In the wake of the Tucson massacre and the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, George Packer wrote that hostile rhetoric has become so much a given nationwide that “it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.” The political climate apparently troubled Giffords enough that on the eve of the shooting, she sent an e-mail to Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, asking his aid in toning down “our rhetoric and partisanship.” In a phone interview with cn|2 Politics on Sunday, Grayson said, “That is something she and I have been quite passionate about—to run for office in the right way and for the right reasons.”
The current mood seems eerily familiar to those who recall the anti-government sentiment that presaged the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, and the political backlash that followed. In a Comment published in The New Yorker two weeks after the bombing, Adam Gopnik examined the way that politics and extremist rhetoric came together at the time to turn people, and institutions, into abstract objects of hate:
The point, of course, isn’t that [Rush] Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or G. Gordon Liddy caused the killing. It is that they seemed never to have given a moment’s thought, as they addressed their audiences, to the consequences of stuffing so much flammable resentment into such tiny bottles. Conservatives are generally clear-headed about the connection between rhetoric and action when it comes to people who are not conservatives. A generation ago, conservatives had no trouble associating “revolutionary” sloganeering of the “by any means necessary” variety with the bomb that shattered the math building at the University of Wisconsin. And when it comes to Leonard Jeffries or Louis Farrakhan today, it is not hard for George Will or Murdoch’s Post to insist, against the grain of liberal indulgence, that if you inject daily hatred into the bloodstream someone might get sick… The problem is not that the militias have been mysteriously infiltrated by extremists but that the federal government has, especially in the past two years, been inflated into an imaginary hate-object big enough for a nut.
In a Talk of the Town piece that ran later that year, Sidney Blumenthal recounted the testimony of a witness to the bombing at an unofficial hearing on militias held by Senator Chuck Schumer in July. She was an Audobon society officer, and recalled that:
After she testified at one council meeting, a man in the audience pulled out a noose and said, “This is a message for you.” Another leaned toward her and said, “If we can’t beat you at the ballot box, we’ll beat you with a bullet.”
On Sunday, I found myself going back and taking a look at President Clinton’s 1995 commencement speech to Michigan State University, which took place just weeks after the bombing. In it, he discussed the challenges facing the country and made a passionate case against those who decry government while using America’s “sacred symbols for paranoid purposes”:
Our journey as a nation has never been an automatic march to freedom and opportunity. In every generation there has come a point of challenge and change—when critical decisions are made by our people to go forward or turn back, to reach out or turn inward, to unify or divide, to believe or doubt….
So I say this to the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the government instead of from those who would take away our freedom—if you say violence is an acceptable way to make change, you are wrong. If you say the government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom away, you are just plain wrong. If you treat law enforcement officers, who put their lives on the line for your safety every day, like some kind of enemy army to be suspected, derided, and if they should enforce the law against you, to be shot, you are wrong.
_The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.
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Read more New Yorker coverage of the Arizona shooting and its aftermath.
