Trump’s crackdown is only just beginning Even liberals are sick of violent disorder

A Spanish friend once told me that for years after the death of Franco, every time a larger than usual number of car accidents occurred over a weekend, there was a call for the return of fascism. For some, freedom of expression could not hold a candle to freedom from physical harm. Imagine how those people would have responded to what has become the American commonplace of one mass slaughter of innocents after another.

The unspeakable atrocity of innocent people being shot to death by a deranged mass killer continued last week. Two children were murdered and 18 other people wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The media coverage gradually devolved, as it always does, from conscientious reporting and outraged commentary to the usual money-driven spectacle. The Left called, as it always does, for gun control; the Right seized on the fact that the shooter was, apparently, a trans person. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan memorably said that he was returning his “entrance ticket” to God because he could not accept that He would allow the suffering of a single child. In America, the abomination of murdered children is quickly absorbed into helpless routines of commerce and cultural conflict.

And yet no one made the connection between the killing in Minnesota and Trump’s dispatch of the US military to Washington DC for the sake of preserving, he declared, law and order. Trump made it clear that he wasn’t stopping at DC, announcing plans to send the military into other cities, all liberal, as it happened, like Chicago and New York. But aside from sending condolences to the people stricken by the violence in Minnesota, Trump said not a word about mass shootings in America. The street crime Trump claims he wants to extinguish, as he has extinguished illegal border crossings, has been a feature of organised humanity since people began to congregate in numbers larger than two. The mass slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than that someone wanted to slaughter them — that is something new. Isolated detachments of soldiers are not sufficient to stop it. You would need soldiers everywhere.

If Freud was right, and depression is anger turned inward, then the statistics showing that a majority of Americans are clinically depressed might mean that, for some, homicidal rage takes the form of depression turned outward. The simple fact is that the origins of a mass shooting are buried in an individual psyche; they are impossible to prevent. That is perhaps why Trump deploying American troops to American cities has not met the sort of resistance one might have expected. Rather, there is a feeling, among even the most liberal of us, that in a society where the mass killing of children, of innocents, has become a common occurrence, safety has to come from somewhere. I don’t know a single liberal not horrified by Trump’s profligate use of the American military to do the job of American police. But I don’t know many liberals who are either over the age of 50, or not the product of wealth’s elevations and exceptions (or both), who don’t, on some deep instinctual level, welcome the sight of a soldier in the context of a civil society that has become increasingly unstable.

That doesn’t mean that America has become increasingly violent. As the liberal media is at great pains to point out, and justifiably so, crime rates have declined over the past few years. It just so happens that the regions where they remain elevated are in the West and the rural South. Crime is far higher in MAGA states like Tennessee, or Alabama or Mississippi, than in even the most violent blue cities.

But the reality of crime matters far less than cultural attitudes toward crime. For if violent crime is higher in the South than in the North, the way people think about crime in the two regions is radically different. In the South, antisocial behaviour is habitually contrasted with the values of law and order, values rooted in the moral frameworks of family, religion and patriotism. The North, where the causes of crime matter more in terms of policy than crime per se, is regarded by the South as downright libertine. Telling the Right that their own regions experience more crime than the places in the country Trump is portraying as being under siege by criminals is irrelevant. In the eyes of many Republicans, those liberal places are under siege more by their “permissive” attitudes toward crime than crime itself.

If, however, the different parts of the country have different perceptions of their experience of crime, they all share the same condition. America’s rate of violent crime far exceed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. Taken as a whole, the United States is a violent place. All the while, the vast economic displacements of the past 30 years have introduced their own violence, as what remained of a manufacturing economy gave way to an information economy, which has now been subsumed by the digital world. In a situation of rapidly mutating norms, crime is not merely a fact, but the symbolic shadow of a wider malaise.

It is one of the peculiarities of being an American now that you don’t have to live in a city with a high rate of crime, like Washington or Chicago — or Memphis or Birmingham — to feel personally threatened. The presence of predation on the internet; the screen-abetted withdrawal of people into themselves; the dissolution of shared cultural experiences into countless, private streaming niches; the fractures produced by identitarianism; the blurring of fact and fiction, the personalising and customisation of the justice system; the displacements of human experience and human labour by AI — you could live miles away from anyone, yet still feel as as if you were living in an urban crime zone. It is no wonder that “weaponised” has become such a popular expression. When the most disparate experiences become turned into “weapons,” it means that mass murders — soul-murders, psyche-murders, feeling-murders, status-murders, murders by money, trauma, gaslighting, “subtle acts of exclusion” — are happening all around us.

In this sense, Trump’s war on the liberal cultural of negativity toward America might well turn against him if it is successful. Once negativity as a dominant cultural attitude subsides, his appeal starts to fade. The media’s relentless apocalypticism, its “weaponisation” of everything under the sun, is what has people cheering, across the political spectrum when Trump sends troops into American cities. When America’s cultural institutions, from the media, to high and popular art, to higher education, constantly cry that the sky is falling, people are going to turn to whatever figure or force promises protection. Imagine that proverbial visitor from another planet, but one who comes with their family, and has a human biology. Within two hours of experiencing the news, our extraterrestrial immigrants would hear that climate change is bringing total destruction, the next terrifying pandemic is right around the corner, the races hate each other, men and women hate each other, something called artificial intelligence is wiping out the quality of being human, and your child’s genitalia are not as permanent as you thought they were back home. And because it is so hard to keep up with all these encroaching terrors, crime — the primordial human fear of being killed or violently assaulted by another human — embodies all of them.

If a few more car accidents than the average was enough for some people in Spain to wish for the return of Franco, violence in America is exponentially more consequential. As the perception of chaos rises, calls for safety, stability and protection will become naked and intense. A mighty state teetering atop a failing society, America cannot exist much longer without the imposition of order; from one side or another. As a parent leads a child across a busy road, American democracy will soon be guided by the firmest hand.