‘We can’t let evil win’: At Boston summit, state leaders confront political violence

Days after a United Healthcare executive was felled by an assassin’s bullet in Midtown Manhattan last year, Michael Smerconish walked the same street.

He knew it well. The talk show host had walked it to work at CNN and SiriusXM countless times before. But when he did this time, he was struck by what he didn’t see there.

“There were no flowers — no flowers of the sort that you would see when, God forbid, there’s something that happens on a roadway, and families show up and they leave something as a symbol of that person,” he recalled.

“Worse than that, while there weren’t flowers commemorating the location of that loss of life, there were wanted posters in that vicinity,” emblazoned with the faces of other corporate executives, he said.

For Smerconish, that experience, coupled with stories about the social media scorn heaped on Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone who was among those killed during a shooting at Park Avenue office tower last month, is evidence that something is deeply wrong with our politics and the way we treat each other.

“There’s a brazen sense of embracing violence and somehow rationalizing it,” Smerconish mused before an audience of thousands of state legislators and their staff who’d gathered for the start of an annual summit in Boston’s Seaport District on Monday morning.

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The three-day meeting of the National Conference of State Legisatures, a kind of industry trade group for people whose business is state government, opened with an emotional tribute to the June assassination of Minnesota’s state House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, her husband, and the family’s beloved dog.

Current Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, a Republican who was in the minority when Hortman held the gavel, said her onetime colleague never made her feel shut out of the process.

“When I was first elected as minority leader by my caucus in 2023, Melissa, as Speaker of the House, reached out to me right away and offered a weekly meeting,” Demuth said.

“She didn’t have to do that. She had all of the votes that she needed, and she could have easily dismissed me as just another member of the minority rave,” she continued. “Other leaders would have. But Melissa’s brand of leadership brought people in, instead of shutting them out … Often we were miles apart on policy, but that never got in the way of seeing the humanity in each other.”

With her voice often breaking with visible emotion, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, a Democrat, retold the harrowing story of the chain of events that led to the death of Hortman and her family, and the grievous wounding of Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.

Hortman, who was 55 when she died, was “infinitely consequential to the future of our state, and she inspired a future generation of leaders,” Murphy told the audience gathered in a cavernous ballroom in the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center.

“She was brilliant, tenacious, funny, and unassuming,” she continued. “She loved cake, her family, her husband Mark, and her children. She loved margaritas, her garden, skiing, and she loved her work. She was always came ready to work. She was a partner, an ally, and a formidable opponent.”

Hoffman, who was still recovering from his injuries and was unable to travel to Boston, appeared in a short video. Like his two colleagues, he denounced the violence and appealed to the audience’s better angels, telling them “we can’t let the evil in the night win.”

But the question of how to do that, of how, in Murphy’s words, to vanquish the “dehumanizing narratives and conspiracy theories” that are “fueling the radicalization” of some people, was a more vexing one.

That took up the majority of Smerconish’s conversation with Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, each of whom mused on the fault lines in American culture that have caused voters to lose faith in institutions, and for citizens to “self-select” and spend an ever-decreasing amount of time with those who think and believe differently than they do.

“I was involved in a pretty competitive primary, and I was trying to be recalled from my own side,” Vos, a Republican, said. “And one of the things that was challenging is that my pollster — I was up 40 points when I started the race — and my pollster said, ‘I think you’re going to lose.’”

Vos recalled asking his pollster for an explanation, and said he was told, “‘You’re just not an angry enough person, Rob.”

The pollster went on to tell him that “’You need to figure out how, when you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror and you ask yourself, what are you mad about?’ Because that’s where a lot of people in the world are, especially those who are the most engaged.”

The two men pointed to a constellation of reasons for that rising anger, ranging from algorithm-driven social media, which elevates and rewards provocative posts, and the partisan fracturing of the press, to a social isolation that’s outlasted the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All this hostility that we’re condemning is rewarding individuals who are the loudest voice in the room,” Smerconish said. ”And what’s easily forgotten, and I have mountains of data that I can cite that backs this up, is that they’re the extremes and they don’t represent the majority of Americans.”

“The majority of Americans are somewhere between left-of-center and right-of-center. But you’d never know that if you landed here from a different planet and turned on a television outlet or a radio outlet, or, for goodness’ sake, looked at the Internet,” he concluded.

And even as Smerconish and Vos stressed the need to sand down the rougher edges of American politics and pleaded for a return to a shared civility, the nation’s current reality remained hard to escape.

That’s because a group of Democratic legislators from Texas, who had fled their home state in hopes of derailing a Republican-led redistricting effort, were reportedly in the crowd.

But one former lawmaker who knows something about perseverance, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, urged her colleagues not to give up on trying to find their way back to a betterTucson and more civil politics.

“It can be so difficult,” Giffords, who was nearly killed by an assassin during a constituent service event in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011, said. “Setbacks are hard. But I tell myself, ‘Move ahead.’