Normal people in an authoritarian party
On the Oregon Republican response to the attempt on Donald Trump's life
Since Saturday when Thomas Matthew Crooks used an AR-15 to try to assassinate Donald Trump, I’ve been tracking how Oregon’s Republicans have responded to that event. Below are two, completely normal and not-authoritarian responses from two Oregon Republican leaders. It’s worth noting that these people strongly dislike each other and come from different factions of the OR GOP, and yet their statements on Facebook are what one would expect from people in positions of influence and authority in a democracy governed by the rule of law. They do not jump to conclusions about what happened. They do not call for retribution or vengeance (though some people in the comments section of McQuisten’s post do). They do not interpret this act of violence as part of some sinister plot against Republicans or Trump. In the hours following an act of political violence, this is exactly what people in positions like this should say.
While those two individual Republican leaders responded to this terrible and shocking event in a normal fashion, the party to which they’ve both devoted a significant portion of their lives responded in a manner that can only be described as menacingly authoritarian and propagandistic. The OR GOP’s first post about the event, only a couple hours after it happened and before we even knew the name of the shooter, blamed it on “the left.”
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A few hours after blaming tens of millions of non-Republican Americans for an act that turns out to have been carried out by a 20 year old registered Republican who has been described by his high school classmates as “a conservative,” the OR GOP then turned around and issued a statement calling upon “the media to stop feeding the contentious us-against-them culture amongst Americans. This tragic and inflammatory division in America has been created and perpetuated not only by the White House but also by mainstream media.” This may seem like a contradiction—decrying us-versus-them rhetoric while making evidence-free claims blaming “the left” for the attempt on Trump’s life—but it actually makes perfect sense if one starts from the authoritarian assumption that the Americans who don’t agree with you are “unhumans” or not “real Americans.”
The OR GOP’s next post, after decrying those who would foster an “us against them culture,” claimed that a metaphorical statement Biden made in a private donor call meant that “they,” the Democrats, are the ones engaged in an insurrection against America. The assassination attempt was supposedly just the latest example of that ongoing insurrection. Again, it’s important to note that when they posted this we still knew almost nothing about the shooter or his motive. But somehow Biden definitely bore the blame.
The OR GOP then doubled down on the conspiracy theories about a nebulous “them” and “radical leftists” by recirculating a post by Brendan Straka, a far right fabulist who is currently on probation for egging on the January 6 insurrectionists. Note the confidence with which the OR GOP pronounces this an act of “the radical left” based on one piece of evidence, a $15 donation to Act Blue from three years ago, while also providing a conspiratorial explanation for why Crooks was registered as a Republican and was wearing a t-shirt associated with right wing gun culture. The gap between the few scraps of information that were known about the shooter and the confidence with which the OR GOP was ascribing political meaning to the event is glaring. How could their followers interpret this other than as an encouragement to think ill of their fellow Americans who had nothing to do with Crooks’s actions? An odd choice for the OR GOP to put a post on Facebook that encouraged people to embrace a spirit of “divisiveness” that they had not only just officially decried a few hours ago, but also claimed caused the event in the first place.
The cherry on the top of all of this is that in the comments section a member of the Salem-Keizer school board chimed in to complain about how our “leftist” dominated school system does not prepare students well to engage in honest, evidence-based debate. All educators do is encourage people to demonize others…he says in response to a post in which the Oregon Republican Party has just demonized Democrats and “the radical left” and blamed “them” for an act that could not be plausibly connected to them with any evidence that existed at the time or now.
While Tracy Honl and Kerry McQuisten’s Facebook posts resisted ascribing blame for the attempted assassination, the party to which they’ve both devoted their hearts and souls for years was circulating inflammatory and logic-defying posts like this.
Ah yes, there is obviously a coherent “they” that includes John Hinckley, Jr. (who shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster) and Thomas Matthew Crooks (whose motives remain unclear but at this point do not appear to be in any way connected to any sort of “them,” leftist or otherwise).
One defining feature of propaganda is that it floats free of empirical evidence. Here we see a post about two assassination attempts on Republicans that occurred 40+ years apart that have nothing to do with each other, but which the OR GOP has shoehorned together into a story about the supposedly murderous “American left” that seeks to destroy “us” and so, by implication, must be dealt with accordingly. This is a permission structure for totalitarianism. [It’s also Squeaky Fromme/Gerald Ford erasure…but that’s another matter.] It also has echoes of the long history of antisemitic conspiracy theories that I wrote about in this piece.
Seth Cotlar
The shadowy, “Soros-funded” “they” that supposedly works in cahoots with “the liberal media” in order to “destroy you and everything you hold dear” is an essential component of the political culture of the OR GOP. If by some chance someone began to doubt the existence of this imaginary "they,” much of the MAGA world view would crumble into dust. If politics is just about electing imperfect but generally well-meaning people to craft imperfect solutions to problems that our evidence-based, good-faith efforts can only partially enable us to understand, then all of the drama is drained from politics and there's little reason to show up to a rally to “save America.”
Treating politics like an existential battle between good and evil rallies up the base on social media and fills up seats at political rallies, but it’s not conducive to engaging with the world as it actually is. The reporting that’s come out so far strongly suggests that what happened on Saturday is not all that different from the scores of other mass shootings we’ve seen over the past 20+ years. A troubled person with easy access to a weapon of war decided to go out in a blaze of glory and take others with him...in this case that person tried to take out Trump. There's no evidence at this point that the shooter was connected to any political organizations other than the Republican Party with which he'd registered to vote. His classmates described him as a loner. His act appears to have about as much political content as that of John Hinckley Jr. There's nothing epic about it. It’s just another day in an America that’s armed to the teeth and filled with humans who suffer from all of the ills that humans have always suffered from, though in the past they didn’t have such easy access to massive modern arsenals.
But that familiar, sad story about what happened on Saturday, just another day that ends with a ‘y’ in gun-saturated America, has no propaganda value. Thus, the OR GOP immediately fed this shooting into their pre-existing story about the supposedly existential battle they’re engaged in to save "western civilization" and America from wokeness, or “radical left Democrats,” or [fill in the blanks with the boogeyman du jour]. Back in the Cold War era American politicians like Joe McCarthy frequently spoke in such hyperbolic and apocalyptic terms about “the internal enemy,” but after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989 such talk became less common and easier to dismiss as empty rhetoric. But over the past decade that authoritarian rhetoric has come roaring back into style on the American right and feels deathly serious to many in Trump's audience. One might think it would be difficult to mount a campaign based on “American carnage” when unemployment is at a historic low, crime rates have been steadily falling, and inflation has returned to a normal ~3%. It might also seem weird to be talking about how apocalyptically terrible everything is while denying the existence of climate change, a truly dire civilizational crisis about which the majority of Americans are justifiably very concerned. But here we are…the stories about “American carnage” and “the climate change hoax” feel true to tens of millions of our fellow citizens, reality be damned.
Believing the authoritarian, Trumpian propaganda about the horrible and violent things “they” want to do to “us” had tragic consequences for one of the Trump supporters who was killed on Saturday. Corey Comporatore was roughly my age and grew up in the same sort of semi-rural, Western Pennsylvania culture that I did. I recognize him as someone I would have played Little League with or sat beside in a high school history class. Corey loved Trump. He believed the Trumpian story that the Democrats were trying to start a second Civil War, and he said he was ready for it. He went to that Trump rally to show his support for the guy who he mistakenly thought was leading the troops in Civil War 2.0.
The event that took Comperatore’s life had nothing to do with any sort of Civil War. His life was tragically cut short by what appears to be a nonpartisan act of gun violence that America’s Republican-enabled gun culture has made an all-too-common recently. Mr. Comperatore and his family deserved better than for his life to be ended in such a horribly violent manner.
The Republican Party will likely try to turn Mr. Comperatore into a martyr to their cause, but by his own account, he’d left the Republican Party and registered as an independent. The fact that he was murdered by someone who was registered as a Republican is just another sad twist in this terrible story.
Mr. Comperatore understood himself to be a patriot who loved America, but it might be more accurate to describe him as a patriot who’d been convinced by Trump and his social media propagandists that loving America required him to prefer a foreign dictator to Democratic politicians who tens of millions of his fellow Americans voted for. When President Joe Biden called his wife to offer his condolences on Sunday, she refused to speak to him because her husband was such “a devout Republican.” She has yet to hear from Donald Trump.
I abhor the extremist politics that Mr. Comperatore expressed on his Twitter feed, but I feel nothing but sadness for him and his family. I’m angry at the politicians and propagandists who encouraged him to think that a beautiful Sunday afternoon in July would be best spent cheering on the military-style detention and deportation of the undocumented workers who pick and process the food he bought at the grocery store. Rewind the clock and have a GOP nominee named Haley or Scott or Christie instead of Trump, and Mr. Comperatore would have almost certainly spent Saturday fishing or working on his car or having a picnic with his family. He would not have been in that Butler field cheering on a billionaire pseudo-populist who falsely claimed that the political retribution he intends to extract from his American “enemies” is his selflessly gift to “forgotten people” like Mr. Comperatore. When reality-distorting authoritarian parties come to power, almost everyone suffers, even the ordinary people who voted for them.
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