The U.S. looks into the darkest abyss

Some thoughts on political violence and history

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The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is not an unprecedented event in American history. In fact, it’s a depressingly frequent one. Nearly 10% of all American presidents have been assassinated while in office (four of 45), and there have been multiple assassination attempts on presidential candidates. It also comes at a time when violence and the threat of violence has assumed a more noticeable place in American national politics than at almost any time since the Civil War. The event is particularly hard to parse because its victim is himself the most prominent advocate of political violence in modern American history. That fact makes it even more likely that the nation could be on the edge of a cascade of violence which quickly gets out of control.

As I wrote in a recent free post, now isn’t really the time to get into the he-said-she-said of yesterday’s events. We don’t yet even know the motives of the perpetrator. But I do want to offer a few thoughts about political violence in general, stemming from my work as a historian.

Political violence is always bad. It represents both a negation of what liberal politics is supposed to be about, and also sets a terrible precedent for the future. The continued existence of our liberal democracies depend on the orderly functioning of laws, norms and institutions - things whose power is not mostly physical but rather derives from their legitimacy in the eyes of the population. As soon as people stop relying on these things and start taking matters into their own hands there is a tendency for things to cascade. One act of violence leads to another, then another, and then another. Violence activates an older way of thinking, one that pre-dates our liberal rules and has always existed to some degree alongside them.

A state of violent anarchy creates the preconditions for the rise of dictatorship. Ever since the Ancient Greeks, political thinkers have understood that there is an intimate connection between anarchy and tyranny. When people are faced with the former, they often seek the latter. There is a sort of “flight to strength” which pushes people to embrace whoever they think can stop the shooting and bring some sort of stability. Tit-for-tat violence also blurs the issue of moral responsibility. One side might be responsible for ten times more violence than the other, but they will invoke the acts of the other side - even if purely defensive - to justify themselves. This kind of moral blurring facilitates the rise of tyranny, too.