America Is Struggling to Sort Out Where ‘Violence’ Begins and Ends

When people frame speech as a kind of violence, they’re often trying to turn that kind of invisible, impersonal violence into something more visceral — identifying the individuals responsible and confronting them directly, sometimes physically. This is one predictable result of expanding the category of violence to include words and beliefs: It begins to feel reasonable, or even like a form of self-­defense, to respond to words and beliefs with physical action. This year, after a right-wing campus group invited the alt-right instigator Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, and demonstrations turned into a chaos of scuffles, fires and broken windows, Berkeley’s student newspaper, The Daily Californian, ran a series of essays defending the use of violence in protests. ‘‘Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act,’’ one argued. Another: ‘‘I urge you to consider whether damaging the windows of places like banks and the Amazon student store constitutes ‘violence’ — and if so, what weight this ‘violence’ carries in the context of the symbolic, structural and actual violence’’ that Yiannopoulos represents.

A movement to redraw the lines between speech and violence is taking shape on the right, too. Last year, the conservative lawyer Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit against Black Lives Matter, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, accusing them of ‘‘inciting and causing serious bodily injury or death’’ to police officers. (The case was dismissed; Klayman has appealed it.) And last month, the political cartoonist Ben Garrison published a panel showing screeching liberals like Madonna (‘‘BLOW IT UP!’’), Kathy Griffin (‘‘DECAPITATE TRUMP!’’) and Rachel Maddow (‘‘TRUMP IS HITLER!’’) with their fiery rhetoric lighting the fuse of a bomb labeled ‘‘FAR LEFT TERROR.’’

In addition to accusing one another of actual violence, we are now, more and more easily, counting the tenor of speech as violence enough in itself. The accusation has become so familiar that in certain circles, it’s curdled into a punch line — as when people post a picture of a bad outfit or a new celebrity couple and say, in mock outrage, ‘‘This is violence!’’

If speech is violence, what should be done about it? When a masked anti-­fascist demonstrator punched the white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face in January, a video of the assault prompted a popular meme and a moral question: Is it cool to punch a Nazi? Writing in The Nation, Natasha Lennard called the video ‘‘pure kinetic beauty’’ and argued that ‘‘if we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance,’’ then ‘‘direct, aggressive confrontation’’ is warranted. In an interview with Quartz, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek disagreed. ‘‘People say symbolic violence can be even worse, but don’t underestimate physical violence,’’ he said. Let the alt-right ‘‘represent the decay of common morality and decency,’’ he argued — progressives ought to ‘‘become the voice of common decency, politeness, good manners and so on.’’ Or as Michelle Obama put it during the 2016 campaign, ‘‘When they go low, we go high.’’

Of course, that campaign failed. And to some on the outer edges of the political discourse, it’s not just O.K. to forsake ‘‘politeness, good manners and so on’’; it’s a critical tool for fighting the powerful, for whom good manners often serve as a kind of shield. During the abbreviated public debate over the Senate’s health care legislation, Senator Bernie Sanders tried to drive home the human cost of repealing the Affordable Care Act with a tweet: ‘‘Let us be clear, and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law.’’ Illness and death might seem like natural considerations when evaluating health care policy, but Senator Orrin Hatch’s office soon accused Sanders of being uncivil, ‘‘accusing those we disagree with of murder.’’

Fetishizing civility has a way of elevating style over substance. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, has found a place in our political discourse precisely because his bland demeanor and khaki collection perplex those not accustomed to seeing a racist resemble a frat boy at a formal rather than a Klansman in a hood. He adopts a civilized tone to advance opinions once considered beyond the bounds of civilized debate, advocating ‘‘peaceful ethnic cleansing,’’ as if that were an actual thing.

One temptation of making accusations of violence is that it seems capable of cutting through all the political noise, making an issue feel visceral and urgent. But with everyone redefining violence based on their existing political sympathies, it just as easily works to mislead and confuse — conflating structural inequality with political name-­calling, or equating the impact of artistic expression with the effects of a policy vote. What’s often lost in the mainstream discussion of symbolic violence is that this is a power struggle as much as a rhetorical one. It’s not just a fight over how we speak, but over who is speaking and what we will allow them to say — from those who express extreme positions in polite tones all the way over to those who express reasonable positions in impolite ones. A fight over politics is mixed up with a battle over tone, squabbles over whose rhetoric is out of line and who started it. It makes the political discourse louder, but not any clearer.

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