Let us hear these criminals' voices and their reasons!

So, of this man's famous 1,000 word manifesto? We should read it.

Political assassinations do not have the happiest histories of consequence. For instance, when Russian ‘radicals’ killed a Czar, his successor was worse. I am not exactly the fan of those who commit such acts, but I do believe what bothers them should be discussed. If the criminal wants to call our attention to the outrageous and no longer tolerable character of some governing enterprise, even by the short-cut of attacking its personnel, which does get media attention, I think we should honor the bid on our attention by talking about what is wrong with our government and what (since assassination is not the best way) we can do about it. How can we get rid of this awful government? Or oppose and try to stop it from what it has been doing? The attempted assassin is not only trying to eliminate an opponent, but also get our attention. He succeeded, alas. The corporate elites that control our media, and of whose class our political elites are a part, want to control the messaging. They cannot easily keep the matter out of public attention, and they may not want to. Trump and his advisors may want the public to have in its attention the fact that an assassination attempt was made on the president. I’m not sure such things really bother them; maybe they are like reactive hiccups in a machine that counter-reacts in predictable ways, and in this tactical game it may well be that the corporate agent, in this case a government and a class that cannot break with it except superficially, with the superior force easily wins. We know now that the Communists did not start the Reichstag Fire, but what if they had? The Nazi Party which claimed it did would have reacted as it did, and liberal historians would blame the Communists for a crime, which they would then have to consider a mistake. Responsible journalists and their managing company executives ought to be asking real political questions, and not ones about the management of crime. The boredom of reading all that can overcome you quickly if you are not into shitty obsessional ruminations.

In this case of such criminals with their spectacular acts, with their desperate courage documented as personal frustrations in the face of real publicly relevant annoyances, we should talk about what they tried to do and how upsetting this is, not as a possible truth about them that should interest those who would “treat” their behavioral tendencies somehow, but as a possible truth about the matter that bothers them, in these cases, not them alone. Of course, no one in the medical and therapeutic establishment is interested in such matters, which might concern citizens in a democratic space where there are acknowledged matters of public concern that people can and do speak and worry about, if not act on individually, which can be quite dangerous; they are only interested in what is the matter with that person. Now, anything any person might say or think that is intelligible in a space of giving and asking for reasons for claims about states of affairs in the world that are part of the res publicae or matters of public concerns, such a statement can also always be said to be uttered by a person with a psychologically or medically identifiable set of qualities that could be then taken as invalidating the putative meaning they would give of what they say or indeed do. What does it mean when a common public discourse reduces the one to the other? For: If a madman says that the emperor has no clothes, is it not of interest to us that, perhaps, indeed, what he is saying is true, and the emperor really is naked, just so long as we are duly informed that the speaker of the statement is a madman?

And if the fact that we can consider as separate the (presumably mad, and obviously deviant, since a priori crime is a form of deviance) personality and the meaning and possible truth and in some (imperfect) sense justice (I mean by this something like a good reason advanced for an unjustifiable deed, or a desirable end (replacing the president) advanced by an inacceptable means (implied in the repudiation of political violence), if this too is obvious, then at least I can wonder why all the obfuscation. A politically motivated crime, whether or not it can be shown to be in fact motivated, driven, or explained by the person’s abnormal psychology, is (at least also) what it manifestly presents itself as: a politically motivated crime. In other words, I suspect that what is at stake here is the very question not of political violence but of political action of any kind, and whether or not political actions should be explained away as really psychological. In that case, audiences are being implicitly warned: you cannot oppose those in power. Maybe not your company boss either. Though the system we have today is well advanced to the point where no one thinks of doing so overtly at least, because at least individually they would just be immediately fired. Indeed, most of the people of my generation that I knew in school and college knew that you can never challenge or oppose any act of anyone in authority, you will immediately be either fired or treated like a criminal. Maybe politics itself is crime. Everyone I respect knows that forms of political thought, if that means challenging somehow the way things are in the world or milieu you are living in, is only possible in art.

The media pundits all echo Trump himself, reiterating the obvious:

The man must be "mentally ill."

That is because they are scrambling to "explain" the event in a way that treats politically motivated crimes as acts of madness or crime as such and not acts of politics.

This works by an endlessly circular logic. Political violence is criminal by definition when it is carried out by actors not acting under government authority.

Since madness is little more than abnormality, backed by medical and psychological reports that justify the judgment when pronounced by suitable experts, a crime like this is objectively an act of "mental illness." The circular logic consists of establishing that crazy things that some people do are done because they are crazy. The rhetorical repetition involved has the intended effect on audiences of invoking strongly felt iterations confirming the common sense judgment.

So media explainers rush to account for the act as motivated irrationally. Psychological inquiries may find useful factual details that could explain what we already know: a shocking crime was committed. The evidence will fill in the sketch of the shock. The audience then is expected to act like a chorus. The chorus iterates the common sense of the moment, what everyone knows, because it is obvious, and must say, while we are performing our roles as citizens who know we must applaud what is right and loudly condemn what is wrong.

Crime by definition is immoral. If this seemed not to be the case, people would think the state is a tyranny, making illegal acts that should not be.

Anxiety is provoked in audiences witness by report to some kinds of political crimes. Then it is the job of leaders with good conscience to step forward and model the voice of chorus for us all. You will hear this in churches and synagogues if you haven't already.

What about this anxiety? What else can we say about it?

Many people don't like our nation's current government and much of what it is doing. This includes many Americans, and clearly this attempted assassin.

What would it mean if this assassin's motives appeared to be at odds with our disapproval of violence? We can separate acts and reasons if we refer the actions to reasons given that ‘authorize’ and motivate them. We cannot do so if actions are regarded as only the behaviors of intelligent animals whose psychology can be studied but are not, at all or in the instance, capable of being considered as rational actors. And we also call people crazy whenever we don’t want to consider them as acting in light of reasons we should ourselves evaluate in order to determine among ourselves what really ought to be done. Something other than that, for sure, but what?

While it might seem that this is justifiable especially and perhaps only in the case where the action is obviously a crime, in fact this manner of regarding people and their actions and behaviors in psychological and medical terms, which is marketed to us as enabling self-management in terms of one’s own ends and purposes, in order to live “a good life” in which one is manifestly operating or functioning “well,” the mark of which is personal happiness, is normally how the American corporate state or system regards individuals today. We are not citizens very much, if that means that the organized social life we are involved in is one where we rule rather than are ruled. No one is a citizen in that sense within a psychological framework of the managing of persons, because these are frameworks of management. And the management is by corporations, which do not have citizens, only shareholders.

Imagine you are jury member who, on examining the evidence, finds that the man's reasons for disliking our current government are perfectly sound, and your honesty and sound judgment as citizen compel you to recognize that he is right. But of course the act is a crime.

The NY Times has this document and doesn't want us to read it?

I think this might put things into sharp relief in a way.

Except for one problem: Trump is not the cause of America's neofascist tendencies but its symptom. The last time a president was removed from office (through an impeachment proceeding) as a consequence of widespread dissatisfaction with the policies and actions of his government (a genocidal war abroad and massive police repression domestically, targeting both protest against that war and political and social unrest among the poor and labor unrest within a soon-to-be-forgotten working class), the beneficiaries were competing factions of the governing elite that under the aegis of the Democratic Party, gave us identity politics to make the university and corporate worlds safe from challenges to capitalism. That the government that had been managing this genocide had also brought fascism in liberal guise in the form of a coup in Chile was overlooked as the psychological ethos of liberalism triumphed. Maybe, said the liberals, it was not the protestors who were crazy (Nixon had bugged the psychiatrist's office of Vietnam whisteblower Daniel Ellsberg) but Nixon himself. So who is the crazy one? Is it the criminal or the (gasp) possibly out of (self-)control official leader, who is to be blamed for the civilized barbarism domestically and internationally of our corporate state? Lots of people, say the functionaries of that state, including among "progressives." And fascism marches on.

Revolutions are not assassination programs. They have a different logic. If our ruling classes feared revolutionary change, or even mass social unrest on the left (right-wing vigilantes may not bother them, as they work hand in hand with the government's own), they might not really mind these crazy acts of attempted killing as much as they claim, as they fit their own media-dependent and rather reactive logic and, indeed, modus operandi.

Our government is not afraid of violence. We live in a land of violent liberty. Our present government is afraid of sane and well reasoned opposition.

One way to head this off is to drown out political questions with ethical ones. (Which have obvious answers, affirmed by everyone (for the record: myself included) and so are not really questions. For unless there is a sovereign with exceptionality to the law because he decides on it, perhaps after systematically declaring questions of truth and justice irrelevant in the face of a will to power appealing to the audience’s identification, every sane person by definition affirms that some crimes are by divine right forbidden, or crime is crime, it hurts, shocks, and is indeed, once again, to be repudiated!). These ethical certitudes are then easily referred to psychological investigations (which likewise are not questions we might ask ourselves, though criminals and madmen, or potential criminals, ought to do so only in light of the certainties that public judgment has pronounced and that they should perhaps meditate on and recognize) in which it is taken for granted what is to be explained, which is basically: why is the apparent crime against the state in a fact a crime? And, indeed, only a crime and not a matter of the political — whatever that is in a supposed democracy that is in many ways just a managed corporate state. All political thinking ruled out by the reaffirmation that even political crime is in essence deserving of the loud and clear pronounement that it is only (and appalling!) crime (the outrage giving deeply resonant music, as it were, to the iteration of the concept, for real crime really outrages, and the public, gathered at the site of execution should roar!), the purely ideological character of the resulting discourse is thus revealed by the fact that the questions then asked are not really questions at all, just iterations of the common sense.

The New York Times serves this function remarkably well, albeit, contrary for example to Fox TV, with an admirable literary eloquence that at least mimics thoughtfulness. The assault on democracy engaged in by our media in servile cooperation with the government that it is its job and reason for being to criticize should strike us as chilling in contrast to an assault on a part of our government that is, obviously, worthy of so much attention precisely because it is comparatively far less effective. The logic of control, less agentive than systematic, is tactically far more apt than the spectacular shocks of recognition achieved by or mad or wild passages to the act that are easily recognized only as targeting powerful individual agents. I am reminded here of Brecht’s comparison of robbing a bank to founding and operating one.