The Shooting That Wasn't

Reflections on the White House Correspondents Dinner

I’ve had several people ask me what I think about the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and the honest answer is not much. First of all, it didn’t happen. And the thing about events that didn’t happen is they didn’t happen. Second, the guy’s plan seems not to have been terribly well thought out. Run into a highly guarded area with a big gun and…then what? And lastly, I think that most of the nation is just tired. In an era of big events, this feels like small potatoes.

The news media, the most self-important and self-dramatizing class of people in a nation full of self-important drama queens, would like us to believe this is a Big Moment™. But that’s because it was on their big night. They were there. And they won’t let us forget it. They are all acting like they did a tour of duty in Vietnam if they were at the WHCD. People in professions that are not as “performative,” as the kids say, showed more sangfroid. See, for example, former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in a housing project in East New York, seemed unfazed.

Now we have to do the whole national soul-searching thing. “Why did he do it? Who are we as a nation? Are we heading towards civil war?” Well, the interesting thing about Cole Tomas Allen—classic three-part assassin name—is that he was not from the extreme left pace attempts to pin this on Hasan Piker. He was not an anarchist or a “Third Worldist,” but a Bluesky denizen, an extremely angry liberal, the kind of Democrat who would fume about Bernie bros spoiling an election. What does this tell us? The normies are furious. Typically, we think that extreme views lead to extreme acts. But, as with Luigi Mangione, he seems to have politics that hovered near the center. Assassination is often a fundamentally conservative or reactionary choice: there’s a threat to an order, so you remove the threat. The most famous assassination in history, that of Julius Caesar, was done by aristocratic conservatives defending the old republican system. John Wilkes Booth, who modeled himself on the killers of Caesar, was a defender of the Old South. And obviously, the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr. did not like the changes he was bringing, etc. Allen viewed himself as a protector of American liberalism attacked by the revolutionary Trump regime. He would do by the gun what Comey and Mueller couldn’t do by law.

Incidentally, Marxists have never been much for terrorism—if you discount the decadent New Left groups of the 1970s, who were either totally ineffective or, in the European case, mainly used as tools by cynical Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the West. As Jeet Heer pointed out on Twitter, Trotsky once dismissed terrorists as “liberals with bombs.” That’s because even the most wild-eyed anarchists share the fundamentally liberal conclusion that if you get rid of certain people, things will change. Marxists wanted mass action with systemic goals. As Trotsky wrote in his 1911 pamphlet, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.”

A strike, even of modest size, has social consequences: strengthening of the workers’ self-confidence, growth of the trade union, and not infrequently even an improvement in productive technology. The murder of a factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of proprietors devoid of any social significance. Whether a terrorist attempt, even a ‘successful’ one throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete political circumstances. In any case the confusion can only be shortlived; the capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function.

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

You can see all this clearly at work in the Mangione situation, where he sadly has become a cult figure among an impotent left. One should also note a certain irony here in the fact that Trotsky himself fell victim to assassination. Stalin always believed that getting rid of people worked. But I digress.

As I always like to point out in the wake of such events, America is a big country, with a lot of irate and insane people who own a lot of guns. The miracle is that there is actually so little political violence in relation to the wide availability of the means. Especially, if you consider the American past. The 19th century was a vast bloodbath, even if you discount the Civil War or the genocidal campaigns against the Indians. Two presidents were killed within its bounds, and a third barely outside of it. You couldn’t have an election without a city rioting for days, and many of the candidates being bludgeoned before they could take office. Theatrical performances were beset by angry crowds intent on disposing of actors they didn’t like. Mobs pulled preachers from their pulpits for saying maybe we ought not to keep other men in chains. Feuding families picked off each other’s cousins. Irishmen of opposing sorts would turn any parade into an occasion for bloodshed. A southern representative nearly beat a U.S. senator to death on the floor of the Senate chamber. Not to mention the daily horrors inflicted on slaves for the purposes of keeping them in that condition. You know I’m not the type to discount the uniquely threatening aspects of this era, but when the New York Times writes, “[T]he violence has engulfed the nation’s entire political system at all levels of government,” my response, like Tim Barker’s, is that they should get a fucking grip.

I don’t mean to be callous; Far from it, but I would just point out that there’s a ton of violence today that’s not really political at all—spree killers deciding to off their classmates and the like—that we mostly now shrug at and consider inevitable. And like all Americans, I think I’m growing slightly inured. When there are so many real occasions to frown, it’s exhausting to do the brow-furrowing ritual.

One last thought, about the Second Amendment: a lot of 2A proponents talk about its necessity to fight against tyranny. But who decides what constitutes a tyranny? The entire point of being armed, it would seem, is that you don’t have to wait for others to come to the same conclusion but can act of your own accord. “But wait, that’s not really a tyranny!” you might protest. Yes, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It would then appear, from a Machiavellian point of view, that the threat of assassination would be a feature rather than a bug of our constitutional system. An armed society is a polite society, as they say. I’ve always pointed out that the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment interact in volatile ways: First, you have people with guns exposed to heated rhetoric, and second, you have people with guns exposed to the heated rhetoric of the other guys, which may piss them off. Can we have a civil government with the implied assumption of a state of low-grade civil war? Is freedom of speech and association compatible with the freedom to acquire a small arsenal? These are questions that never seem to come up in our moments of “national soul-searching” in the wake of such events. Instead, we do that very American thing of waffling between being mawkishly sentimental and wanting to Act Now to Fix the Problem and just not giving much of a shit about anybody else.