Several of my colleagues have written about today’s controversy: the shooting, at point-blank range, of Renee Good. They are just a few participants in a nationwide argument over what her death means—and, more precisely, who bears responsibility for it. Our vice president has explained that Renee Good was a “deranged leftist”; our president has explained that Renee Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has explained that Renee Good had been “stalking and impeding” law enforcement officers throughout the day and that she tried to “weaponize her vehicle” by trying to run over one of them, adding that the ICE agent fired “defensive shots” at someone who appeared to be perpetrating “an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.”
In fairness, when questioned by CBS News, federal border czar Tom Homan was (at least initially) much more responsible: “The investigation has just started. I’m not gonna make a judgment call on one video when there’s a hundred videos out there.… It’d be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation. Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.… What good is it to do right now to prejudge the facts of what happened without giving law enforcement professionals, whether it’s the FBI or the local police there, give them time to look at all the videos, talk to all of the witnesses, talk to the officers, and make an educated decision on what occurred today?”
To expand on Homan’s point, here is the way it is supposed to work: The facts are supposed to drive our beliefs and our actions. That is, first, we perceive facts; second, because of what we perceive, we then form beliefs and decide on actions.
But it doesn’t always work that way. I wish the facts were always in the saddle. Instead, as Cass Sunstein recently wrote, our beliefs and actions are often driven by “the immense power of narrative, and in particular the immense power of narratives in constitutional and political life.” Sunstein was describing the way that narratives drive Supreme Court jurisprudence, but his point has broader application.
I have many “friends” on social media who are eager to contribute to, or shape, the narrative of Renee Good’s death. It is a conversational maelstrom. One might describe it as an argument over what conclusions we might draw from the evidence we have. One might describe it more accurately as an argument between many people, where everyone wants, very badly, the narrative they describe to be true. This is so whether that narrative describes (for instance) a good cop defending himself from a murderous driver who deserved to be punished for her refusal to submit to lawful authority or (for instance) a woman fleeing from masked gunmen who assaulted her and then shot at her repeatedly through the side window of her car.
Many of the participants in this many-sided argument do not seem to be letting facts determine their account of things; instead, it appears that they start with a narrative and then hunt for facts and theories that support it. (Some of them do, anyway: when Secretary Noem decries the violence directed against ICE officers and then explains that publicly videotaping their work is one such species of violence, I worry that she believes that citizens who want to make a record of what they see in public should be discouraged from doing so.) In short, Cass Sunstein has identified something important here: the propagation of narratives is a central part of political life.
So what should we say about what really happened? Perhaps the wisest course, at this point, is to exercise a bit of humility. As the adults in the room remind us, caution is in order: Sometimes law enforcement authorities will propagate untruths that portray the victim as the attacker; if government higher-ups are smearing the victim as the bad actor in this case, it wouldn’t be the first time. There is a good argument that we are without sufficient grounds for having strong confidence in the opinions we have about what happened on that terrible day in Minneapolis. It may even be true that we will not have good reason for strong confidence in our opinions about the events in question until the crucible of the adversary process burns away propositions and theories that have little objective justification.
Perhaps the courtroom will illuminate some details that are now shrouded in darkness. That is one reason why it should be a matter of grave concern when the officials at the top of our federal government—just after they learn that a woman has been shot dead by law enforcement—reflexively tell us that, in reality, she was the one at fault. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our representatives have decided that they must produce a narrative first—and that they can look up the arguments later. When that is the norm, it makes Lily Tomlin look prescient, as she famously said: “No matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.”
