Arizona Aftermath
When you find yourself defending against the accusation that your side’s rhetoric is a contributing factor in a mass murder, you have already lost the argument. You are only engaged in damage control.
You see this phenomenon all the time, and it cuts in both directions. If you find yourself having to repeatedly explain that there are no death panels in your health care bill, you have already lost the argument.
Fine details of a defense matter intensely to partisans, although they never change each others’ minds. The mood of the broader public is usually defined by the emotional mythology behind a charge, and how persistently it hangs in the air.
Republican pols ruefully recall the shift in national mood that cost them momentum after the Oklahoma City bombing. A similar braking effect will occur now, no matter how successfully they distance themselves from Jared Loughner’s schizophrenic worldview. It’s not about how closely his delusion-ridden ideology maps to one end or another of the mainstream spectrum.
The tide didn't turn from the Gingrich-era Rs in 1995 because the general public came to the conclusion that Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices were representative of Republicanism. The change came because hyperbolic anger seemed suddenly tone-deaf in the wake of a mass political killing.
This will happen again now. Individual pols may be somewhat tarnished by their past cavalier use of martial and hunting imagery. It’s in the months and years ahead that the real change will be felt. For a while at least, full-throated anger will be out of fashion in American political discourse. So will shooting range trash talk. Flirtation with conspiracy theory will return to the closet.
It will be interesting to see how hard and fast Glenn Beck tacks away from his journey into conspiracy land. I’ve always seen him as more calculated than crazy and predict that he’ll find an adjusted schtick pronto.
Office-holders will see this as a matter not just of political self-preservation, but of the literal kind. You can be sure that they all imagined themselves in Gabrielle Giffords’ place the moment word of the shootings came down.
Exaggeration, vituperation, and crazy talk have been part and parcel of American political rhetoric since its inception. All tragedies fade eventually into memory. Sometime in the future the heat will turn back up again. And then something horrible and sobering will come along to shock everybody sober yet again.