New Edition Preface
Since the kickoff of the 2016 presidential campaign, a climate of fear and intimidation has dominated national life in the United States to a degree rarely seen before, poisoning our politics and reaching into our very relationships with friends, co-workers, and neighbors.
Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying is about how this came to be and enabled the rise of authoritarian rule, how we can find our way through it, but also why it is not likely to go away anytime soon.
At the core of this political history is a larger US public culture of intimidation and bullying in the workplace, media, and political arena that has been building for thirty-five years. The current harsh environment is a direct challenge to citizens and residents, especially those seeking to engage in progressive activism and party politics now and in the years to come.
The book’s hope is to provide a kind of clarity that helps us get a handle on events and diminish the terror of the current moment by providing some shared protective mental armor.
This book offers a unique guide to the strategies and dynamics of contemporary political intimidation and public bullying: the dangers they present, the snares and traps that envelope their targets, and the lessons to be learned.
In the end, it’s about shedding light on the dark side of contemporary national life in order to see beyond it.
For this new edition I have thoroughly revised and updated the original text and added 70% more material in the way of new research and many current examples including an entirely new chapter (Chapter Seven) on civilian and state-sponsored physical and armed violence. The first five chapters lay the groundwork for the lessons offered in Chapters Six and Seven and the Conclusion. As an appendix I have added, A Political Glossary for the Trump Era and Beyond that highlights the dramatic shifts in U.S. politics and the emergence of far-right groups and organizations in our national life.
The Organization and Flow of Chapters and Topics
The Introduction presents the origins, purpose, and main arguments of this book offering a definition of public bullying and political intimidation as a special form of political violence and power that has become the essence of political action and governing in the United States. It highlights the radicalization of Trump’s agenda in his second administration placing it in the context of recent history and current events including the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars in Europe and the Middle East, and the electoral breakthrough of far-right political parties in Europe and Latin America.
Chapter One: Political Violence, or They Meant What They Said tackles the question of verbal and non-verbal political violence and offers an overview that glances back in time at the roots of current forms of intimidation in politics. Topics include the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the War on Terror, the rise of attack ads in political campaigns, and the example of the much-publicized rough tactics of the Giuliani administration in New York City (1993–2001).
Chapter Two: Intimidation and Bullying in the Wider Culture: The Workplace and the Media pursues the story of the how the wider culture coarsened enabling right-wing political agendas and extremely aggressive political tactics. It focuses first on the managerial revolution dating from the 1980s that under pressure from Wall Street’s new expectations of high profits instituted harsh, even abusive treatment of employees and middle managers to meet their goals and gave rise to the figure of the tyrannical CEO. I then turn my attention to a second revolution, the revolution in the limits of acceptable public behavior and speech that began around the same time, especially in broadcast and cable media, which smashed the last remnants of respectful public conduct.
Together, Chapters One and Two offer an explanation of the creation of a full-blown national culture of public intimidation and bullying. I argue it was the product of the reciprocal interaction of what was taking place in the workplace, the media, and the emerging theater of dominance in politics spurred by the radicalization of the Republican Party that began under Newt Gingrich in 1994. These three arenas of national life came to function as mutually legitimizing spheres of activity, such that behavior and speech in one domain (say, the workplace) can have the effect of authorizing similar conduct in other domains (media and politics) and vice versa.
Chapter Three: Enter Trump: The Tyrannical CEO and White Entrepreneur as Capitalist Folk Hero follows up by outlining how an abusive boss like Donald Trump could flourish and become a potent political force in this new environment. Trump stands out as a hybrid form of political authority stemming from the synergy between the many facets of Trump’s persona as a public figure—still poorly understood to this day—that draw on some of the deepest wellsprings of contemporary US culture. In combination they allowed Trump to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of many. He ended up attaining the status of admired symbol of the aggressive white entrepreneur/businessman and capitalist folk hero whose approval ratings actually increased to 45% during the first impeachment’s proceedings in December 2019.
Chapter Four: Political Thuggery and Party Identities and Chapter Five: Playing for Keeps: The 2016 Elections review the long history of the GOP’s and Democratic Party’s different practices of and responses to political intimidation by virtue of their respective social composition, identity, cultures of loyalty, and conceptions of government. As it will become clear, no one individual or group has a monopoly on bad behavior, just as no one individual or group has a monopoly on good behavior. But persons and groups are positioned differently to engage in acts of bullying and intimidation and to respond to them. I bring that history up to the 2016 elections and then to the present.
Chapter Six: Learning from the Dynamics of Political Intimidation and Bullying: A Practical Guide proposes a distillation of the dynamics of public intimidation and political bullying encountered in the preceding chapters in the form of a unique practical guide. These dynamics act as a unique form of power that connects individual experience with collective forms of society and can severely weaken the ability of those targeted to participate in civic life. Chapter Six considers what we can learn from them as we oppose the ultraconservative counter-revolution in Washington through forms of activism and party politics in a resolutely hostile political climate.
Chapter Seven: Confronting Armed Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism takes on the extreme forms of civilian and state-sponsored physical and armed violence unfolding today including the deployment of armed ICE agents and the National Guard and Marines targeting “Democratic cities.” With some urgency it examines the peculiar challenges that acts of domestic terrorism perpetuated either by individuals, extremist groups, or state-sponsored physical and armed force pose to the rule of law, political institutions, and even our common understanding of politics.
Finally, the Conclusion: On Our Own looks into activist responses to the persistence of far-right politics and its practices of intimidation. It looks forward to how residents and citizens can convert what we have learned in the preceding chapters into protective mental armor undergirding a clear-eyed and effective activism that breaks with the fear that has become all too much the ground of our collective life together.
The chapters can be read in virtually any order and without consulting the Endnotes, which are there for those wishing to explore particular points more in depth or to consult my sources.
Roddey Reid
Berkeley, California
August 21, 2025