Americans accustomed to treating electoral politics as a war between good and evil are discovering that some of their compatriots have embraced a crusade against evil. This feeds a rising tide of political violence including, not incidentally, a second attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump in Florida on Sept. 15. The battle for control of the government has become too dangerous.
“@POTUS Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free,” recent would-be assassin Ryan Routh posted on X earlier this year. “Trumps should be MASA …make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.”
Routh’s apocalyptic tone and words matched those of too many other participants in the United States’ increasingly rough political scrum.
While his actions were his own, his inspiration could be found by marinating in the country’s political climate. In a September 2022 speech in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden insisted: “We must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.”
On July 26, after assuming the role of Democratic standard-bearer, Kamala Harris called Trump “an existential threat to our democracy and our most fundamental freedoms.”
The day after the latest assassination attempt, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton castigated the press for its alleged lack of a “consistent narrative” about “Donald Trump, his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world.”
Trump infamously plays this unpleasant game with high-stakes language, too. In March, he claimed that if he loses the November presidential election, “we’re not going to have a country anymore.” He’s warned that a Harris presidency “will destroy our country in a year” and, while debating Harris, cautioned that his opponent and her allies are “the threat to democracy.”
Importantly, during that debate, Trump also said, “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” referring to the wound he received during the first assassination attempt in July. And now he’s been targeted by a second assassin.
In truth, the Manichean language of modern American politics almost seems crafted to drive mentally unbalanced people to find meaning in pursuing the violent defeat of forces they’ve been told will destroy everything they value. Such individuals take up righteous missions in the sordid business of politics.
In 2021, Linda Feldmann of the Christian Science Monitor took a look at the country’s already chaotic political scene and wrote “for many Americans, politics has become a quasi-religion — especially as participation in actual, organized religion has plummeted.” The scholars to whom she spoke saw theocratic fervour from “MAGA devotees on the right to social justice warriors on the ‘woke left.’”
That’s because “human nature hasn’t changed.… We still crave justification,” believes former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. And in people’s search for a new sense of meaning, “seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace — and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation.”
As a result, we end up not with prosaic debates over tax rates and trade policy, but with sectarian struggles between the irreconcilable forces of good and evil.
“Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral,” polling expert Nate Cohn noted four years ago, in the New York Times.
I’ve written before that the dominant political factions in the U.S. have split between populists and elitists, but they also fly the flags of moral crusaders. People who disagree may compromise, but there’s little room for hammering out a deal when you’re battling those you see as almost demonic.
Polling by Pew Research finds large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats consider opponents closed-minded, dishonest and immoral. YouGov found that “Democrats and Republicans are increasingly likely to dislike each other and to feel hostile toward members of the other political party.”
When you’re sufficiently hostile towards the opposing “evil” faction, you might turn to extreme measures. In April, a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found one in five adults believe “Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track.” That’s not a majority, but it’s certainly enough people to cause mayhem.
A May data review from the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Army’s West Point military academy even found that threats against public officials have steadily risen for the past 10 years. The number of people arrested for making threats in breach of federal law has almost doubled in the past six years from the previous four.
Public figures like Trump are by no means the only victims. In July, an elderly Michigan man erecting a Trump sign was run over by a politically motivated attacker who took his own life the next day. Arsonists have targeted campaign offices, political signs and politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), but also the offices of conservative organizations in Minnesota, an Ohio church that hosted a drag event and even police cars and campus buildings at the University of California, Berkeley. People have killed each other in political disputes.
Americans expect worse to come. Three-quarters of respondents to an August Deseret News/Harris X poll said they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about violence around this year’s election.
Elections should never be seen as so high stakes that they justify violence. If Americans truly believe that Trump, Harris or anybody else would endanger the country upon winning the presidency, then the real problem is that government wields too much power. Election outcomes are unpredictable, so the offices to be won shouldn’t pose so much peril.
Once control of government is less important, maybe we’ll learn to live alongside each other again.
National Post