Apocalypse Always

Let us not be naive.

Elections have played host to violent and existential rhetoric since, well, forever.

The second contested American presidential election – the 1800 contest between Adams and Jefferson – was overrun by it. Congressional chaplain William Linn warned Americans that electing Jefferson would insult Washington’s ashes, destroy religion, and loosen all the bonds of society¹. Good Christians were cautioned against “indifference” to the “impending danger” of America’s “ruin” that would come at his hands, and reminded that they could not vote for Jefferson without “betraying [the] Lord.” The Jeffersonian camp, only a few years removed from Thomas’s reminder to Adams’s own son-in-law about the bloody manure of patriots and tyrants so necessary to water the tree of liberty, told Americans that the “hideous hermaphroditic character” of the oppressor² Adams would certainly launch a war with France and centralize tyrannical authority in the presidency. After all, he was secretly plotting to marry his children off to foreign princes in order to establish a lasting Adams monarchy in America.

The response of the Adams administration to these affronts was to use the newly printed Alien and Sedition Acts to throw just about anyone who levied such spicy language against the administration in jail. James Callender, the muckraker-for-hire who published the Reynolds Pamphlet you may remember from the musical Hamilton (“have you read this shit?”), was fined and jailed for his claims that Adams would be the End of the Republic^TM. Another supporter heard a gunshot at a parade in Jersey, was overheard remarking that he “hoped it hit Adams in the ass”, and got slapped with a citation for that bit of cheek, too. After a couple dozen such cases of what we might today call brazen lawfare (and after a couple journalists got their printing presses roughed up by violent mobs), the citizens of Kentucky and Virginia had had enough. Madison and Jefferson quietly acted as the pen behind the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which asserted the right of states to nullify what they saw as unconstitutional laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts. In yet another salvo of counter-battery fire, one of George Washington’s final observations before his death was to assert that Jefferson and Madison threatened to “dissolve the union” through these actions³.

Politicians, ministers, public figures, journalists, statesmen, and garden variety assholes have been threatening the End of the Republic^TM since the Beginning of the Republic. We are always beset by tyrants, demagogues, would-be dictators and monarchs, buffoons, cretins, devils, demons, infidels, foreign agents, Missourians, and narcissists. Should our opponents triumph, it has always meant the end of democracy, of our identity as a Christian nation, of the American Dream, of our way of life, of freedom and liberty and Chevrolets and Capitalism and love and puppies. Of America.

When Henry Clay handed John Quincy Adams the Presidency over Andrew Jackson in 1824, it was the first of several “corrupt bargains” that we would come to associate with the presidency for the next two centuries. To the Jacksonians and the press in their camp, Adams and the Democratic-Republicans were cheaters, liars, and thieves, inheritors to an illegitimate government that harbored dangerous imperial visions. In 1896, industrialists rent their garments and publicized claims that William Jennings Bryan would create an economic apocalypse. Bryan, in his turn, far more famously accused McKinley of crucifying humanity on a cross of gold. McKinley got himself shot, of course, only it wasn’t really a Bryan supporter who did it so much as an anarchist. Not that this stopped anyone from creating the more convenient Narrative.

A decade later, Roosevelt accused Taft of being a traitor to Republican ideals. In return, Taft gave a speech in April 1912 which he claimed that in Teddy the American people were “in danger of a dictator” who would “cling like a leech to the White House and never leave it.” Woodrow Wilson used the opportunity to make sure everyone knew that electing him was therefore the only way to save democracy, and Eugene Debs made sure everyone knew that the whole lot of them were just in it for Wall Street. William McKinley, dead for more than a decade, apparently used the opportunity to appear as a ghost to tell John Shrank to shoot Teddy dead. He failed.

A couple decades later, Hoover told us that FDR would destroy the foundations of the American way of life, while FDR told us that he was the only one that could save capitalism from itself. A couple decades after that, LBJ greenlit that ‘Daisy Girl’ ad to make sure Americans knew that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for global thermonuclear war, a view MLK was happy to co-sign in his assertions that a Goldwater presidency would be “suicidal” not just for America but the world. And all that’s skipping a certain period between 1861-1865 and just about every period in which some trigger-happy arm of the US government decided that it was done tolerating strikes, protests, or demonstrations.

So no, let us not be naive. There is nothing new under the sun. Politicians and the media have been blinding Americans with existential, violent rhetoric and threats since they realized that fear and hatred are pretty powerful forces when it comes to getting people to vote the way you want them to.

Let us also not be naive by pretending that there is no relationship between the purposeful escalation of language and the violent ends it contemplates. The propaganda to which we subject ourselves and our countrymen is infinitely more common and vastly more effective than agitprop from foreign belligerents. The origin of these very pages lies in the clear, unmistakable linguistic patterns observable historically in mass media which create the Common Knowledge that the moral threshold for violence has been met. It is a bit harder to know where the threshold between talking about the necessity of violence and actual violence is for the public than it is for a government hell-bent on engineering support for a military action it knows it will take. OK, it’s a lot harder. So no predictions here.

Just a warning.