America is facing a moment of reckoning on political violence

It’s a tough business living through the chaos of the second Trump term and trying to discern which events of the daily horror show will turn out to be significant pivot points in history. Maybe, in a way, all of them will. 

But I keep returning to the deeply terrifying story of the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted assassination of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife by the same man. It’s astonishing, at least outside of Minnesota, to realize that this spasm of political violence happened barely more than a week ago. Already, in that short time span, a half-dozen other red alarms have sounded on the rapidly developing and ongoing collapse of the country that we all once knew and loved.

(Murdered in your own house in the middle of the night by a man pretending to be a police officer — how is that not terrorism? The only thing more horrifying would be if he were a police officer.)

As much as the short-attention-span bulldozer keeps churning under yesterday’s news, this type of targeted political violence demands a longer conversation, the kind of conversation that was front of mind in America 60 years ago, in a period in which high-profile assassinations permanently warped the American experience in a thousand obvious and not-so-obvious ways. The leader of that conversation in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr., tragically was the victim of one of those assassinations.

In the intervening decades, Americans generally have dealt with their political differences from a place of nonviolence — with, of course, many exceptions. As vicious and ugly and morally bankrupt as the political sphere has become, particularly in the age of social media, we’ve for the most part stopped short of gunning down our political leaders. Now, though, a line has been crossed, and it’s time to talk about violence and nonviolence again. In the ’60s, King recast Gandhi’s debate about nonviolence for an American audience. It’s a conversation that seems to have atrophied.

The good news is that, on the very same day as the Hortman assassinations, millions gathered across the country in “No Kings Day” anti-Trump protests that resulted in only scattered confrontations (including a fatal shooting in Salt Lake City). That suggests that routine violence has yet to establish a foothold in political protests. And we should be grateful for that. 

MLK’s focus on nonviolence as both a worthy political ideal and a philosophical commitment in order to live a humane and honorable life influenced Santa Cruz in at least two prominent ways. One was the establishment in 1976 of the Resource Center for Nonviolence, co-founded by former Santa Cruz mayor and peace activist Scott Kennedy, who died in 2011. And the other is Barrios Unidos, the community center and grassroots civil rights organization founded in 1977 by Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez partly as a means to find a path for nonviolent values in the struggle against street violence. 

The day before the Hortman assassination, I was mulling a different kind of political violence, the potential for violent confrontations at the upcoming “No Kings Day” protests and the possibility of a Kent State-style tragedy with ill-prepared National Guard troops in the streets of Los Angeles. I decided to visit Barrios Unidos on Soquel Avenue to chat with Nane, who had been a friend and acolyte of another great teacher of nonviolence, César Chávez. Thousands of drivers a day drive past the giant mural outside Barrios Unidos of Chávez, accompanied by the quote, “Nonviolence is more powerful than violence.”

These days, Barrios Unidos is ground zero for helping immigrant communities face the threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and immediate arrest and deportation. For its nearly 50-year history, Barrios Unidos has always been facing an enormous challenge. Today, the situation is more extreme and dangerous than ever.  

Nonviolence, Nane told me, is not easily attainable. It’s an aspirational goal. A reflexive impulse to violence is part of the human experience and in many cases, it’s understandable and even justifiable.

“I’ve been a student of the Martin Luther King philosophy, and Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence,” he said. “But I also understand the anger of many young people. [ICE] drags your mother away, your uncle, you’re going to react to that, especially when you’re being provoked.”

Nonviolence, at least the way Nane sees it, is never absolute, that there is a point when people have to defend themselves, their families and their communities. But it’s too easy to opt for violence before you ever reach that point. “In terms of nonviolence,” he said, “I always have to start with myself, and [ask myself]: how far are you willing to take it?”

But, while the nuances and limits of nonviolence in an often violent world may be a matter for the individual to grapple with in his or her own heart, the effectiveness of nonviolence is often measured in the degree that it is a social act. A political protest, for example, of 100 people can turn violent if two or three of those people decide to move beyond vocal protest into acts of violence. 

“We have to organize to make a strong nonviolence presence,” Nane told me. “Say, someone’s out there in the streets and they’re hurting and they want to act out. What’s behind that? Is there something that’s affecting that person’s family or a relative or a loved one? How do we intervene and offer our help so that individual doesn’t pick up a rock?”

It’s common these days for political organizations like Indivisible Santa Cruz, which organized the June 14 rally in downtown Santa Cruz, to train their volunteers in the basic principles of deescalation. In that sense, activists in nonviolence training are like firefighters. They have to be comfortable with the asymmetry of stopping violence. Ninety-nine nonviolent protesters can be endangered by one who decides to act out in violence.

King’s brand of nonviolence has often been misunderstood as a kind of passive resistance, when in fact it was more aimed at bringing about strategic disruption and meaningful change without the use of violence. It was a lesson he learned early on in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Later, he employed tactics such as sit-ins and marches with the direct intention of getting arrested. “The purpose of direct action,” he said in 1963, “is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” In its own way, “I Have a Dream” was an alternative way to attack injustice without resorting to violence.

These principles of nonviolence only make sense in the context of political protest. What happened in Minnesota last weekend is another realm altogether, and in that realm, the discussions about nonviolence are going to have to get deeper. Paradoxically, the best nonviolent response in such instances is to be more aggressive vocally and rhetorically, to push back as strongly as possible against the notion that we can ever grow accustomed to this kind of horror. (America’s track record with mass shootings doesn’t offer a lot of hope in this regard. Nor do some of the ugly partisan responses to the Hortman assassination.) 

Ultimately, we all must come to the realization that nonviolence is not passive, not private or, at least in some contexts, not even peaceful. It’s an active, even aggressive posture that insists even though violence is part of the human experience, it’s also an acid that will ultimately dissolve everything we hold dear.

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