Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

We are going to have define terms. You're not going to weasel your out of this using your vocabulary.

Is TacFlamers damage in the 30s?


En garde!

Hannah Arendt wants to distinguish between violence and power. One perspective she briefly cites (in On Violence) is one that, while not exactly equating the two or linking violence to a manifestation of power, describes power as like a subset of violence. (But Arendt would not agree, arguing that violence and power are opposite.) Speaking on democracy, the institutions and laws of republican government are maintained not by power of men or laws, but of the people's consent in the legitimacy of the two. In other words, the people exercise the power over the state to give the state power, or to diminish it (separate from authority).


There are plenty of conceptions of political violence today, but I think most which don't simply limit or predicate the definition to or on bodily force, harm, or intimidation for political cause or in political context, are related to the musings above. (Though again Arendt would disagree, seeing violence as instrumental rather than as a relationship inflicting "damage".)

A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable in the suppression of the rights of minorities and
very effective in the suffocation of dissent without any use of violence. But that does not mean that violence and power are the same.

So, in light of a recursive power to power of republican subjects, protest could be interpreted directly as an act of violence against the state in that it aims to turn that power against itself, to diminish it.

To be clear, you would be much likelier to see leftist activists espousing views on political violence that can label most acts of policy as potentially or inherently violent, and probably only radicals who accept protest itself as inherently violent. I don't actually follow anarchist theory or praxis to be precise about it, but have encountered various Internet conversations, so I look to the classic work for familiar ground. What I mean with my post above is that Republicans hoping to expand laws in the interest of limiting undesirable protest, or punishing those who engage in it, fall into the trap of playing with this logic of power. The legislation can't operate without the assumption that protest is violence diffuse, with individual eruptions emerging therefrom, which on its face then has to contradict the letter of the Constitution - which would have to be interpreted as legitimizing this specific violence of people over state. Now we're in Steve Bannon territory or sommthin. A Republican sticking to their more natural instinct that the process of protest and any given violent event must be distinguished cannot simply find "a protest" a violent enterprise, so law or policy should only be used to either balance the exercise of protest against other rights or somehow trim about a "true" core of protest. So traditionalists can defend the Boston Tea Party by pointing out holistic virtues, or by separating out the destruction or rowdiness for condemnation apart from the rest. But that's another story

Just a notion.




On a more concrete note, some old surveys from the early 70s suggest an interesting diversity in common understandings of violence.

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