Cotton Mouth

Last night, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas issued a tweet that called for drivers inconvenienced by public protests to “take matters into your own hands.”

I suppose it’s not surprising to hear a bloodthirsty ghoul like Tom Cotton make this demand. During the summer of 2020, he famously used the op-ed pages of the New York Times to urge President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act* and deploy the U.S. military in our streets during the Black Lives Matter protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

As hard as it is to escalate your stance from “let’s use the army against protesters,” Cotton has found a way, urging that ordinary citizens be allowed to “take matters into [their] own hands” and do whatever it takes to get rid of protesters blocking traffic.

And given the fact that we have a recent example of a right-wing driver deciding to mow down left-wing protesters in his path, a decision that resulted in the death of one woman, it’s especially shocking.

As I’ve noted before, the “law and order” crowd has a tendency to slide quickly into calls for lawlessness, and this is simply the latest installment in a long line of examples. Throughout his campaigns, Trump has spun wildly — sometimes within a single appearance — from praising law enforcement and calling for a return to “law and order” in one moment, to urging members of his crowd to attack protesters the next, even promising to pay their bills** if they were arrested.

Again, I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but we can trace this line of conservative politics from Cotton and Trump back to the man who originated and popularized much of this approach, Governor George Wallace (D-AL) — right down to the threat to run over protesters.

During his 1968 campaign, when Wallace ran for president as an independent, a standard part of his stump speech was a riff about how some anti-war “anarchists” had laid down in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s limousine during a protest. Unlike LBJ, whom he accused of coddling law-breakers, Wallace promised he would not be passive in the face of a non-violent protest. “If one of these anarchists lies down in front of my limousine when I’m president,” he would then say, “it’ll be the last limousine he ever lies down in front of.” The crowds always ate it up.

But in truth, Wallace was all bluster. As newspapers reported in the fall of 1968, Wallace had already been confronted by a demonstrator lying down in front of his limousine, during his 1964 run as a Democrat. His driver was willing to run the man over, but Wallace was horrified at the thought: “Goodness, man, don’t do that!”

So, yes, Tom Cotton’s call for vigilante violence fits within a longer stream of right-wing politicians calling for left-wing protesters to be brutalized, even if only for the crime of inconveniencing commuters.

But remember — even George Wallace saw limits to this. Not Tom Cotton.

* “Hey,” you might be asking yourself, “if Tom Cotton thought BLM protests warranted the invocation of the Insurrection Act, I wonder if he thought that the actual insurrection at the Capitol deserved to be cracked down on in the same way?” Ha ha, no, of course not.

** Good luck with that.