The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets - Amerikastudien
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The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets
Barry Shank
During the past few months, really throughout the pandemic,
our chief family outdoor activity has been walking our dog, Simone,
around our neighborhood. We now know every street and alley in the
surrounding 2.6 square miles, and Simone has left traces of her es-
sence in almost every front yard. We live in Bexley, an “internal sub-
urb” of Columbus, Ohio, one marked off from the surrounding city by
its reputation for excellent public schools, high property taxes, large
and expensive homes, and the official national designation as an “urban
arboretum.” Two sides of Bexley are bordered by literal railroad tracks.
The other two sides are marked by heavily trafficked streets. Inside is
where all those trees are, where the good schools graduate well-edu-
cated young people, where almost everyone smiles at us as we walk our
dog. As the summer faded into autumn and the beginnings of winter,
the trees have changed with the seasons, giving us something new to
look at as we stroll through our perfect little village.
Each morning before our walks, I skim the headlines from The
New York Times, diving more deeply into only a few of the stories. One
Saturday soon after the election, an article with this headline caught
my attention, “Biden Asked Republicans to Give Him a Chance.
They’re not Interested” (Herndon). This was somewhat surprising to
me because in my neighborhood, the yard signs that proclaimed loy-
alty to Trump and Pence were significantly outnumbered by signs that
read: “I might be a Republican, but I’m no fool.” As I read the article,
however, I began to understand. It drew largely on interviews from
people who lived in Mason, Texas, “a rural, conservative town of about
2,000 people,” where the local pastor struggles to keep politics out of
his Sunday services. At the end of the piece, a sixty-six-year-old white
man, who “saw this election as a battle for the country’s soul,” prom-
ised that if any Democratic or Black Lives Matter protesters came to
Mason he would “guarantee you they won’t be in this town very long.
Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 59-65 59 Barry Shank
We’ll string them up and send them out of here—and it won’t be the
same way they came in.”
I thought about that quotation during our walk that day and the rest
of the weekend. Apparently, at least some in that town were promising
violence if folks like me showed up there. Why would this be true? Just
a bit before that closing quotation, the same man insisted that Biden
was going to take his hard-earned money and give it to lazy immigrants
who “don’t do nothing but sit on their butts.” Violence in the defense of
racism. Here we go again, America, I thought dismissively, as I strolled
along our tree-lined streets surrounded by large well-built monuments
to polite, domestic bourgeois innocence.
Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, mainstream news
sources searched for an explanation of how it could have happened. The
New York Times and The Washington Post sent reporters to corners of
Ohio and Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin, identifying and interview-
ing large numbers of voters who previously voted Democratic but who
had turned towards Trump. In the buildup to the midterm elections
in 2018, academic researchers joined these journalists, trying to under-
stand the partisan polarization that had come to characterize political
discourse. Theories about the impact of social media, the power of Fox
News, and a growing epistemic divide began to dominate popular un-
derstanding. Jonathan Rauch’s piece in National Affairs, “The Constitu-
tion of Knowledge,” famously argued that the Trump era was “the first
time we have seen a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack,
emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective
ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.” Rauch named the conse-
quences of the attack “troll epistemology”:
[T]rolls discredit the very possibility of a socially validated reality, and open
the door to tribal knowledge, personal knowledge, partisan knowledge, and
other manifestations of epistemic anarchy. By spreading lies and disin-
formation on an industrial scale, they sow confusion about what might or
might not be true, and about who can be relied on to discern the difference,
and about whether there is any difference. (Rauch; emphasis in original)
The purpose of these attacks was to delegitimize the very idea of ex-
pertise. Scholars, medical doctors, intelligence professionals, climate
scientists, economists, and any other professionals who participated in
the public debate were cast as simply self-interested peddlers of esoteric
ware of no real use to anyone but themselves and their friends.
A significant reason for the success of troll epistemology was its func-
tion as a backlash against the Obama administration. Barack Obama’s
election had put a Black face atop the bespoke suits of twenty-first-cen-
tury expertise. Decisions made early in his administration’s efforts to
control the effects of the Great Recession created relief programs that
exacerbated economic inequality. The inability to protect blue-collar
middle-class jobs made the recovery efforts seem to have been purposely
unfairly constructed. The laudable desire to develop a passable version
60 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets
of accessible health care for millions ultimately created programs that
required a sophisticated ability to access online information and ana-
lyze competing offers. These skills were unequally distributed across the
country, increasing the frustration with official expertise and its expec-
tations. Stirring in the simmering racism that is always available beneath
the surface of American life created a volatile mixture. It did not take a
genius of political strategy to exploit those feelings. In fact, they seemed
particularly susceptible to the regular operations of our network society.
In their massive volume published via open access by Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and
Hal Roberts mounted hundreds of pages of quantitative and qualitative
data to support the thesis that the current epistemic crisis could not have
been caused by technological developments alone, such as the Facebook
algorithm or social media tracking and targeting. Nor could the blame
fall on foreign hackers. “Instead,” they suggested “that each of these
‘usual suspects’ acts through and depends on the asymmetric partisan
ecosystem that has developed over the past four decades” (Benkler et
al. 21). Their analysis showed that the Republican strategic efforts to
extend and maintain their political coalition drove the growth of this al-
ternate information ecosystem that nurtured, supported, and reinforced
the spread of disinformation. At the end of their book, the authors of
Network Propaganda turned to the work of Donald Kinder and Nathan
Kalmoe to argue that the great bulk of American voters are not moti-
vated by ideology at all. The intensity of the partisan divide, reinforced
and exacerbated by two distinct epistemic systems over several decades,
has created a paradoxical condition where the driving force behind the
choice of information systems is an inherited partisan identity, moti-
vated by social factors of belonging and difference. Quoting Kinder and
Kalmoe, they assert that “public opinion arises primarily from the at-
tachments and antipathies of group life” (Benkler et al. 305; Kinder and
Kalmoe). For activists and political leaders, policy positions matter. For
most people, political choices follow from a deep sense of belonging to
one group and an intense dislike of others. In effect, then, we have cre-
ated a political system in which internal division is intensified by a feed-
back loop that grew out of an electoral strategy based initially on ideol-
ogy but which has since become rooted in affect, desire, and disgust. We
are disputatious tribes unwilling to bear the presence of the other.
In her engagement with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political,
Chantal Mouffe highlights both the value and the danger of group-for-
mation in a democracy. Seemingly echoing James Madison in his Fed-
eralist No. 10, she writes: “The great strength of liberal democracy […]
is precisely that it provides the institutions that, if properly understood,
can shape the element of hostility in a way that defuses its potential
[for antagonism]” (Mouffe 5). As the United States has inched closer
to liberal democracy, these institutions have come under strain. While
the constitutional American “we” centered on whiteness and maleness,
Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 61 Barry Shank
other differences of identity and interest could be negotiated. With the
formal expansion of the political community, which remains an incom-
plete project, the lines of antagonism have intensified between those
wishing to retain the political dominance of whiteness and maleness and
those committed to acknowledging the emerging sovereignty of inter-
sectional differences.
Following the election of Donald Trump, this antagonism hardened,
approaching the extreme of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Mouffe
links the calcifying of that distinction to democracy’s dependency on
identities:
In the domain of collective identifications, where what is in question is the
creation of a ‘we’ by the delimitation of a ‘them’, the possibility always exists
that this we/them relation will turn into a relation of the friend-enemy type
[…]. This can happen when the other, who was until then considered only
under the mode of difference, begins to be perceived as negating our iden-
tity, as putting in question our very existence. From that moment onwards,
any type of we/them relation, be it religious, ethnic, national, economic or
other, becomes the site of a political antagonism. (2-3)
Even after the announcement of Joe Biden as president-elect, profound
political antagonism has left us with approximately 54 million people
who believe that the election was stolen and around 80 million who
think that those in the first group are crazy.
There is no innocent place in the United States. There is no place
where this fundamental division is not felt. Here are some facts about
my hometown. The median single-family home price in Ohio is
$156,000. In Bexley, the median is $360,000 with approximately 10 % of
the homes costing over $1,000,000. The median household income in
Ohio is $58,642. In Bexley, it is $108,750. The percentage of households in
Ohio where someone has a four-year college degree is 18.2 %. In Bexley,
it is 77.7 %. The public schools in Bexley are among the very best in the
entire nation. In 2019, 96 % of those who graduated from Bexley High
matriculated at a college of their choice (cf. Bexley City, Ohio State,
Bexley High School). On three separate occasions over the past twenty
years, the Supreme Court of Ohio has declared that the state’s school
funding system is unconstitutional, unable to equally educate the people
of Ohio. With no means to enforce that decision, nothing has changed.
When I shudder at the violence promised to Democrats who might
visit Mason, Texas, I need also to recognize the violence that guards our
streets, our dog-walks, our homes. It does not come from the point of a
gun. It blends softly into the structure of the community. Our comfort
is dependent on the violence of a massively unequal economic system
that for almost forty years has been funneling money away from some
communities and into places like Bexley. This is both a consequence
and reinforcement of “the big sort,” where those who have been favored
by neoliberal policies have moved to communities like ours. This is one
of the gifts that neoliberal expertise has given us. State school funding
62 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets
reinforces those advantages, ensuring that greater economic opportu-
nity accrues to children lucky enough to grow up in those communities.
Lower marginal income taxes accelerate the growing wage gap while
shrinking funding for government services that had worked to reduce
the costs of being poor. None of this is news. But it is worth pointing
out that our quiet, charming neighborhood full of successful people and
their beautiful children exists at the expense of small towns across Ohio.
Those small towns voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and in even
greater numbers this past November 3rd. Despite the existence of little
villages like ours, scattered around its urban centers, Ohio is now solidly
Republican.
When twenty-year-old pickup trucks drive through my neighbor-
hood, loudly belching malodorous exhaust at every stop sign, I joke to
my wife that Bexley should ban those trucks. Am I really joking? Those
who drive those trucks, especially pickups flaunting Trump-Pence
stickers, appear to me as “the other, the stranger,” someone who is “in a
specially intense way, existentially something different and alien” (Schmitt
27; emphasis added). Intellectually, I know better. I know I should not
feel that way. But I can smell my own disgust.
Is that the end? Not quite. If we are talking about the immediacy
of affect, of desire and disgust, then intellectual, fact-based arguments
are pointless. To climb down off the edge of enemy confrontation, I
need—and maybe you need, too—deep evidence of humanity, of fel-
low-feeling, of shared experience. Believe me, I am not arguing for
turning the other cheek or standing bare-chested in front of someone’s
misaimed AR-15. In closing, I suggest instead a musical exploration. For
the past several years, Dolly Parton has climbed to the top of national
recognition. Parton’s story is well-known (see, for instance, Smarsh).
Her hits from the past are canonical in musical history. Features in
The New York Times pair with locally written stories in The Columbus
Dispatch, where her donations to vaccine research are applauded along
with her long support of childhood literacy programs (Doyle; Lordi).
With a stature almost as significant as Beyoncé’s, her reach extends
way beyond her initial demographic. There are now dozens of young
country music artists who spread Parton’s legacy, identifying the places
where her work meets up with Beyoncé’s, exploring the intimate con-
nection between personal struggles and the limits our culture—yes,
our shared culture—places on all of us. Listen to Brandy Clark’s “Who
You Thought I Was,” Adia Victoria’s “South Gotta Change,” or Mickey
Guyton’s “Black Like Me.” Feel yourself merging into those beats and
humming along with those guitars, whispering the words to yourself.
And then rethink what expertise means, rethink the social obligation
of knowledge production, rethink what it requires of us now. The sov-
ereignty of expertise must meet the sovereignty of shared experience in
order to destroy the common sense of neoliberalism and restore some-
thing like a common polis.
Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 63 Barry Shank
Postscript, after January 6, 2021
There can be no doubt that white nationalism is a cancer metastasiz-
ing across the American body politic. The spread of this disease has been
accelerated by the economic disruptions of the past twenty+ years, and
the relentless second cancer of neoliberal market-worshipping policies
that divide the country into winners and, yes, losers. It might appear
that the essay that I wrote for this special issue is now simply naïve.
But I still think that something in that piece is correct. As with all
political coalitions, there are significant fractures and divisions within
the American right. Yes, white nationalism is central. Yes, damaged
white male ego drives the violence. And when not restrained, not treat-
ed as the serious illness it is, the violent anger of frustrated dominance
can explode. As we saw.
A few days after the insurrection, I logged into Facebook for the
first time in weeks to see what people outside my intellectual / politi-
cal bubble were saying. I read a lengthy thread started by a “friend”
(Facebook friend only) that was devoted to fighting the censorship of
conservatives on platforms like FB and Twitter. What struck me about
the conversation was this sense that these otherwise pretty reasonable
people could only talk about how the liberal corporations (?), the media,
higher education, and so many other forces are conspiring against them
to deprive them of channels of communication. Anger, yes, but distrust,
fear, and uncertainty were the dominant affective modes. Aggrieved,
pained, certain of the correctness of their beliefs—all of that was func-
tioning as the political glue that kept them tied to the radical impulses
of the Republican party and followers of Trump. It was as though noth-
ing else mattered. Only that people like us were forcing people like them
to go further underground in order to maintain their community.
I do not think any of them would applaud the violence that took
over the Capitol. But they were not talking about that. They were talk-
ing about the need to protect President Trump and what they saw as
their own political futures from the inexplicable transformations that
had disrupted their place in the world.
Those are the people we have to reach. The maniacs who were plan-
ning to invade Congress and hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi are
beyond redemption. They are cancerous cells that must be surgically re-
moved. But these other folks who connect themselves to the right fringe
because of their fears of no longer being able to control their lives have to
be brought back into normalized democratic discourse. Maybe not these
people, but their children and their friends. We have to be able to see
the fractures in the Republican coalition and work away at the cracks in
order to more fully expose the crazies for what they are.
I do not think Trumpism will go away with him out of office. He
has nurtured the spread of this cancer, and for many of the folks on that
thread, he is a hero for doing so. Yes, of course, the spread of radical
64 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets
right-wing discourse across alternative media sources has normalized
this position. And we all know that rational arguments are not effective
when the affective forces are so dominant. But I continue to believe that
listening to those fears, taking them seriously, and responding to those
feelings is a necessary step in the process.
Works Cited
Adia Victoria. “South Gotta Change.” Prod. T. Bone Burnett. 28 Aug. 2020. Web.
22 Feb. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEm0qOxhGxo.
Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda. Oxford,
UK: Oxford UP, 2018. Print and Web.
Bexley City, Ohio. United States Census Bureau. 2019. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://
www.census.gov/quickfacts/bexleycityohio.
Bexley High School. “Mission Statement.” 2020. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www.
bexleyschools.org/Downloads/19-20%20Bexley%20Student%20Profile.pdf.
Clark, Brandy. “Who You Thought I Was.” Your Life Is a Record. Prod. Jay Joyce.
Warner Bros. Records. 23 Jan. 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=_cwpl-yii_w.
Doyle, Céilí. “It’s Better to Give than to Receive: Dolly Parton Discusses Book Pro-
gram’s Legacy.” Columbus Dispatch, 29 Nov. 2020: 1A, 6A. Web. 22 Feb. 2021.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2020/11/29/dolly-parton-
discusses-imagination-library-book-programs-legacy/6226334002/.
Guyton, Mickey. “Black Like Me.” Bridges. Prod. Nathan Chapman. Capitol
Nashville, Forest Whitehead. 22 Sept. 2020. Web. 22. Feb. 2021. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeAhhS1Ql4s.
Herndon, Astead W. “Biden Asked Republicans to Give Him a Chance. They’re
not Interested.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Nov. 2020. Web. 13
Jan. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/us/politics/biden-trump-
republicans.html?searchResultPosition=1.
Kinder, Donald R., and Nathan P. Kalmoe. Neither Liberal nor Conservative:
Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago IL: U of Chicago P,
2017. Print.
Lordi, Emily. “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton.” New York Times Magazine,
30 Nov. 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/t-
magazine/dolly-parton.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201202&
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Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993. Print.
Ohio State, United States Census Bureau. 2019. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www.
census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/OH/INC110218.
Rauch, Jonathan, “The Constitution of Knowledge.” National Affairs, Fall 2018.
Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-
constitution-of-knowledge.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago, IL:
U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.
Smarsh, Sarah. She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived
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