The scene was shocking, to be sure. But sadly, it wasn’t surprising.
In fact, one might be forgiven for wondering at the fact that more bullets haven’t been flying at political rallies. You don’t have to look far on any social media outlet to find people salivating at the prospect of a politics of enmity and blood. And these are not just occasional cranks that nobody listens to, but often people with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers and sometimes with serious money behind them.
The enmity is only slightly masked among the more “respectable” classes, who still present politics in existential terms, simply leaving the “destroy our enemies” as an unspoken implication. That is part of why the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is so disturbing. Added to the inherent shock of an assassination attempt is the fact that it seems like such a natural extension of the kind of politics we see around us all the time. To confirm, one merely needs to look at the many deranged online reactions to the shooting.
Aside from the growing number of extremists who hunger for escalation, the name of the game now seems to be moderation, for a few days at least. Stone-faced media pundits wonder if we’ve taken things too far; politicians put out press releases about how we must seek “unity” and “lower the temperature” of politics.
But as Peggy Noonan observed at the Wall Street Journal, it all seems so pro forma. Maybe there will be joint press conferences, a photo-op on the Capitol steps, or a brief period of respite from “fascist” talk. But will we get anything that’s beyond surface-level? To parse the metaphor, there is no wall thermostat to simply “turn down the temperature.” Calls to de-escalate are all to the good, but they are almost all focused on the epiphenomenal—the problem isn’t the rhetoric, per se. The problem is where the rhetoric comes from. That rhetoric is just part of a system of complex incentive structures that systematically poison political talk, ideas, and action.
One characteristic of today’s disease in the public mind is that it seems to be driven specifically by our political life—not by underlying social conditions. American society is not one that, on paper, should be seething with hatred. The tension in public life is not driven by a suppressed underclass groaning against oppression. There is no grand sectarian religious enmity. At a personal and local level, race relations have never been better. Religion, class, race, and a host of other elements, of course, all feature prominently in the cacophony that is public debate, but only after they have been fit into a larger national political narrative. Most Americans, even the extreme partisan agitators, honestly seem to care less and less about whether someone is black or white, an active Christian or an atheist, an East Coast elite or Midwestern farmer, so much as they care what kind of American you are, as the Internet meme goes. They care about the political “community” you are a part of, and what identity markers you embrace.
The vitriolic politics we practice is not feeding off already-simmering social tensions. It creates these identities and “communities,” most of which would not otherwise cohere on their own. Rather than managing and mitigating the tensions that naturally arise in any society, our political process actively generates new ones and calls forth the worst in human nature to bolster them. If there is to be a serious effort to make this moment a turning point—to tame the existential, “by-any-means-necessary” politics—it would require more than press releases or calls for a fabricated unity. It would require serious thought about our political practices and how they might change.
It may be impossible to say in advance what that sort of reflection would entail. But it would have to go beyond “taking a step back” or the other clichés and instead consider some deeply rooted qualities of our public life that incentivize the vitriol.
It would need to consider why so many people seem to have given themselves entirely over to politics. Why do so many find a quasi-spiritual fulfillment in it, such that they can only see it in truly existential terms? This sort of person is constitutionally incapable of “turning down the temperature.”
That may lead to consideration of the decay and cooptation of so many other sources of community and authority outside of the struggle for national political power. Today, national politics tries to pull everything into its vortex. College campuses are platforms for violent protest; the bathroom policies and library collections of primary schools are matters of national debate; churches often identify themselves as much by political labels as religious ones; business and economic life is infused with political symbols and posturing; local communities have been burned down to make a national political point. Even the individual person is increasingly understood in terms of “identity” markers that have been forged in the fire of partisan debate. Given this reality, is it so surprising that people begin to feel that everything they love is at stake in national political conflicts?
Paranoid conspiracists are wrong to suggest that every part of life is being controlled and dominated by this or that nefarious group. But the power at stake and the corresponding mentality of public officials gives these stokers of discord more than enough grist for their mill.
Then there is the oft-observed distrust in institutions. Americans have no confidence in their constitution, laws, and political institutions either to perform the specific function they traditionally fulfill or to properly form and restrain the individuals operating within them. And one can’t understand the distrust in our political institutions without realizing that it is well-earned: The powers of Congress, the courts, and most obviously the presidency and its behemoth executive administration have been routinely misused to reward friends and punish enemies, betraying their core purpose and eroding any limits. It is little wonder so many people reach for irrational hope in parties, movements, and persons of whatever ideological brand that promises to purify things from the ground up.
This in turn leads back to the incredible amount of concentrated power in the hands of our national government, which inevitably gathers in the executive branch. Few people blink an eye when someone refers to the job of the president as “running the country” (a phrase both of our two most recent presidents have used). One man, with the flick of a pen, can drop bombs on any part of the world; cancel private debt; choose not to enforce laws that the representatives of the people have instituted; bribe the institutions of civil society to conform their policies to an ideological model; unleash swarms of officers from massive federal enforcement or regulatory agencies to harass any man, woman, child, business, or organization in the country.
That kind of power is up for grabs every four years; it can swing drastically from one direction to another on a crisp January morning, through a process that the average citizen has only a token participation in. In these circumstances, a simple call to “unity” falls flat, for it is easily absorbed into the cycle of fear and resentment: Unity on whose terms? Unity under whose auspices?
Paranoid conspiracists are wrong to suggest that every part of life is being controlled and dominated by this or that nefarious group. But the power at stake and the corresponding mentality of public officials give these stokers of discord more than enough grist for their mill. We don’t live in a repressed dystopia. We retain many freedoms so valuable that they are taken for granted. And our Constitution and traditions provide us with remarkable resources for reviving a healthy form of civil life.
Yet we do increasingly seem to be in the midst of a widening gyre put into motion specifically by our manner of political practice. For the “temperature” to be turned down, it would take more than rhetoric. It would require a different way of thinking about and engaging with fellow citizens, one in which people don’t feel that every aspect of their life, even their very personal identity, is on the line every four years in a winner-take-all battle. It would require a citizenry open—perhaps out of exhaustion—to moderation. And it would require a wise and far-sighted statesmanship that seems nowhere in sight.
All that might just mean it’s impossible. But if we truly want a healthier civic culture, it will require a change that goes beyond words.
Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.
