Better bothsidesism than my-sidesism
On rushing to blame our opponents for political violence, waiting for the facts be damned.
Billy Binion, writing in Reason, bemoans the great game of "gotcha!" between Democrats/leftists and Republicans/right-wingers that breaks out whenever an act of deadly political violence is carried out - usually before the victims’ bodies have cooled:
When it came to the Minnesota shooting on Saturday—during which a man named Vance Boelter allegedly killed Rep. Melissa Hortman (D–Brooklyn Park) and her husband, Mark, and wounded state Sen. John Hoffman (D–Champlin) and his wife, Yvette—many public figures leapt over some of the basics and jumped straight to something else: the shooter's politics.
It's an understandable impulse when considering some of the victims were politicians. But the issue here is less that people asked the question—it's that they went straight to answering it.
"This is what happens when Marxists don't get their way," Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) said on X on Saturday, not long after the news broke. He soon followed up with another post: "Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street," he wrote, with side-by-side photos of Boelter, one of him holding a gun and the other of him smiling. It was an apparent dig at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is a Democrat. (Both posts have since been deleted.)
[…]
Meanwhile, details would start coming out that would prove inconvenient for Republicans' narrative. Boelter was a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, his roommate told the local press, something others close to him have confirmed. An evangelical Christian, he had been sharply critical of abortion and said that people who identify as gay and gender-nonconforming do so because "the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul." Government records show he was registered as a Republican in Oklahoma. (Minnesota voters do not declare an affiliation when they register in that state.)
In other words, unless Boelter experienced a recent, secret political conversion, all signs point to the notion that he was, in fact, a Republican. Does it matter?
In some sense, sure. Prosecutors will be interested in his background in piecing together a motive. And the aforementioned Republicans, ironically, made Boelter's partisan association matter far more than it otherwise would have when they chose to spread what appears to be viral fake news. (Also ironic is that those same people often complain the loudest about fake news. Alas.)
Yet those conservatives simultaneously (and unwittingly) made the case for why Boelter's politics should not matter much at all. The premature posts made clear that their actual goal was not a righteous desire to get to the bottom of things or to bring justice to two people who had just been killed in their own home. It was to score a point in America's never-ending, mind-numbing game of political football. They just went the way of Charlie Brown this time.
One of the ways you win that game, apparently, is by trying to prove your ideological opponents have a monopoly on political violence. That's going to be an easy one to lose.
Not surprisingly, Binion has many people screaming at him on Twitter (dog bites man) that he's engaged in terminal bothsidesism - or that he’s a fully paid-up member of the “bad” team - and that it's the other side that's truly dangerous, which honestly kind of makes his own point better than he could.
Yes, Mr. Montana/LopRidgeway responds to an article pointing out that Boleter likely wasn’t a left-wing Democrat by…saying that all political violence comes from left-wing Democrats.
Twitter does have a “do you want to read this article first” prompt before you retweet it, but I don’t think it gets any more use than my stationary bike. Less, likely, because at least the bike gets a lot of use as a clothes rack.
Honestly, whatever the problems with "bothsidesism," on the whole it's far less corrosive to society than rushing to the barricades to defend your "side" at all costs, ignoring and/or lying to cover up anything wrong your team says or does, which is a moot point because your team is never wrong to begin with, and when they actually do something wrong, well, it was justified because shut up.
I do kind of love that most of the right-wingers angry at Binion are short and to the point, while the self-professed "anti-fascist" responds with a Twitter post longer than an epic nineteenth-century Russian novel. There’s probably an essay to be written about that phenomenon alone.
Ironically, the more we learn about Boelter, the more it becomes clear that whatever his partisan affiliation, there was a significant “Elvis emerged from a UFO and told me to do it” element to his crime:
In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate, according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter.
The letter is the clearest evidence yet of Boelter’s mindset after the targeted violence against Minnesota politicians last week. It is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.
[…]
Asked to comment about the letter, Hennepin County Attorney spokesperson Daniel Borgertpoepping said the office cannot comment on an open investigation but “due to the seriousness of the allegations it contains, we will state only that we have seen no evidence that the allegations regarding Governor Walz are based in fact.”
(I mean, that’s what he would say, right?)
It’s not at all a cop-out to say that a perpetrator of political violence also had serious mental health problems. If anything, I’d argue that most if not all would-be assassins have serious mental health problems, and that if it wasn’t partisan politics they’d latch on to religion or celebrity or college football rivalry or something. As much as we tend to pretend otherwise, especially when fighting on social media, few tragedies have just one root cause.