I can be myself. These subtle changes in language are deeply meaningful to me.
Mackenzie Karbon
washington dc
George Packer replies:
It is true that institutional equity language guides are written for a narrow audience, but they are not hermetically sealed from the wider culture. They are all based, as I have described, on the recommendations of “experts” whose influence extends deep into the mainstream, including media organizations. Its use is widespread because no well-intentioned person wants to be caught on the wrong side of a forbidden word. Otherwise, unnatural terms like Latin and person involved in justice would remain the private language of a small priesthood.
The language of gender would have needed a whole article of its own, with a different analysis. The utterance of pronouns can be more inclusive, except when necessary, which becomes a new form of exclusion of those who do not accept the current gender ideology. I didn’t write about state legislative bans on books and ideas, because that’s another issue, too, one that has been much, and deservedly so, criticized in The Atlantic and elsewhere. I concluded my story with a reference to right-wing linguistic orthodoxy, and I hope to expand on it in another story. My purpose in this was to point out how the proliferation of a quasi-official, imprecise, euphemistic, jargon-filled, ever-changing vocabulary in the name of social justice actually makes it harder to see and remedy injustice. Anyone who cares about justice shouldn’t be too quick to change the subject.
Behind the deck
In this month’s cover story, “The Counteroffensive,” Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg report on the stakes in Ukraine’s battle to oust Russia from its territory. Visiting the front lines and discussing the end of the war with President Volodymyr Zelensky, they consider what a Ukrainian victory might mean for democracies around the world. Our cover features original art and hand lettering by musician Bono.
— Oliver MundayAssociate Creative Director
This article appears in the June 2023 print edition under the title “The Commons”.
