Alarmism, Good Faith Disagreement, and 2020
This update is for a number of reasons more brief and less comprehensive than I was hoping my next post here would be. However, I feel a distinct sense of urgency at the moment, and felt it was better to get something out rather than wait.
Part of my distress arises from what I see as a notable lack of coverage of the gun-control debate here in Virginia. However, this piece by Lois Beckett is the first I’ve come across that properly and thoroughly puts the situation in context. The following passage best captures what I’ve been seeing personally in the last two months:
“White supremacist “accelerationists” have seized on the standoff as the potential beginning of a civil war that will destroy the United States and allow them to build a white nation in its ruins, according to Alex Friedfeld, a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League.
“The story they’re telling is that the Jews and immigrants are responsible for turning Virginia blue, and they’re coming to take your guns,” Friedfeld said.
…
To white supremacists, Virginia looks like a perfect example of their ideology: “You’ve got white replacement. You’ve got what they’re calling Jewish gun grabbers, and the people rising up, saying the government is illegitimate.”
My major critique of Beckett’s coverage is that it doesn’t specifically mention the bill central to the fears of gun owners generally, and anti-government militia-types in particular. This bill, submitted by State Senator Dick Saslaw (D), would make possession of an extensive set of firearms felonious in the Commonwealth. Saslaw’s proposed law, along with later proposals as varied as bans on indoor gun ranges, limiting martial arts training centers, and many more reasonable gun- and militia-related ideas such as ‘red-flag’ laws, are the crux of what spooked the online right starting just before Thanksgiving.
There are a number of threads I’d love to follow up on related to even just those few points, but what I’d really like to call your attention to now is an idea known as ‘high conflict.’ Although some of the points in this opinion piece stuck in my craw, it describes what I have seen growing by leaps and bounds since late November:
Because hatred is what we should be talking about these days, at least as much as we talk about the facts. The American people appear to be in a “high conflict,” which is a term of art among people who study conflict. A high conflict is one that feels existential and irresolvable, and it continues on its own momentum, even when specific problems could in fact be solved.
…
Hatred, though, is different. Hatred assumes the enemy is unchangeable. Irredeemable. Unimprovable. The goal of hatred, generally speaking, is not to correct; it’s to annihilate. Why correct someone who is inherently and immutably evil? Hatred, then, is an impediment to peace, Halperin says. It escalates and prolongs conflict, and it can motivate people to commit massacres.
I’m not an expert on internecine conflict or domestic terrorism, but I hope that my writings so far here demonstrate that these are topics I take seriously and watch with no small degree of apprehension. I’ve spoken with a few fellow anti-fascist and anti-racist activists lately, and most with any degree of familiarity with the situation here in Virginia at the very least share my confusion with Democratic strategy regarding gun control, if not the same level of concern over the increasingly-vocal and direct calls to violence online. However, I’ve been watching social media and forums where a lot of gun rights advocates, neo-Confederates, and of course outright neo-Nazis and fascists gather for years, and since the 2019 elections, I’ve checked into those places almost daily.
It’s my strong assessment that we here in the Commonwealth are in a high conflict. Many residents do not know it, but as Beckett detailed, many thousands are already thoroughly convinced that the time for an apocalyptic struggle is upon them. They are not interested in a ‘reasonable debate,’ or the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ I cannot overstate how intensely many of our neighbors, coworkers, and even out-of-state country-women and -men are spoiling for a fight. Even out-of-state war profiteers are positioning themselves to make money off of what thousands of Americans see as an inevitable fight:
And so what I hope you come away with from this post is that there is an alarm to be rung. I am ringing it, because I think we need frequent, frank, and sustained discussions in our personal lives as well as the media about the reality of our situation, in Virginia and in the country as a whole. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid, and I’m trying to keep the balance of personal care with measured, pragmatic preparation for things to get ugly, and fast. This is not how I wanted to start the new year and new decade, but here we are.
Please talk to me if you want to learn more, share ideas for action and deescalation, or just chat. I still believe building and maintain solidarity through concrete action and faith in each other’s shared humanity is indispensable to our mutual survival and thriving. Even if many of my fellow Virginians and Americans (at the moment) do not.
