Ron Johnson comes close to getting the point

Since the comments were published, Johnson’s tried to rebut accusations that the differentiation he draws was primarily based on race.

“I completely did not anticipate that anybody could interpret what I said as racist,” Johnson said in a local radio interview, as my colleague Aaron Blake reported. “It’s not. This is about rioters.”

“I told Joe Pags the truth: I honestly never felt threatened on Jan. 6,” Johnson writes. “But, I added, I might have been worried if Donald Trump had won and the violent leftists who burned Kenosha, Wis., and Minneapolis last summer had come to Washington.”

He pointed to data suggesting that “570 leftist protests became riots last year” before getting back to his central point.

“This isn’t about race. It’s about riots. The rioters who burned Kenosha weren’t of any one ethnicity; they were united by their radical leftism,” Johnson writes. “Their politics, together with their taste for violence — so different from the Trump supporters I know personally or the Trump rallies we all saw carried out peacefully — should concern us.”

And that, right there, is the point. That’s the insight that Johnson reveals yet which he somehow fails to grasp.

The senator’s effort to equate the Capitol attack with acts of violence that spun out of last year’s demonstrations is not a new one. There are a variety of differences, including that the latter was predicated on concerns about police treatment of people of color and the former on false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Johnson’s datapoint on that violence is also misleading. The research he cites found that there were 10,600 demonstrations, of which fewer than 570 included demonstrators engaging in violence. By contrast, there were three major pro-Trump protests after the 2020 election in Washington; all three (in November, December and January) ultimately involved participants later engaging in acts of violence. (Various other protests around the country in support of Trump ended without incident — and almost certainly with less frequent intervention from law enforcement.)

But the violent actors in Washington aren’t the Trump supporters whom Johnson knows. Johnson knows lots of Trump supporters and the ones he knows are peaceful. Ergo: They aren’t a problem.

The first obvious extension of this point is that it substitutes Johnson’s immediate experience for the group overall, precisely the sort of extrapolation for which he at another point chastises his critics.

His critics “fail to see the damage they do by pushing a narrative designed to portray the 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump as potential domestic terrorists or armed insurrectionists,” he claims, crafting a little straw man while he’s at it. We can flip this around easily: Johnson apparently doesn’t see the rhetorical error in casting that same group as entirely blameless.

It certainly may be the case that Johnson’s associates all support Trump and all exist squarely on the devoutly peaceful end of the political spectrum where most Trump supporters reside. It may also be that case that some of those people stray a bit further in ways that Johnson doesn’t see. He would not be the target of their opprobrium, of course, so he may not recognize in his allies an anger or hostility that they exhibit to his enemies. If we might beg the question a bit, Johnson’s willingness to rationalize the actions of those who stormed the Capitol certainly suggests that he may not be going out of his way to see Trump supporters as dangerous.

Johnson has the same blinkered view of the people he knows that we all do. Not every American, however, is in a position where such a limit makes it hard for us to effectively do our jobs.

Consider the other obvious extension of Johnson’s solipsistic assertion: Does he actually know any of those who participated in protests over the summer? Johnson explicitly sees those protesters — whom he ridiculously loops in with “antifa” — as inherently dangerous in a way that he doesn’t see Trump supporters. Perhaps this is distinct from the obvious racial differences between the groups. Perhaps, being generous, his assessment of the validity of the point being raised by last summer’s protesters is similarly unbound to questions of race. It is nonetheless worth asking how familiar Johnson is personally with the people who felt it was important to support the cause at the heart of those demonstrations.

Reread what Johnson wrote: “Their politics” — those who demonstrated last year — “together with their taste for violence — so different from the Trump supporters I know personally or the Trump rallies we all saw carried out peacefully — should concern us.” Stating even obliquely that “their politics should concern us” is obviously a problematic claim from a sitting senator and not a statement that bolsters his efforts to distance himself from the question of race. But “their taste for violence” is a broader and more obviously ridiculous statement given the ratio of violent actors to peaceful ones. And it’s one that again runs Johnson afoul of his stated aversion to painting Trump supporters with a broad brush.

When Trump began claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen and as Republicans — including Johnson — elevated and amplified those charges, we noted that a lack of personal familiarity with those who hold different political views than our own might be playing a role in the traction the falsehood gained. A poll from Pew Research Center over the summer found that 4 in 10 Trump supporters had no friends who supported the candidacy of Joe Biden. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of counties with lopsided margins in the presidential vote has increased, indicating a decrease in the number of Americans who live among those who hold different political views.

In other words, a lot of Trump supporters — and a lot of Biden supporters, certainly — don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree with them. A lot of those people probably see their own allies and friends as innocuous and a lot of them may similarly be likely to view their political opponents as far more suspect or dangerous than is actually the case. On that point, Johnson’s right: The left’s lack of familiarity with run-of-the-mill Trump supporters might make them less likely to view the president’s base with sympathy and, perhaps, more likely to cast them all as equivalently dangerous.

What Johnson fails to understand even as he makes this case, though, is that he’s doing the exact same thing in the other direction.