What's the worst part about horrific, murderous violence in America? Well, except for the death, the ruined lives, the pain and the fear and the rush to pass laws that wouldn't have prevented it, I think it has to be the media criticism.
The challenge, at least for conservatives, is that the media's double standard is so profoundly obvious and at the same so passionately denied that bringing it up feels like an exercise in gaslighting.
If a former
When then-Congresswoman
And yet, some cherished myths die hard. As news came out that the "Ballfield Shooter,"
This is not to say that conservatives always color themselves with glory in the wake of these horrors either. In the cases when a murderer is clearly of some kind of right-wing bent, many conservatives rush to insist that right-wing rhetoric either played no role or should not be blamed. That's defensible in and of itself, but if your position is that political speech should never be indicted when a right-winger commits a crime, you probably shouldn't let your understandable desire for payback seduce you into insisting that left-wing rhetoric is to blame when the shooter is a left-winger.
What is remarkable about this fixation with political rhetoric is how shallow it is. I think political rhetoric, on the right and the left, does play a role in violence, though perhaps not in the case of Loughner or the equally deranged
But not every murderer is a paranoid schizophrenic. Some of them get their ideas from somewhere. Popular culture is surely one source. Another is our political rhetoric. The literary critic
Where does that come from? I can come up with a dozen partial or possible theories (in part because I've been writing a book on all this for the last several years). But I think one contributor to this dire predicament is obvious: the size and scope of government.
For decades we've invested in the federal government ever-greater powers while at the same time raising the expectations for what government can do even higher. The rhetoric of the last three presidents has been wildly outlandish about what can be accomplished if we just elect the right political savior.
When you believe -- as Hodgkinson clearly did -- that all of our problems can be solved by flicking a few switches in the
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Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.