Hide your kids, hide your wives
Liberal democracy or protesting at public figures' homes. Pick one.
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We didn’t realize it at the time, but 2010 viral legend Antoine Dodson turned out to be something of a prophet. Protesting at public figures’ private homes is a tactic that sure seems like it’s taken off in recent years:
Something truly sinister is happening in America. The critical distinction between public and private life is being eroded.
You can see it first of all in political protests. Not content with marching in the streets to air complaints, demands, and grievances as a public spectacle, demonstrators of all kinds increasingly seek out the private homes of public figures to hound them intimately and personally. In the past year or so, the examples have mounted quickly. The mayor of Portland had to move house because activists besieged his condo building, breaking windows of other people’s offices and throwing burning debris into them. The mayors of St. Louis and Buffalo were also driven from their homes, and Chicago’s mayor was under constant threat: “[Lori] Lightfoot already receives 24/7 protection from cops including officers stationed at the residence.”
After a police shooting in DC, protestors didn’t just demonstrate outside a local police station, as is their absolute right, but traveled 13 miles to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s home to yell deadly threats at her:
“If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no sleep,” protesters were allegedly heard chanting outside the home, according to a video posted on social media. “If we don’t get it, burn it down.”
This also happened in Pittsburgh (“an encounter that ended with tear gas”), Philly (“five hospitalized — including a police sergeant with a broken finger”), and Oak Park, where protestors “banged on [Mayor Abu-Taleb’s] windows and doors, tore up a garden and spray-painted sidewalks when the board voted down a police defunding measure.”
Such tactics have escalated to vandalizing the private homes themselves, often covering them with graffiti, to drive home the message: “Spray painted phrases included ‘BLM,’ ‘Jacob Blake,’ and an expletive directed at San Jose’s mayor.”
[…]
Although not as persistent or as widespread as the far left’s invasion of the privacy of public figures, the far right is not innocent either. LA Mayor Garcetti’s residence was targeted by anti-lockdown activists; LA County’s public health director was also targeted at home; some folks brought menacing tiki-torches to the Boise mayor’s home; in Duluth, Trump supporters organized 20 trucks to circle the mayor’s home. Over the new year, Nancy Pelosi’s private home was vandalized, graffiti written on her garage door, and a bloody pig’s head was thrown into the mix for good measure.
There are also attacks on school board members around the country, who favor teaching the concepts of critical race theory to kids, or are implementing Covid mask policies. It’s fine and good to protest; it is not fine and good to force these people and their families to live under personal siege.
Anti-mask demonstrators, for example, hounded one Brevard School Board member and mother, Jennifer Jenkins, at her Florida home, at one point coming to her doorstep and coughing in her face. She later testified that she was ok with demonstrators outside her home, but that “I object to them following my car around, I reject them saying they are coming for me and I need to beg for mercy … that they are going behind my home and brandishing their weapons to my neighbors. That they’re making false DCF [child welfare agency] claims against me to my daughter. That I have to take a DCF investigator to her playdate to go underneath her clothing and check for burn marks. That’s what I’m against.”
What we are seeing here is not just the boorishness of mobs. What we’re seeing is something more dangerous: the erosion of the boundary between public and private. Violating private homes and intimidating people’s families are just two of the more glaring examples. The Internet, via emails, has also rendered the whole notion of private correspondence — a principle the Founding Fathers saw as essential to freedom from tyranny — so porous that it barely exists. A permanent record of everything you have ever put into pixels, however intimate or personal, exists somewhere; and it can be easily searched exhaustively — forever. There is no safe space from that.
There’s a lot of overlap between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but I’ve long believed that the former state aims to control your public behavior but will leave you alone if you don’t make too much noise, while the latter tries to control your thoughts and infuse every aspect of your daily life with the ruling ideology. (The book A Village in the Third Reich, which I reviewed a little while back, describes about how even the local alpine ski club had to be a Nazi alpine ski club.)
Authoritarianism is Hungary (and arguably Russia before this year) and the latter is North Korea (and arguably Russia as of this year). Every totalitarian state is authoritarian, but not every authoritarian state is totalitarian.
And I agree with Andrew Sullivan that the phrase “the personal is political” is by its very essence totalitarian:
The idea that “the personal is political” is not just a glib phrase. It is actually best exemplified by totalitarian systems, which seek no limits to their authority over private matters, even those matters that are buried deep in your mind and soul, and which enroll citizens into becoming mutual spies in pursuit of heretics. I don’t want to live in that transparent, unsparing, brutalizing world. It turns us all into spies; it gives no one space to think or escape; it is devoid of mercy and gives no benefit of the doubt.
Let’s not lose the distinction between public and private. Let’s remember that everything we decide to do to violate the privacy of others comes back to legitimize others’ violation of ours. The immediate payoff may be gratifying; but what it does to a society over time, as the tit-for-tats cascade, is to remove the chance for civil debate, and enhance the power of personal hatred, and, ultimately political violence. That’s where this leads: a descent from civil argument to civil war.
Kat Rosenfield made a similar point in The New Statesman:
Public demonstrations rally people to your cause, personal harassment just alienates them. Taking the fight to someone’s home is a transgression of the social contract, irrespective of how much you might disagree on an issue or how convinced you are of the invincibility of your target. A private residence, public restrooms, the restaurant where you eat dinner with your children – even in polarised times, we’ve always deemed certain spaces out of bounds, because this helps preserve the fragile and tenuous trust that allows societies to function smoothly.
Yet that social contract doesn’t bind as it once did. It has eroded in the last few years so that rules became more like guidelines, all of them permitted to be broken if the target is unpopular enough to deserve it or privileged enough not to feel it. It’s not just JK Rowling on the receiving end, her views on women’s sex-based rights having sparked such outrage. American activists have taken to chasing politicians into bathrooms and out of restaurants; a journalist can laughingly doxx a critic with no professional repercussions; an author receiving death threats for her work is dismissed as a drama queen.
What these incidents have in common is that a successful person is serving as a stalking horse for normalising behaviour that was once unacceptable. For JK Rowling, who is essentially “uncancellable” in that people will always buy her books no matter what she does, the idea isn’t to damage her; it’s to shift the focus of the conversation from tactics to targets. Suddenly, you don’t have to argue any more about whether doxxing is OK. You only have to argue that it’s OK this time, for this reason. In this case, that reason is that you’re punching up.
In times of conflict, we’re all familiar with the notion of sacrificing convention for the cause – it is hard to insist on civility in times of war. But this is something else, a “lol-nothing-matters” world in which the stakes are so low that your actions cease to carry any moral weight. Rowling becomes simultaneously something more and something less than human in this scenario, an undefeatable supervillain who can absorb all the abuse you throw at her. When you’re convinced you won’t land a single blow anyway thanks to her protective privilege, what’s the point in exercising restraint?
The answer used to be that brutality is corrosive to the self, to the soul. The rules were there not for your enemy’s sake, but your own – to protect you from becoming the thing you hated. He who fights monsters should take care that he doesn’t become one, and so on, and so monstrous behaviour was taboo. Proving that you were worthy of power meant proving that you wouldn’t abuse it when you won it; you wouldn’t break the social contract around something like doxxing for the same reason you wouldn’t kick a dead body, or stub out a cigarette on the arm of a braindead patient. Just because the guy can’t feel it, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
But suppose you never intend to rule. Suppose instead that your identity and the identity of your movement is founded above all in a sense of intractable helplessness, of impotent doom. Suppose you’re sure that no matter how hard you swing you’ll never hit anything but air.
With no power comes no responsibility. We may soon discover how far the norms of the social contract can be eroded: how cruel people can be to an unfeeling target before any sense of conscience kicks in. How many cigarettes they can put out on the arm of a comatose enemy before the smell of burning flesh becomes nauseating.
With a major SCOTUS decision on abortion rights imminent (I’m already planning a long hiatus from social media when it is released) some pro-choice activists have moved on from protesting at the courthouse to Justices’ homes to the schools attended by the Justices’ children.
Mind you, it’s not a defense of this behavior to note that anti-abortion militants have used similar tactics - and much worse - for decades. Indeed, I’ve seen people argue that pro-lifers’ political and judicial wins have come about because of decades of violent, invasive activity. My own belief is that it’s happened despite this.
And whatever happens with Roe v. Wade, I fear the wrong lessons will be learned. If it is overturned, it will be held up as proof that decades of intimidation worked. If one or more conservative Justices blink and sign on to a watered-down ruling that doesn’t completely strike it down - especially if it’s Barrett or Kavanaugh, who’ve borne the brunt of the protests and in the latter case was targeted by at least one would-be assassin - it will also be held up as proof that intimidation worked, even though we wouldn’t know when they backed down (or if they ever actually concurred with Alito’s draft decision in the first place).
Protesting at people’s homes certainly isn’t new, but it’s always been considered somewhat taboo by polite society. As that fades away, we’re all potential targets because of anything we say or do.
Totalitarianism isn’t just a system of government. It’s a state of mind.
On a lighter note, Charles Cooke’s newsletter about using kids in political protests immediately reminded me of this: