What Does It Mean To Incite Violence?
All political speech potentially incites violence. Political violence, though, requires a certain sort of listener.
It is a mistake to speak of violence, and its incitement, strictly in the third person. If we want to understand how incitement works, it is useful to consider violence, especially political violence, in the first person. What would it take, for me, to send pipe bombs through the mail? Could I be persuaded to murder anybody, under any circumstances? And should someone be allowed to try to convince me? After all, violence is human, and nothing that is human is alien to me (or you).
For me, it would require an acute sense of threat, helplessness, vulnerability, and exposure, as well as a sense that the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of violence.
When put this way, much of the difficulty in understanding that incitement to violence can work vanishes. But how can that sense be created? And how do we know it when we see it?
These questions are necessary because our understanding of incitement is clouded by at least two factors.
Firstly, it is clouded by political bias. We are far more likely to think our political opponents are inciting violence than our political allies. I have yet to hear a single person say, “I agree with what you are saying, but it is simply too dangerous to say, and should never be said again.”
It is not a coincidence that Ted Cruz accuses Black Lives Matter of inciting police murders, and opponents of President Trump think he inspired the “MAGA bomber,” the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and other instances of political violence. This is not to say we never disdain our provocative political allies. Rather, there’s a temptation to label ideological opponents as murderers, which should be checked.
On a related point, if we attempted to impose serious legal remedies for incitement to violence, we would be required to ban both the Bible and the Koran, which contain clear attempts to incite violence.
Secondly, the question of incitement is clouded by what violence we consider legitimate. The president is generally not accused of “inciting” violence when, for example, he orders missile strikes against Syria. This could be considered one of the clearest cases of incitement, since there is an indisputable causal pathway between the words the president utters and the missile strikes.
But that is not what is meant by incitement. Nor is campaigning for a war-mongering candidate. State violence is granted a legitimacy that non-state violence does not receive. Indeed, deeming certain speech “incitement” has historically been a tool of the state to repress dissent (see, for example, Abrams vs. U.S.).
It is also interesting to note the power gap that is implied when we accuse someone of incitement. Little people listen and carry out the dirty work, while big people inspire and persuade. The powerful incite the powerless, not the other way around. Jihadist propagandists rarely put on the vest themselves. In other words, if a charismatic big-mouth ever makes you feel like hurting someone, consider if you are being manipulated for his purposes.
While the speaker attempting to incite violence occupies higher social stratum than the intended audience, the successful completion of an act of incited violence is actually much more dependent on the listener. Historians who specialize in fascism or the Second World War consume more Nazi propaganda that virtually anyone. Yet they don’t become Nazis.
Racist incitement, or any political communication, clearly does not have a reliable causal relationship with violence. The influence of inflammatory rhetoric is uneven, and nearly impossible to predict.
Although I’m focusing here on inciting another person to attack third parties, the listener is also decisive in cases in which the listener is taunted to attack the speaker (“fighting words”) or is convinced to commit self-harm.
Incitement should then be understood as a function of the listener’s vulnerability, or receptiveness, to certain appeals. Though more powerful, the big speaker ultimately does not decide if what he says results in an actual act of incitement. The little listener does.
Any political communication, or expression of threat, contains in it the potential to inspire violence. I would go further, and argue that political speech is interesting precisely because it could inspire violence, or already has. There is, then, some level of incitement that we should be prepared to tolerate.
How then, if words do not reliably cause violence, and if the speaker does not control how he will be interpreted, can we ever hold anyone accountable for incitement?
The concept may indeed be unworkable from a legal perspective. I would need a prosecutor to prove that the speaker intended to incite (hard to prove), that what was said was known by the speaker to be clearly and totally false (truth can easily incite violence, and it is not always clear what is true in politics), and that violence occurred because of what was said (close to impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt).
The possibility of spurious causation lurks in any discussion of incitement. How do we know that another factor is not simultaneously causing both the violent rhetoric and the violent action?
A clean causal pathway between Soros-caravan conspiracies propagated by the president of the United States — along with career white nationalists — and racist slaughter cannot be demonstrated. However, instead of asking if rhetoric can ever generate or cause violence, we might instead ask if rhetoric can ever facilitate or encourage violence. This question is illuminated by a different question: “Can rhetoric ever prevent or inhibit violence?”
It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that rhetoric does have the power to encourage violence, even as most arguments that hold the speaker causally responsible remain unconvincing. It would also be very difficult to run for national office, when a candidate’s arguments often stress the vital importance of his election.
The distinctions made between Cesar Sayoc (the MAGA Bomber) and James Hodgkinson (the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to murder Congressman Scalise last June) are also lacking. The attempts to exonerate Bernie miss the point: If you want to find a reason to justify shooting Republican congressmen, you’ll easily find one, and Sanders supporters are vulnerable to certain appeals. Focusing on what Sanders says is a mistake. The focus should be how everyone else hears what he says.
Maybe Bernie didn’t inspire Hodgkinson himself, but there is no deficit of think pieces and tweets that could potentially justify what he did. This observation again raises the possibility of spurious causation.
Maybe Trump’s ridiculous speeches about migrants and Sayoc’s bombs are effects of the same cause, with economic malaise and declining white demographic dominance being prime suspects.
Incitement to violence is not a straightforward process, and more often than not serves as a political weapon to discredit opposition. But this is easy for me to say: I am not the one being shot at. For some communities, this is a question of life and death. The risk of incitement might be low, but the consequences can be catastrophic.
The fact that Trump is willing to take the risk of inciting his audience, and has not yet walked back any of his more outrageous claims about refugees and the news media, make his condemnations of violence ring hollow. Trump, and everyone else, needs to consider not so much what they say (although Trump could try), but how others hear it.
If refugees are as big a threat as Trump says — if they are truly dangerous “invaders” — it is not entirely illogical to conclude that attacking them and their allies is an act of desperate self defense.
Robert Bowers seems to have reached that conclusion before he assassinated 11 congregants of a Pittsburgh synagogue.
