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National tragedy used to bring national unity. If only momentarily, partisanship was put aside, and people of all political persuasions came together.
No more. The nation received a startling reminder of that sad fact on Sunday when Republican senator Mike Lee went online to share his reaction to the weekend’s horrible shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses.
“This is what happens,” Lee wrote in a since-removed post on X, “When Marxists don’t get their way.” Accompanying this ugly, unfounded comment was a photo of the suspect in the shooting, Vance Boelter, wearing what appears to be a latex face mask.
As if that wasn’t enough, Lee posted another picture of Boelter under the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, an apparent reference to the Minnesota governor and former Democratic nominee for vice-president, Tim Walz. During the 2024 campaign, Republicans accused him of being soft on crime and mishandling the riots after the murder of George Floyd.
So why not suggest that he is somehow to blame for the shootings?
Shameful. Lee has dishonored the institution in which he serves, and he knows it.
Republican Senate leaders should censure their colleague. If they do not, they will further shred whatever dignity is left in that body.
Put in context, Lee’s posts show how far we have come from the vision and hopes of the founders of the American republic. Recall that James Madison, co-author of the Federalist Papers and fourth president of the US, warned that government by the people could become what he called a “spectacle … of turbulence and contention”, driven by passions to make decisions “adverse to the rights of others or the permanent and aggregate good of the community”.
Madison preferred what he called a republic, a government in which representatives would display the wisdom necessary to “discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations”.
Oddly enough, in October 2020, Lee channeled Madison when he insisted “that our form of government in the United States is not a democracy, but a republic … Insofar as ‘democracy’ means ‘a political system in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed’, then of course that accurately describes our system”. He continued: “But the word … is often used to describe … the view that it is the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens.
“Our system of government,” Lee noted, “is best described as a constitutional republic. Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power.” In that system, the job of the Senate, Lee suggested – citing Thomas Jefferson – is to cool “hot passions … It’s where consensus is forged, as senators reach compromise across regional, cultural, and partisan lines.”
Perhaps the senator has forgotten those lines.
His posts about the Minnesota shootings seem designed to further fuel the “hot passions” of our political moment, rather than to “cool” them. They surely do not help build consensus across party lines.
Now Lee’s agenda seems different. He wants to show his Maga scapegoating bona fides by conjuring leftist plots as an explanation for every problem.
And he is not the only member of the Maga crowd to do so. He was joined by Elon Musk, who wrote on X: “The far left is murderously violent.” Musk reposted the following from a person who identifies herself with these words: “GOD | #MAGA | Freedom |#Trump2024 | Constitutionalist | America First | Shall Not Be Infringed | USMC Wife”.
“The left kills the CEO of United Healthcare. Kills two Israeli ambassadors staffers. Attempts twice to assassinate the President. Doxes and attempts to murder federal ICE agents and Police - all week. And now kills a MN state rep and her husband and injures a Senator and his wife. The left has become a full blown domestic terrorist organization.”
Madison must be turning over in his grave.
And, as to the evidence that supports Lee’s or Musk’s claims about the Minnesota suspect? There is none.
Don’t forget that the president himself has frequently demonized “radical left lunatics” and labelled people Marxists. Last September, he blamed a “violent, radical-left monster” for the second attempt on his life.
Using tragedy to demonize others and stoke fears about adversaries has become a new normal. No more rallying around the flag and doing the job that Madison thought political leaders in a representative democracy should and would do.
In 2016, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, writing in the wake of what was then the deadliest mass shooting in American history, suggested that “not since 9/11 has a moment like this brought the nation together, and that evaporated quickly. Since then, calamity seems only to drive the left and the right further apart, while faith in the nation’s institutions deteriorates further.”
We know that Lee knows better than to do what he did on Sunday. He demonstrated that in 2020.
So why, five years later, would he go after Walz or Marxists after a national tragedy? We can only speculate.
Politicians like Lee live for and on social media. Legislating is hard; accumulating “likes” with a quick post is easier.
Getting attention by being outrageous or provocative is the name of the game in what is now referred to as the attention economy. Madison, who thought that any damage done by what he called “fractious leaders” would be limited to their local area, could never have imagined the gravitational pull of that economy or its global reach.
Sadly, Lee’s posts are making him a winner in that economy. By Monday morning, the first of them had been viewed 5.3 million times, and the second attracted 7.8 million views.
Not bad for someone with 799,000 followers on X.
In a deeply divided nation riven by political sectarianism, Lee did what his partisan supporters expect him to do. Give no quarter. Be on the offensive. Push your point.
These are the rules, even when a tragedy occurs. In fact, it increases the “opportunity for free publicity” that people like Lee crave.
But let’s be clear. While we can understand the forces that might explain why Lee turned tragedy into disinformation, that doesn’t mean we should accept or forgive him for doing so.
In the kind of constitutional republic that Madison imagined and Lee once praised, tragedies like the murders in Minnesota should bring out the best in our leaders. Their duty was, when Madison wrote, and remains today: “to remind us of our shared humanity, not deepen our political divides.”
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Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
