This interview between the NYT and the author of 'how to blow up a pipeline' includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between 'political violence is never acceptable' and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn't support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).
This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.
spoiler
NYT: We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.
Malm: Of course we can. Why not?
NYT: That is moral hypocrisy.
Malm: I disagree.
NYT: Why?
Malm: The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
NYT: But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
Malm: Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.
NYT: Could you give me a reason to live?
Malm: What do you mean?
NYT: Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.
Malm: I’m not an optimist about the human project.
Should have pushed even harder on the acceptable violence nonsense, make it clear that any system is inherently violent and the liberal democracy isn't an exception. I wonder if the bizarre "Could you give me a reason to live?" thing was a desperate ploy to shift the conversation away before he could get to it.
My friend does this with me when we talk about politics, kind of begs me to give him something positive to hold onto. It always trips me up because I honestly don't get it.
I do think he was going to get at this with his 'there are coherent pacifists, and that is a commendable position'. Then the interviewer tries to wildly shift away from comparisons to meeting slavery with violence and talk of coherent pacifism.
I think this may be because liberals (especially in the USA) are not realists. They still view the world idealistically ie just keep voting...it's all we can do!, climate change will be dealt with by someone very smart and is a problem for the next generation, other countries are not 'free' like us, etc.
Just tell him that your view is more optimistic than the liberal position. To the liberal, poverty, climate change, racism, etc. are mainly things that "just happen" and they have no systemic way to fix them. By pointing out that they are systemic and people are deliberately maintaining these systems, yeah the literally most immediate implication is "Bad people have a lot of power uwu" but the reason this actually matters is that by pointing out these are contingent structures made by human action, you are proving that they can be unmade by human action! You believe that a better world is possible, the liberal believes we've already hit the end of history.