The fear will linger ...

What happens to the psyches of members of legislative bodies who have experienced incursions by armed right-wing thugs screaming for their overthrow? Plenty, it seems.

Michigan statehouse in April. Photo by Jeff KowalskyAFP

Matt Shuham of Talking Points Memo interviewed members of the Michigan and Idaho legislatures who have endured gun-toting anti-coronavirus restriction protesters invading their space. 

“Now I’m like, ‘Well gosh, does it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?’” said state Rep. Ilana Rubel, a Democrat and minority leader in the Idaho House of Representatives.

... State Rep. Donna Lasinski (D), minority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, recalled sitting mere feet from the swinging doors that separated the House “and the men who were screaming and armed right outside our chamber” in April. 

She said the rage on display in Washington, D.C. last week recalled what she’d seen at her own workplace — “when you hear someone scream, and you hear the change in their voice that has moved them to a point where you feel like there’s no return, where you feel like violence is imminent.”

From the point of view of the thugs, intimidation is the point. And unless this kind of terrorism can be curbed, very few people are going to be willing to sign on to contest and hold elected office. And that means the terrorists win.

Watching this has reminded me that our Constitutional structure of government was not designed to be operated by professional politicians whose career path consisted of winning and holding elective office. The founding generation expected Congresscritters and their state analogues to be short-termers, white gentlemen taking a break from their plantations (South) or perhaps their law practices (North). 

Though political parties formed within a decade and professionalization rapidly followed (all that patronage for office holders to distribute!), it's worth remembering that eighty years after the founding, our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, had been merely a one-term Congressman who had retreated after a loss to a country law practice. He enjoyed continued prominence only thanks to the accident that the national party structure was reformulating itself to generate a new, anti-slavery, free labor party (the early Republicans). His equivalent of Twitter was a national lecture tour reinforcing the drive toward free-soil expansion of the nation to the west. And, having won the Presidency in 1860, he had to slink into Washington under threat of assassination in Baltimore before even taking office. In Lincoln, we lucked into a politician who believe in something beyond a career and paid the price.

People whose ambitions are simply to hold a cushy job and perhaps graduate to a lucrative lobbying career aren't going play in the political arena if it is perceived as more dangerous than prestigious. We have to make elective office safe enough to attract people who want to engage in public service without fear. Ideologues will come to the fore when temperatures remain as hot as they are today. 

Biden wasn't my guy by a long shot. But nothing is served by so breaking the structures of government that only ambitious monsters and monomaniacal zealots will take part. Let's hope he can calm the roiling seas.