Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
Saturday’s tragic news out of Pittsburgh was the latest in what is by now a long series of sudden outbreaks of violence across the United States. There’s a feeling of ritual to it by now: There are the ominous tweets as the news breaks, the president’s flailing response, the commentary about loneliness in America and, of course, the inevitable spiral into permanently unresolved debates about gun control.
We all know it’s going to happen again. We all know how we’re going to respond when it does: We’ll tweet, write op-eds, show up at protests that have no effect, slowly forget about it, and wait for the next act of violence.
I’m not saying any of these things are bad. Funny tweets offer people a place to vent and can build community. Opinion columns, ideally, get people to think and circulate ideas. (If I thought they were useless, I wouldn’t write them.) And protests, when they get in the way of the wealthy and powerful, can be effective. (Remember when activists ruined the Secretary of Homeland Security’s dinner? President Trump signed an executive order ending family separation the next day.)
Nevertheless, as long as these things work within the confines of classical liberal political thought, they’re inadequate, for a simple reason: Violence is the heart of classical liberalism. The thinkers whose ideas the Founding Fathers relied on — by which I mean John Locke and others of his age — essentially take violence as the natural state of human beings, and then justify government as a paradoxical “violence to end all violence.”
Locke’s opponent, Thomas Hobbes, says this directly. Locke does so indirectly: Essentially, Locke posits a pre-government state and asserts (counterintuitively) that private property exists in a real way in this state. Locke then says that people will not necessarily respect this private property right, and that this disrespect for property is violence. (One might add that property rights, rightfully understood, are just violence anyway, but Locke himself doesn’t claim this.)
Because most people want to avoid violence, Locke says, groups of people solve this problem by creating what is famously known as the “social contract,” a magic document in which individuals agree to some form of government, which has the status of contract despite the fact that you “sign” it automatically upon being born.
As Andrew Willard Jones writes in Before Church and State, “The liberalism that developed out of Hobbes and Locke conceives of human interactions as, at root, contractual actions and of contracts as a type of compromise in the face of conflict, in the face of scarcity. Because all human interactions are ultimately contractual and based on property rights and the State is that which enforces contracts and property rights, there is within liberalism itself the presupposition of the ubiquitous power of the sword.”
This may all seem abstract, but it appears in our society in very real ways. For one, as Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote in 2014, property-based violence manifests itself in our society’s relationship to the police. Violence is ever-present in the public imagination, and a constant, heavily armed police force is (supposedly) needed to protect us for it.
It’s unsurprising, then, that President Trump has offered a masterclass in Hobbesian rhetoric from the beginning: The notion of sovereign protection from the the war of all against all is the core of his political program. As then-candidate Trump said in his nomination acceptance speech: Threats are everywhere, and “I alone can fix it.” Just last week, Trump decided to deploy the military to the southern border to stop a band of asylum-seekers, which he is persuaded is full of “Middle Easterners” (by which he apparently means terrorists).
But most obviously, liberalism’s foundational violence manifests itself in our society’s grudging acceptance of constant violence. Like the title character in Macbeth, we don’t like the blood on our hands, but we’ve concluded that it’s the cost of getting ahead in the world. So the blood keeps pouring, from College Park to Pittsburgh, from Florida to California, from sea to incarnadine sea.
John-Paul Teti is a senior computer science major. He can be reached at jp@jpteti.com.
