The Lanternfly Law of American politics

You have probably heard the news. New Yorkers of all ages have become gleeful, merciless killers.

On the streets. In the subways. In the parks. Even in their own homes. The massacres here continue, with no end in sight.

But it’s not what you think.

The tens of thousands of nameless dead are in fact Spotted Lanternflies, nickel-sized insects with kimono-like layers of spotted gray, black, and fiery-red wings. “A sexy cicada,” as my colleague Riley Callanan aptly describes them.

And the trouble with the Lanternflies around here is simple: they’re out-of-towners.

Native to Asia, they’re believed to have hitched a ride to the US on a shipping container about a decade ago. The population exploded across the Northeast, along with concerns about their impact on forests and farms.The Lanternflies, it turns out, secrete a gooey honeydew that foments deadly fungi.

Experts began warning of billions of dollars in damage. And so local governments urged us all to kill them on sight.

People listened.

Today, if you point out a lanternfly on any New York sidewalk, stoop, shirtsleeve, subway platform, or slide, people will spring into action: stomping, swatting, crushing, squashing. The bloodlust for this tiny creature is immense. As one popular science magazine put it, we must “destroy this useless garbage insect.. without mercy.”

Even the youth have been conditioned to kill. My eight year old son told me yesterday a girl in his class has declared herself head of “The Lanternfly Committee.” Her primary responsibility in this role is to scream that there are lanternflies around whenever there are lanternflies around. And when there are lanternflies around, all committee members (and present non-members) must stomp them into oblivion.

I will say this – it can be cathartic to stomp the shit out of lanternflies. Boss chewed you out at the office? Stomp a lantern fly. Mets blew a lead in the ninth? Die, lanternfly. Fed up with your kids asking you about lanternflies? Stomp more lanternflies.

No one is sure if all this killing is really controlling the lanternfly population, but so what? We aren’t just venting – we’re doing our part for society. This violence is virtuous. The killing must go on. And it will.

In that sense, I think there’s actually a little of the lanternfly in our politics more broadly these days. Call it the Lanternfly Law of Politics. It says: our opponents are no longer simply people we happen to disagree with, they are a threat that must be wiped out before they can do more harm.

You see this kind of thinking everywhere these days. Depending on what your views are, you might see liberals, or conservatives, or Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris, or the media, or the tech companies, or the police, or the federal government itself as a menace steadily devouring the foliage of our society.

As a result, in response, our political culture is becoming more extreme, more violent. People on the left will point to January 6th or the broader increase in threats of rightwing terrorism in recent years. People on the right will point to the not one but two plots to kill Donald Trump that occurred this summer.

We should all point to this as evidence that we are in a bad place.

Perhaps nowhere is the Lanternfly Law more obvious, or more dangerous, than in the language used to describe immigrants. When Donald Trump describes his political opponents as “vermin”, or immigrants as parasites who are “poisoning the bloodstream” of our country, he is tapping into a rich, vile history of demonizing foreigners as invasive species.

It’s powerful, of course, because it works. True vermin and invasive species are, by definition, threatening to our organisms, our communities, our ecosystems. So that kind of language taps deep into our lizard brains and provokes a primal emotional response.

But we aren’t… lizards, we are human beings. And immigrants or people you disagree with politically aren’t vermin, they are… also human beings.

We can argue about sensible rules for immigration, abortion, speech, guns, Lanternflies, whatever. But giving ourselves permission to dehumanize our neighbors and rivals like this is always dangerous.

The Lanternfly Law is, in the end, the root of all demagoguery: it’s a kind of political conjuring trick that gives people license to express their basest impulses under the cloak of civic virtue or community protection. You aren’t behaving like an ideologue, a loon, or a psychopath, the Law of the Lanternfly says, you are defending society as you know it.

So the next time a Lanternfly scuttles by or settles down, by all means stomp it to dearth if that makes you feel good.

But when it comes to the way we speak and think about our politics and society more broadly, be careful before you go chasing those sexy cicadas.