I met Zoe Roberts when she was managing the congressional campaign of a candidate Blue America had endorsed. When I saw she had written a new book, With Liberty and Justice for All— A Liberal’s Guide to Liberty, I asked her if she’d write a guest post for us. And… you’re about to read all about vengeance politics, something you may have never heard of before.
This is Vengeance Politics
-by Zoe Roberts,
former County Board Supervisor in Eau Claire, Wisconsin
In the last fifteen years, our political landscape has shifted dramatically. We’ve seen resentment politics, obstructionism based on tribal identity and now we’re confronted with the very real possibility of what I call “vengeance politics.”
In many ways vengeance politics is the natural evolution of resentment politics, which can be loosely defined as the grievance politically toward another group of people. Katherine Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison did an excellent job defining its impact on our politics through her field work throughout the State of Wisconsin. She found that rural communities have a resentment toward urban dwellers. Essentially documenting what many call the rural/urban divide.
Where vengeance politics differs is in that it’s about the response to a group not getting their way. Examples include, losing an election, losing a referendum vote, having a bill vetoed, and lashing out at peaceful protestors. Where resentment politics doesn’t include the threat of violence or actual violence is where vengeance politics differs and does.
We can find most of the elements I’ve noted just within the past couple of years. Joe Biden’s win and the subsequent election denial. Abortion referendum loses in multiple states including deep red Kansas. And a plethora of bills being vetoed for their overt bigotry and hatred of all marginalized groups of people including women.
We’ve seen violence related to nearly all of these, Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors, the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. We’ve seen threats against election personnel and even Judges and other courthouse staff.
To corroborate this further, we’ve seen the loss of any objectivity in right wing media news reporting, not that there was a lot to begin with. It’s become propaganda and is often based on baseless lies and conspiracy statements that lack any credibility and factual evidence. For example, the House GOP just launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden with a complete lack of evidence of any wrongdoing after conducting an investigation over the past year. Of course, right wing media is backing this action up with the use of lies, innuendo, and conspiracy. The propaganda model they utilize is eerily similar to what is known as the “Russian Firehose of Falsehood.” This model basically inundates followers with propaganda until they believe it as fact. Hence, why the falsehood about Trump having won the 2020 election and the lies about election fraud have spread and are believed by so many people on the political right within America.
The House impeachment inquiry is about nothing more than political vengeance. It’s a form of political violence. Political violence in this case being about three things: First, it's about the intimidation of Joe Biden and other liberals, or as they say “owning the libs.” Second, it’s about retaliating for the House Democrats having impeached Donald Trump twice. Something that was justified by evidence and should have been legitimately followed through within the Senate. And finally, it’s about agitating the right wing, which increasingly is willing to achieve its goals through threats and violence rather than traditional political means, as evidenced through the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Whitmer, and the attempted forced entry by heavily armed militants into the Oregon State Capitol where lawmakers were involved in a special session closed to the public.
Now that we have an idea of what vengeance politics is, we need to discuss how we put it to an end. First and foremost, as with anything political, we need to understand the importance of voting. Voting doesn’t only take place every four years for the Presidency, it takes place multiple times every year in many states. Local races are often neglected by the public, but local politics, within our system, is actually where the bulk of democracy occurs. Most local school boards, county boards, and city councils aren’t designed with a lower and upper chamber, which means the majority vote wins. Therefore, if you want to protect democracy from vengeance politics, it begins at the local level.
Over the past several years, the political right has recognized this. It’s why they have made an effort to change the dynamics of school boards through groups like “Mom’s for Liberty,” which in turn pushes book bans, anti diversity, equity and inclusion policy forward into the public realm. The result is an increasingly hostile educational system towards marginalized communities and women.
In everyday terms, we need to make sure we’re voting in every election and supporting pro-democracy candidates and causes.
Next we need to prioritize the deconstruction of gerrymandering and other anti free and fair election schemes corresponding to voter suppression. Gerrymandering in my home State of Wisconsin has resulted in the Republicans controlling our State Assembly and State Senate with a minority of votes statewide. This is minority rule, something James Madison talked about extensively within the Federalist Papers. The result is horrifying; it’s led to the degradation of labor through Union busting policies designed to turn the working class into little more than serfs to oligarchs.
Fortunately, through prolonged effort, we have been able to push back against these measures thus far. In Wisconsin, our gerrymandered maps were just overturned by our State Supreme Court. But it took flipping the ideological balance of the court over the course of a decade to accomplish this. Republicans have threatened to impeach our newly elected Janet Protasiewicz specifically because they are afraid of losing their gerrymandered maps and therefore power within the state.
Other anti-democratic measures must also be rolled back. Voter suppression tactics like requiring “State ID’s” must also be undone. On the surface, at least to many voters, these policies seem to make sense, but when you dig into it, these policies are designed to disenfranchise marginalized people in urban communities that don’t have a driver's license. To further complicate matters, they’re often accompanied by policy that removes state run department of motor vehicles offices from impoverished communities. Forcing people to travel a greater distance, likely without public transportation, to obtain a state issued identification card.
Finally, we need to confront the reverence with which our Constitution is held. The Founding Fathers realized that it would need to be changed through time, and provided mechanisms for facilitating those changes. However, they had no way of foretelling how dysfunctional our politics would become. The Constitution, as Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in the Tyranny of the Minority, contains too many “counter-majoritarian” elements, including the electoral college. Changing this one to majority winner would be a start. At least two recent elections have resulted in minority rule at the Presidential level. One of them featured overtly discriminatory policies, which as a nation, we are still struggling with today. Policies that created concentration camps at our southern border, the xenophobic “muslim” ban, and the exclusion of transgender people from military service.
The challenges our nation faces as a result of vengeance politics are real and complex. There are solutions, but we must break through our own cynicism, mistrust, resentment, and anger in order to do it. It won’t be easy, it means that despite our own reservations and fears that we must embrace a culture of change. It means embracing ideas that have allowed European democracies to remove their counter-majoritarian institutions and become far more functional democracies than America is today. Change is hard, but falling behind the rest of the world due to governmental dysfunction will be harder and take far longer to fix.
