Perpetuum vigilante
Jordan Neely's funeral will be held today in Harlem.
On May 1, Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine, placed Neely, who was homeless, in a chokehold as Neely was behaving erratically toward other riders on the New York City subway. Neely asphyxiated and died, and now Penny is charged with second degree manslaughter. But Neely, like other vigilantes Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin and Daniel Perry in Texas, has become a hero on the right. He's gotten praise from GOP politicians and received over $2 million in donations for his legal defense after appeals on right-wing media.
The whole thing got me thinking about violence, impunity, and democracy. So I called up New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who's been writing about white vigilantism and the right. Our conversation has been edited for length.
This vigilante violence isn't new but the celebration of it on the national scene as a sort of a political identifier is kind of new. What do you think is going on here?
Yeah, what's new is the extent that it's migrated into national partisan politics. And respectable political figures celebrating it is quite new. This is politicians simply following where their voters are. And one thing that has certainly been true in the last half decade is how the conservative media consumer (aka the GOP base), has moved to having these fantasies of a cleansing violence. That means attacking protesters or running them down with their cars, for example. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, some Republican legislatures passed bills that made it not a crime to run over a protester with your car.
Actual disorder is localized and relatively uncommon. But conservative media is constantly broadcasting images of disorder and mayhem. The message is that this is all the result of the "the left." Now there are many Americans who sincerely believe that in 2020 entire cities were burned to the ground, or were "no-go zones." Taken together, it's inculcated a sense that it's either us or them, and using violence against "them" is a totally acceptable response.
For me what rings through is impunity. Daniel Perry deserves impunity. Daniel Penny deserves impunity and money. The entire apparatus of the House Republican Conference is geared toward impunity for Jan. 6, and certainly for Trump.
There's a belief that it's not just wrong to try to hold these people accountable, that it's illegitimate to do so. Because in their minds they did nothing wrong. And this gets back to the original idea about order. Whether it's vigilante actors in the streets or Jan. 6 rioters, they see themselves and their supporters see them as upholding the proper order of things. So to hold them accountable is illegitimate because it's favoring disorder.
It seems like rioting to overthrow an election, and organizing to overthrow it, is the disorder!
And in the New York subway case, to me the disorder is choking someone to death. New York has a real homelessness problem, and the fact that the city and the state has failed to address homelessness and mental illness is a real thing. Being in a subway car with an aggressive homeless person is unsettling. And yet, lethal force and violence is a dramatic line to cross. That fundamentally changes the social order. To my mind, the choking to death is the really disordered thing here. Many people don't perceive it that way.
Vigilante violence on a subway is something different than political violence in a "stolen election." But what do you think the risk is for democracy?
American electoral democracy has coexisted pretty comfortably with dramatic violence over the course of history. The time I always refer back to is Reconstruction, where there is pervasive violence related directly to elections. People assaulting registrars, assaulting and killing voters, etc. For a long time after the 1960's we've had very little. Now, things like the subway choking or vigilante killings have a political valence, even if they're not overtly around politics. And there's a risk that acceptance for politically identified vigilante violence opens up space for electoral violence. Both are bad. But both can coexist in a big country in a way that doesn't bear on a typical person's experience in an election. Sporadic political violence is really the norm in America, and we may have lived through the exception.
It's strange to feel like there's more political violence coming but maybe we can live it.
This is clarifying. If the violence is sporadic and inchoate I don't necessarily think it has much of an impact. But if it's specific and targeted at particular groups and classes of people, then that can begin to really raise the stakes in a dangerous way for democracy. Especially if it's not addressed and prosecuted, it can degrade the citizenship of those other people. This is what happens in Reconstruction. Unpunished violence against Black people raises the stakes in elections but also just degrades the citizenship of Black Americans in the South.
I was wondering how we were going to get from subway violence and anti-protester violence to accountability for the coup attempt and I think we just I think we just tied them together.
I've written about this. When people commit violence with impunity, it creates the conditions for more violence. Jan. 6, is an interesting case because the actual people on the ground have been held legally accountable, but the political leaders responsible, so far, have been able to go about their merry way. And I think that's a sign of how American political culture doesn't really know how to deal with that type of thing, and never has. You know, the leaders of the Confederacy mostly died at home, in their beds. Not in prison, not exiled, not kicked out of politics, but just peacefully at home. And this country has a very difficult time dealing with erstwhile legitimate political actors who attempt to overturn the system. And so that says to me, from the subway to Jan. 6, there's a lot at stake here.
There's probably a lot more accountability to come this summer. Don't miss a charge! Sign your friends up for Breaking the Vote!
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