Some Thoughts On Richard Spencer Being Punched In The Face

In the couple of months since my two week sojourn around the continental US just after the 2016 presidential election, I’ve drastically reduced my social media engagement, particularly on Twitter. During my train trip, which I embarked on with no phone or internet connection, I found myself thinking— perhaps because of a lack of digital distractions— in a deeper and clearer way, but was also more observant of and attuned to the people around me. These are qualities of behavior that I think are necessary in order to engage in acts of empathy. I bring this up today because, with the Women’s Marches occurring around the country and throughout the world, I did a little backsliding and spent some time on Twitter. Some of what I found disturbed me. 

While the bulk of the messages that I read were written in simple support of the extraordinary marches that served as brilliant demonstrations of an open society in action, there was a surprising and disturbingly large number of tweets celebrating the sucker-punching of White Nationalist and alt-right hero Richard Spencer. Let me be clear: I find Richard Spencer to be an utter abomination. With his hipster-y architectural haircut, smug demeanor, and conventional good looks, he seeks to sanitize and normalize racism, anti-semitism & garden variety bigotry. He opposes everything I believe in. He is in many ways ideologically aligned with the German regime that sent members of my family to concentration camps, where some of those family members died.

And yet the moment we revel in acts of physically unprovoked violence toward our ideological enemies, we have lost the moral high ground. (Those militia members who were preparing for their guns to be taken away by a Clinton presidency would hardly need convincing to pick up arms, should this kind of left-on-right violence become more frequent.) But more crucially, we are playing into the hands of the Trump regime when we celebrate acts of violence. Any filmed footage of progressives physically attacking those on the right, or participating in any kind of violent protest whatsoever, can be leveraged to serve the “law & order” narrative that Trump and his cronies have borrowed verbatim from Richard Nixon, the only other president in recent history whose gift for dishonesty rivals that of DJT. Nixon successfully convinced the American people—dog whistling aplenty—that “law and order” (and thus his presidency) was necessary to prevent the country from slipping into violent chaos. And Nixon achieved this in a fact-based media landscape. Whereas we have seen already, in Trump’s first full day in office, that he has no intention of abandoning the autocratic propaganda program, a program predicated on bald-faced lies, that swept him into office. It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to think of how he might leverage a similar video clip in the future. So even for strictly political reasons, I believe we need to be vigilant in avoiding violence. 

But there’s another aspect of the Richard Spencer schadenfreude episode that I find troubling, which has to do with the ways in which digital spaces are antithetical to empathy. Empathy requires time, contemplation, and ideally, the physical presence and energy of other human beings. Twitter allows for none of these. In fact, by disconnecting people from the ideas they espouse, and reducing those ideas to words on a screen, it further diminishes our ability to empathize with the ideas of others. (This is not in any way a new idea but bears repeating.) I suspect that those of us who find Spencer to be a bottom-dwelling hate-toilet, had we been physically present when he was attacked, might have had a somewhat different reaction than one of glee. We have a long road ahead in weathering the terrifying autocracy we’ve just inherited. But we have far from exhausted the peaceful means at our disposal that we may use to overcome it. Until we reach that moment, I will advocate for peaceful dissent and disagreement in any and all circumstances. At the same time, I would encourage all of you, especially those who live in politically homogenous enclaves, to get off the internet and talk to people in the flesh. I don’t suspect you’ll find common ground with people like Richard Spencer, but you may discover, as I did during my train travels, that we can better tolerate difference & disagreement when it has a human face.