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Rhetoric, Palin, and the Arizona shooting

A friend asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin’s responsibility with regard to the Arizona shooting. Here’s what I wrote back.

People have seized upon Palin as a very visible example of unacceptably over-heated rhetoric. This is not entirely unfair — Palin has done much to poison the dialogue, and there are many examples that people have unearthed. But the problem is much bigger than Palin. Advocacy of violence has been SOP for the GOP for a long time now, and there are many who have done it much more consistently than Palin. I’m thinking of Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage — at times, the most popular commentators on the Right. Check this link for many more examples of violent eliminationist rhetoric.

Does this send some people over the edge? Well, direct causation is hard to determine. I tend to view this a bit probabilistically. Let me use the example of health. In any population, there will be robust, healthy individuals, and some people on the margins. And there are always some nasty germs around in the population, and there’s a chance you might get sick from them, but you might not if you’re otherwise healthy. But if we now inject other factors into the population, it changes the odds. Say there’s an earthquake where services get knocked out. Now we’ll see the entire population moving toward poor health. Many people will remain healthy, but the probability of getting sick rises, and it’s going to send a certain percentage of least healthy individuals over the edge.

Similarly, if you have a population of individuals ranging from nice to crazy, and you change the environment so that formerly unacceptable kinds of discourse become commonplace, and in fact so common as to be barely noticeable, you are raising the chances that someone on the edge will take action (though they may not). This time someone did.

I also think our toxic discourse has the effect of hiding people with real problems: “I didn’t think anything when he said that; people on the radio say things like that all the time.” How do we know that someone wearing this shirt isn’t a potential shooter?

How about this guy?

They’re just normal guys, right? Or they could be crazies. They seem crazy to me. But if these people aren’t crazy, they’re making the real crazies that much harder to spot.

I don’t want to put limits on what people can say just because a mentally ill person might take them seriously, but I think it’s time for people to draw the line and vote with their feet and their money when media personalities engage in this kind of talk.

Finally, what I find most objectionable is the attempt of right-wing apologists to disclaim any responsibility by saying the shooter was a crazy guy. Well, yes, he was a crazy guy. Who else would do that if they weren’t? But he was also someone who used a gun for its intended purpose, acting on cues from the most significant and well-paid voices on the right. The GOP claims to stand for personal responsibility, but this incident has shown me that, once again, they don’t believe their own story. Everyone is responsible but them.

2 Comments

  1. Interesting take on the issue. While as a left-leaning Australian, I find the violence in American political rhetoric both baffling and concerning, the evidence doesn't seem to support the contention that this shooting was motivated by right-wing commentators, and I think much of the commentary on the left is political opportunism.

    I'll never understand why so many Americans are convinced that things like gun control (and universal healthcare) are antithetical to a free society. They seem to be working out just fine for every other developed nation. We haven't descended into authoritarianism just yet!

    – A ling1101 student from 2007 🙂

  2. You know the odd thing, though — and this was just my experience: When I heard people making this connection, it wasn't 'left-wing' media outlets, it was outraged individuals on Facebook. Somehow people seemed to connect the dots on their own, right or wrong.

    The Palin/violence connection to me has the feel of these 'conventional wisdom' things that so often turn out to be wrong. But I would buy the idea that this is one of those long-term systemic things. The pot has been simmering for a long time. I don't think it was a coincidence that the target was a Democrat.

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