Principled Violence Against Defenseless Minorities
The Andy Ngo incident has me thinking about a broader point about political principles. Real life leftwing friends of mine expressed statements that seemed to obliterate generally agreed-upon leftwing principles. E.g. we should defend minority groups from oppression, we shouldn't blame the victim of an assault but instead focus on the actions of the perpetrators, etc. (Disclaimer: I am not singling out leftists as uniquely abandoning principles in politics, there are plenty of rightwing examples but this is just what immediately comes to mind.)
Generally I approach these issues with "What if you replace x with y?" in order to ascertain a specific principle. For instance, what if Ngo was a leftwing journalist assaulted at a Trump rally? I noticed that points like this are distinctly unpersuasive for its intended audience and I'm wondering whether the entire premise is questionable. Fredrik deBoer (socialist writer on the SSC linkroll) wrote a lot about the importance of principles in politics and how foundational the idea is to any movement (unfortunately almost all his writing is deleted) but even then it felt like he was screaming into an empty room.
From an operational standpoint, it's obvious that tribal affiliations are foundational in determining positions. "It's ok if my tribe does it" is the reductio ad absurdum of that idea. There does appear to be a norm against making a statement that nakedly partisan, but it doesn't stop people from acting that way anyways.
When thinking about this issue, I also wonder whether my job as a lawyer (one that has worked at the ACLU of all places) completely clouds my reasoning. Whenever I encounter a political disagreement (e.g. when is it ok to punch nazis?) I instinctively start to construct a principle for the matter that can apply universally. An example of the former could be something like "It's not ok to assault people you disagree with" or maybe even "It is ok to assault people who advocate for genocide". I'm not saying either of those positions are the correct ones, please don't read too much into this example, but at least it's an attempt to formulate a coherent set of rules and principles around the issue.
The basis for coherence seems plainly obvious to me but now I wonder why I even think that. I know I am diving deep into a metaphysical rabbit hole and it's especially dangerous because I don't have the proper philosophical vocabulary. Nevertheless, I want to read more about the idea of why principles are important, or why coherence is important, and why we should avoid arbitrary designations (this is ok, this isn't, because) in politics because it seems clear that not many people agree with the idea.
Update 7/8/19: Noah Smith concedes the attack on Ngo was awful, but argues that we shouldn’t lose sight of the trend that extremist violence is largely a right-wing affair.
To me this just seems like a non-sequitur. It's an appropriate response only to retort someone's claim that leftists in general are more violent than rightists. Otherwise I see it as a form of poisoning the well because it implies that someone bringing attention to Ngo's assault is intentionally ignoring right-wing attacks.