All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.
Six years ago, Republican candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada openly fantasized about “Second Amendment remedies” in the midst of an electoral struggle for control of the U.S. Senate:
You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?’ I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.
Some weeks earlier, Angle had warned that the nation is arming for insurrection in lieu of election:
That tells me the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways? That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?
Angle would later try to clarify, saying she was not explicitly calling for the assassination of her opponent; scholars of political rhetoric such as Brett Lunceford did not find her walk-balk particularly persuasive:
Although Angle would later argue that she was not advocating Reid’s assassination, the subtext is impossible to ignore. As Senate Majority Leader, Reid is a representative of the “tyrannical government” Angle rails against. If one is not to take up arms against such a representative, then against whom should the attack be leveled? But one need not actually name names; demonizing the government as an abstract entity is a potent rhetorical strategy that both attacks the opposition and builds up the true believers. As Richard Gregg notes, “By painting the enemy in dark hued imagery of vice, corruption, evil, and weakness, one may more easily convince himself of his own superior virtue and thereby gain a symbolic victory of ego-enhancement.” To put it another way, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
Few modern politicians embody this demonizing impulse more perfectly that the current GOP candidate for president, who takes care to invoke the imagery of “vice, corruption, evil, and weakness” at every opportunity. Recently, Donald Trump chose to go further and invoke the well-known imagery of armed resistance to tyranny in a campaign speech, where the dog-whistle of insurrection came across loudly and clearly:
Guy behind Trump immediately realized what he said was a problem. https://t.co/F3mSP9GLqt
— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) August 9, 2016
Trump will try to walk this back, just as Angle did. He will try to say he was just joking, rather than meaningfully signaling the values behind his movement. Don’t believe it for a moment. When far-right patriot movement adherents talk of watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, they are not speaking in mere metaphors. When they speak of “Second Amendment remedies” they are not talking about the majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. When they ask “[W]hat will be the next step?” if they don’t win at the ballot box, the answer is “fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways” just as Angle said.
Donald Trump is not tossing off context-free quips, he is addressing a particular subculture wherein it is considered orthodoxy that the Second Amendment serves to protect people from tyrannical government overreach to this very day, just as it did at the time of the founding. This implications of such reasoning should be both obvious and disturbing to all who value a civil society.
