By contemporary US standards, the reaction to what was clearly an attempt to assassinate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist, which ended up with her elderly husband severely beaten with a hammer, was unsurprising. Fox News commentators blamed Democrats for the attack and expressed sympathy for the attacker by suggesting he’d been harshly treated. Republicans used the attack to claim Democrats were soft on crime. Right-wing commentators claimed the attack was a hoax and a false flag operation. Elon Musk, who is committed to restoring extremism, hate speech and conspiracy theories to Twitter, personally spread misinformation about the attack.
In a country where the president tried to incite an insurrection to overturn his election loss, where right-wing terrorism has for years been identified by law enforcement agencies as the country’s biggest security threat, where anti-Semitism is surging and where right-wing Republicans routinely threaten political opponents with violence or murder, it seems one more step along the way to civil war.
Much of the US mainstream media continues to treat the rise in violence and hate speech as a both-sides problem, the result of polarisation for which Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans. Some major outlets, like The Washington Post, have begun explicitly pushing back against both-sideism, noting that it is Republicans who have become more extreme and more hateful in their rhetoric — a process that began with the Tea Party movement, which transformed into openly racist “birtherism” about the first Black president, and saw its full flowering in Trump and an explosion in conspiracy-theorist thinking within the mainstream GOP.
It’s important to note none of this is unprecedented, even putting aside the Civil War. Violent, often deeply repugnant, rhetoric characterised the “debates” of many of the now-sainted founding fathers in the early years of the republic; the 1850s was characterised by extremist rhetoric and violence by slaveholder interests. Conspiracy theorising has long been a key feature of US politics from colonial times right through to now. Racist terrorism was a key feature of the South from reconstruction to the 21st century. The 1960s and early 1970s saw widespread terrorism, intense polarisation, constant rioting and political violence.
What’s different is that conspiracy theory thinking hasn’t been this mainstream since before the Civil War. Many conservatives fought hard to keep extremism and conspiracy theorists like the John Birch Society out of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s, and succeeded; the likes of Liz Cheney fighting MAGA Republicans and Trump are now the last remnants of rationality in a party where the fight against extremism has been lost. And there’s an entire mainstream media ecosystem that helps spread conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric, along with social media.
And, not too far away, is the prospect of Trump, a blatant criminal and would-be dictator, making another bid for the presidency — or a smarter, more wily version of him.
What’s still more worrying is that this is happening at a time when the economy is growing and unemployment is at just 3.5% and wages growth is over 6% in nominal terms.
Next year is likely to see a US recession as a result of the Federal Reserve’s determination to smash inflation — as part of a globally concerted monetary contraction (and continuing serious problems in the Chinese economy). A serious recession, one that sees unemployment spike and worries about joblessness (and all that entails in the US, like losing access to healthcare) spread among voters, will only further encourage extremism, tribalism and populism. History shows economic uncertainty is a great friend to tribalism, ethnocentrism and populism around the world.
For the United States, it will have meant 9/11, two major wars, the financial crisis and the ensuing great recession, a pandemic and another recession, all in the space of a quarter of a century.
And in that same period, we’ve all been handed a new technology to create our own communities, spread hate and misinformation and organise violence from the palms of our hands — by platforms that maximise revenues by maximising the amount of time we spend on our screens and how angry we feel about what we’re seeing.
This is a long way of saying that however awful things are in the US currently, all the risks are downside ones: things could get much uglier, and it’s not implausible that that’s exactly what will happen. Like the near-fatal assault on Charles Sumner by a slaver senator on the floor of the US senate in 1856, the attack on Paul Pelosi might end up being a footnote to a far darker chapter just a few years later.
