Well, after this second attempt to murder Trump—and I mean second attempt this campaign, since you may remember even earlier incidents like that man lunging at him onstage years ago and then getting off with a slap on the wrist plus a softball TV interview—it should be interesting to see the media try to dismiss it as having nothing to do with larger forces such as war or geopolitics.
Would-be killer Ryan Routh’s posts made it clear he’s a pro-Ukraine fanatic who’s been involved in efforts in multiple nations, including Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, to funnel fighters to the front lines against Russia. The odds he did that entirely with money from his roofing business seem slim, as do the odds that he had no inside help with his thwarted attack on Trump, since he seemed to know Trump’s golf schedule.
On the side, Routh found time to praise Bernie Sanders and renounce his own earlier conservative tendencies, a bit like the ex-Republican “NeverTrump” crowd that has coalesced around William Kristol, who also likes to see fighters funneled across continents to fight foreign foes. Kristol’s fellow neocon-Democrat Hillary Clinton reacted to Routh’s attack by telling MSNBC, in her usual grouchy, grumbling style, “I don’t understand why it is so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.”
Obviously, the press has been pretty consistent in pushing that narrative, which is part of the problem. New media has helped in its subtler way, too, and Zuckerberg and others quickly deleted Routh’s social media history, or tried to, the better to enable the establishment to decide what narrative to spin around what for now we’re meant to see as the latest utterly unexpected random crazy attacker.
But the attackers aren’t so unexpected at this point, and the line between shooters trained by the military, police, or intelligence sector who “went rogue” and shooters who were always intended to attack perceived enemies of the regime is getting pretty blurry. By now, even the most anti-establishment among us are nearly conditioned to expect police to hand out weapons to rioters and the military to provide cover fire for terrorists. Perhaps they’ll be doing that openly soon—and even right-wingers will cheer if they’re told it’s all part of a crackdown against illegal immigrants or leftists. We’ve gotten about that numb.
Even the most sedate, establishment-ensconced defenders of the U.S.’s Ukraine mission and lofty-sounding liberal critics of Trump can’t resist straying into their own brand of authoritarian talk, little better than the evils they imagine in Trump’s every utterance. Take my old college acquaintance turned Yale professor, Ukraine expert, and author of multiple New York Times bestsellers Tim Snyder, whose 2009 book The Red Prince about century-ago Habsburgs I liked but who seems to get more frothingly insane the closer he gets to writing about the present day.
His intimate familiarity in college with some libertarians doesn’t seem to have taught him much. Not only does his brand-new book On Freedom peddle the usual Political Philosophy 101 half-truths about how we need a big welfare state and a whole scheme of “positive liberty” because property rights don’t guarantee you won’t end up sleeping under a bridge etc., but in his embarrassingly unphilosophical effort to blame his present-day ideological foes for the deep wrongs of Ukrainian history, he has even described the Nazis as pursuing a program of libertarianism in that land.
You see, they permitted lawless attacks on the populace, which in Snyder’s mind is the ultimate deregulation. By this sophistry (probably sufficient to get you a National Book Award or maybe even a Nobel these days, or at least a gig with RawStory or Demos), you could declare anyone from Stalin to the corner pickpocket a strict adherent of libertarian property rights. And now Snyder’s in charge of some big official project to safeguard Ukrainian history or something, no doubt sending a lot of money sloshing around in his general direction.
By all means, hate Trump if you must—and his crackpot associates such as pundit Laura Loomer, who I criticized years ago when she was just a twentysomething violating property rights by interrupting anti-Trump theatre performances and chaining herself to Twitter’s headquarters—but don’t let your focus on him blind you to how awful, biased, politicized, and rotten the left-liberals with whom he spars are.
That left-liberal establishment is also violent, and it inspires violence, in part by its insistence that its righteous rage is necessary to counter purported existential threats from the right. Trump may be garish, but he didn’t create the military-industrial complex or invent slush funds for underwriting globetrotting, angry snipers.
Part of the tragedy of Weimar Germany, the regime that collapsed into Naziism, is that it tends to be remembered now more for its tastelessness and bourgeois decadence than for the ravenous totalitarian wolves on both left and right that waited to tear it apart if it faltered. Get too enthusiastic about bashing one faction and egging on another and you may just be fueling the cycle of violence, and it may manifest in ways you didn’t foresee, all while non-partisan forms of liberty wither in between the feuding factions, looked down upon with condescension.
If you forgive the punches thrown by either Antifa or the Proud Boys on the streets today—not to mention political assassins—no matter how awful you think the other side is, you may reap a political whirlwind similar to that that resulted from people picking sides in brawls between Stalinists and fascists in the streets of Weimar. Don’t snipe at moderate, gentle, bourgeois things such as property rights, civility, individualism, and libertarianism—the way the prudes of both left and right a century ago condemned the purportedly weak-willed shopkeeps and normal people of Weimar—or you may one day realize you were writing the first draft of the arguments that will be used later by totalitarians or violent lunatics, for all your claims to have been the one fending them off.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey