Our Newly Fatalistic Right

Republicans increasingly view mass shootings as acts of God or nature we have no choice but to endure

Emergency personnel work the scene of a shooting at Allen Premium Outlets on May 6, 2023 in Allen, Texas. (Photo by Stewart F. House/Getty Images)

June 1, 2023 will mark the one-year anniversary of this Substack. I was lucky enough to be included in the Substack Pro program that pays writers for a year to smooth the transition to the subscription model. For this first year, I’ve been paid somewhat less than my former salary at The Week, plus a small percentage of subscription revenue. On June 1, my subvention from Substack will come to an end, leaving me entirely reliant on (a much higher percentage of) subscription revenue. Unfortunately, based on my current number of paying subscribers, I will be earning approximately half of what I made at The Week.

Now, the number of both paying and non-paying subscribers is growing at the time. If current rates of growth continue, I will match my former salary a year or two from now. But of course there is no guarantee current rates of growth (set during my launch year) will continue. The truth is, the financial viability of this venture remains pretty uncertain. I go back and forth a few times a month on the question of whether I can or should keep it going as my primary endeavor. I love the work. I love building this community of thoughtful readers and critics of my writing. I love the freedom it affords me—to be my own boss, to write whatever I want. But it’s an enormous amount of work, and the prospect of doing it indefinitely while trying to get by earning an income equal to what I made 20 years ago really gets me down.

I say all this both to encourage you to begin paying for the privilege of reading my work if you can afford it—and to explain why you’re going to begin seeing the paywall used more aggressively beginning today. I’ll be honest: I hate the paywall. I want people to read what I write. I dislike keeping it from people—and dislike antagonizing them by doing exactly that. But as a friend noted to me the other day, I give away an awful lot around here. Probably more than I should. That stops now—at least on most days. I have to risk antagonizing some readers in the hopes of persuading others to begin paying. That’s the only way I’ll be able to keep doing this through the 2024 election and beyond. I hope you can understand why it has to be this way. Thanks for reading.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No issue moves me to despair and, yes, disgust about this country than the steady rat-a-tat-tat of AR-15s (and similar semi-automatic rifles) spraying bullets into crowds of Americans going about their business in malls, schools, and other public places.

My second post at “Eyes on the Right,” written last June, was about guns. I wrote it less than three weeks after ten people were murdered at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and just a week removed from the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas in which 19 elementary students and two teachers were gunned down. There have been hundreds of mass shootings since—with the latest coming on Saturday afternoon in an outlet mall north of Dallas. As of this writing 9 people have been pronounced dead, including the shooter.

The most common response to these shootings online, as in so many other aspects of our public life, is anger. I once responded that way, too. But as the bodies have piled up, my rage has long since curdled into something bleaker. Hardly any kind of gun control can be passed at the federal level these days. Any that could be passed would be far too modest to make a measurable difference to the death toll. And any sweeping enough to prevent the massacres would be a legislative (and possibly judicial) nonstarter. Hence my despair and disgust every time word comes of yet another act of homicidal violence—because I know very well that we will do nothing to prevent the next one, which I also know will come, like clockwork, just a few days later.  

Note that mine is the despair of someone who’s never owned a gun and probably never will. My June 2022 post was about the very different way pro-gun Americans view the issue. I talked there about how such Americans draw on two strands of the country’s civil religion—the classical liberal emphasis on individual rights taking priority over and limiting government power, and the classical republican valorization of self-reliance—to justify stockpiling firearms and opposing restrictions on their right to do so. I then added one more factor that stands in the way of enacting new forms of gun control: the pervasive distrust of public institutions and political opponents that is the source of so many of our social pathologies.

The Right’s Form of Fatalism

All of those are important factors in explaining our divisions and resulting paralysis in the face of barbarism. But there’s more. Pro-gun Americans increasingly view mass shootings like natural disasters—as if a tornado had swept that outlet mall in Texas on Saturday, killing 9 and injuring many more. The event is terribly sad. But there isn’t anything we can do about it. It’s an act of God or an inexorable natural process that’s ultimately out of our control. The world is fallen, we are told. Disordered. Evil is on the loose. Bad things happen. People suffer. All we can do is bury the dead, bind up the wounds of the injured, comfort the survivors, offer up thoughts and prayers, and hope we’ll be fortunate enough to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a well-armed storm bears down on the local school, nightclub, or grocery store, as we know it could at any time.   

This variant of fatalism helps to explain why the public policy proposals we get from Republicans in response to mass shootings take the form they do. Like a local ordinance on the southeast Atlantic or Gulf coasts that requires structures to be built a certain way in order to withstand hurricane-force winds, Republicans tend to suggest we reinforce our defenses against the threat or simply do a better job of preparing for the unavoidable carnage. This could involve designing schools with just a single door that can be thoroughly guarded, proposing to arm teachers so they can shoot back when a sociopath opens fire in a school hallway or classroom, or even training third graders in how to tend to gunshot wounds. To those who favor gun control, such proposals sound grotesque. But to many Republicans, they sound like prudent measures taken in response to events we are ultimately powerless to control.

Such fatalism isn’t limited to mass shootings.