It wasn’t just Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) who decided to thrill the crowd at a Young Republicans event in New York City this weekend by riffing on the prospect of taking up arms against the government.
Given that Greene is a sitting member of Congress, it’s understandable that her line — that had she and former Donald Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon planned the riot at the Capitol, it would have involved more guns and “we would have won” — would be the focus of most of the headlines. But that she felt comfortable offering that would-be witticism was clearly in part a function of the event and the moment itself. Such language was pervasive and the underlying sentiment, of the fringe-right rising up against its opponents, embodied by attendees.
It was a reminder that the mob mentality that drove the Capitol riot is, in fact, omnipresent in a segment of America’s and the world’s political right, stoked and elevated as a means of demonstrating toughness but with occasional collapses into actual violence.
The venue for Greene’s comments was the annual fundraising gala for the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC). In attendance, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), were a who’s who of well-known right-wing voices: Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. But there were also less-familiar members of the fringe in the room, like Jack Posobiec, whose embrace of misinformation and aggressive online persona have elevated his status on the right, and the publishers of the white nationalist website VDare. Far-right European politicians also made appearances.
In a speech, the Young Republican organization’s president, Gavin Wax, declared that, “we want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”
It’s likely that many in the room were familiar with the moment four years ago when war in the streets followed a similar Young Republican event in Manhattan. In 2018, the Metropolitan Republican Club invited Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to speak, triggering counterprotests and, eventually, Proud-Boy-initiated brawling outside the venue. As the New York Times wrote last month, this was a tipping point for both that organization and the NYYRC.
“Soon after the incident, a candidate named Ian Reilly, who, former club members say, had a lead role in planning the speech, won the next club presidency. He did so in part by recruiting followers of far-right figures, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to pack the club’s ranks at the last minute,” the paper wrote. Yiannopoulos recently interned with Greene and was working with Ye, the musician born Kanye West.
“A similar group of men repeated the strategy at the New York Young Republican Club, filling it with far-right members, too,” the Times continued.
Being a Republican in New York City is inherently countercultural, which is probably part of the appeal in general. But — as with Greene’s comments about Jan. 6 — the line between ironic and sincere is blurry. The rise of a semi-ironic, fascism-sympathetic community in Lower Manhattan is in part about the frisson that accompanies articulating such views in a liberal community. But the boundary between pretending to hold a view and holding it is notoriously blurry. Do people free of racism tell racist jokes?
By now, there is an enormous library of polling showing more sympathy for the use of violence as a political response by the right. Here, for example, is polling from PRRI making that point.
There is also evidence that a willingness to embrace nondemocratic forms of government is more common among the group that was being feted at this weekend’s event. 2017 polling from the World Values Survey found that an alarming percentage of the country thought that an autocratic form of government would be fairly or very good. Among Republican-voting Americans under the age of 30, nearly two-thirds held that view.
It is frustrating that polling is structurally incapable of determining the size of small groups. If even only a small portion of either the right or left is sincerely willing to engage in acts of violence, the actual scale gets blurred by the margins of uncertainty that accompany public opinion surveys. It’s also the case that, as NPR reported earlier this year, that polling can overstate a willingness to engage in acts of violence. Among other things, there is a big jump from telling someone you would act violently and actually doing so.
At the Capitol, of course, we saw hundreds of people make that leap — people who perhaps might have indicated a willingness to engage in violence to a pollster and people who perhaps wouldn’t have. The mob mentality at play on that day was a powerful force.
CNN’s Elle Reeve spoke to me shortly after the riot, which she attended.
“I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the way the emotion moves through the crowd,” she said. “It’s like a current. It’s contagious. They’re so happy, but it’s also really menacing. There’s this forward momentum, like the crowd gets a goal and they are all going to do it. And individual responsibility just gets stripped away.”
A certain combination of factors need to be in place for violence to occur. Group engagement and enthusiasm is one. And that enthusiasm is now so pervasive as to undergird an off-the-cuff comment from a sitting member of Congress about how Jan. 6 was winnable. That — ha ha! — an insurrection that they helped foment would be better armed.
At that, the SPLC reported, those in the room “erupted in cheers and applause.”