Short answer: No.
Longer Answer: They should not be in power to be egged.
Even longer answer:
Following the Christchurch Mosque shootings, Senator Fraser Anning said that the whole mess could have been prevented if they had just prevented immigration! Now, there is some irony in a white politician outside of Europe suggesting racial strife was caused by people coming to a new land setting up a life there*. In Europe white nativism has a sort-of-coherent internal logic, if an appalling one. Even in New Zealand, where an imperfect treaty has allowed the Native population an imperfect amount of self-determination, the native Māori continue to contest land seizures and other injustices. If we set aside the audacity to pretend that New Zealand is somehow a white homeland, we’re still left with the incredible victim-blaming of saying immigrants are at fault if they get shot.
Enter William Connelly. He through a raw egg at this politician (and took a picture on his cell phone!!!)
Just like with punching Nazis, the question of—you want to see the Richard Spencer gif again? Good point, me too.
Anyway, just like with punching Nazis, the question of how these tactics fit into liberal society is an interesting one, and one that I think is under-explored. For the most part, people who claim to support liberal society cite the right of these people to be heinous in public without physical consequence. I’m going to put forward that this may not be entirely wrong, but picks up the story in the middle.
Damned Liberals
I’m using liberal in its much older sense. Summarizing multiple philosophies from philosophers who had deep disagreements over several centuries is…well…academically reckless. But when has that ever stopped this blog before? To a very crude degree, liberalism is any political philosophy that says:
- Each person knows what they want
- Unless it harms someone else, they deserve to pursue that
Both parts get complicated very fast. Incorrect information, lying, and basic human folly make the issue of “knowing what you want” inherently difficult. Healthcare is a good example. If you don’t know that vaccines are safe or you are swindled by a snake-oil salesman, you can’t make an informed decision. I think reasonable people can disagree on exactly how much people who are misinformed should be allowed to hurt themselves if the misinformation is from a lack of diligence. But the basic point—that people know themselves better than anyone else—holds up well enough.
It is also possible to trace consequences of any action pretty far, raising questions of when you should protect those harmed by an action and when you should protect the actor. The safe-space debate, in the rare instance its being held in an intellectually honest way, can be framed in liberal terms. Even one’s speech has emotional consequences for the listener, especially when such speech is hostile or misinformed. Protecting the listener versus the speaker is a much more interesting question than a lot of dismissive critics of safe spaces like to suggest.
But setting aside these complications, let me suggest that in a liberal framework, immigrants know what they want and, so long as they are not harming anyone else, deserve to pursue it. How do we square that with Nativist and Nazi free speech rights?
The Case against Nazi Punching
Again, simplifying things, most liberal philosophers proceed from the two points above to argue for a government which:
- Protects all citizens citizens from incursions on their rights from other citizens
- and ensures the safety of that government
I want to suggest that philosophers in the 19th Century did not fully explore the conflict between these two. In fact, I think the American Founding Fathers, who had to confront the issue head on by putting liberal philosophy into practice, came the closest in the Federalist papers. A government that can use violence to stop residents’ violence is easily co-opted into a government that stops residents from pursuing what they want. People who advocate that are a serious threat to the liberal project.
They “resolved” this tension with extreme deference towards individual rights, making it hard for the government to stop speech, even by those who would dismantle the very protections they benefit from. Most of the Anglophone world, New Zealand included, followed suit as they transitioned from a true Monarchy. In a perfect world, I agree: If the government is both protecting all citizens and ensuring its safety there is never any reason to punch a Nazi and if you do, you should face appropriate consequences from the state.
That “if” is doing a lot of work.
Second Best
The problem here is that Spencer and others are a threat to the liberal state. Fascist politicians and their Nativist sympathizers are, by definition, an existential threat to whatever rights any citizen has, but especially those who do not fit their vision of an illiberal society. When a Nativist New Zealand politician starts blaming the victims of a shooting for being shot, I argue that is automatically disqualifying from holding office.
If the purpose of the liberal state is to both maintain liberalism and individual rights, then advocating for the dissolution of that state is necessarily an unjust attack on it. The appropriate action for a government unjustly attacked by its citizens is to strike back. This is even truer when that person holds some measure of power within the government. The least we can do is bar these people from holding power.
Richard Spencer offers an additional complication because he is not a politician but a private citizen. But again his organizing has a dimension to it that cannot be ignored. He is explicitly trying to organize an alternative political structure with the goal of supplanting those currently in power. Those trying to gather political power outside of formal office should be viewed as those trying to seek a sort of office as well.
In both cases, the government has a legitimate interest in curtailing their activity. And in both cases the government is failing in that duty. Allowing right-wing extremism to grow within your government is a violation of the liberal compact. In such cases, civil disobedience, including violent resistance, is justifiable, if not automatically justified. Such responses should be proportional; preventing someone from eating a restaurant or hitting them with an egg is very different from assassination and should be viewed as such. Arguing the exact limits of these actions is more than I can tackle in this blog post. But all the same, the conversation is a legitimate one when the government is abdicating its responsibility to stop threats against immigrants and others.
Conclusion
The argument against egging right wing politicians or punching Nazis rests on the assumption that the government will stop these people when the moment comes. That requires much more decisive action than we are seeing from those within the governments of the Anglophone world, and historical precedent tells us there are dire consequences to waiting too long. While these sorts of attacks cannot come without serious discussion about their limits in practice, it is broadly true that civil disobedience in these cases can fall within the scope of the liberal project.
Punch Nazis. Egg Nativists. Demand your government protect immigrants from both.
*There has been some good writing about how colonization and immigration are fundamentally different phenomena, and I don’t mean to imply anything else here. But, I think that distinction heightens rather than detracts from the irony.
Proof of Burden 