Someone tried to kill former President Donald Trump. We don’t know who, and we don’t know why, but we do know they came awfully close to succeeding.
We should all be terrified of what happens next.
America has politics Recently stuck In a state of simultaneous stability and instability. It is stable in the sense that there are clearly defined and seemingly unbreakable partisan divisions. It is destabilizing in the sense that these divisions have become so deep and so bitter that they threaten the basic belief in political coexistence that any democracy must survive.
Two years ago, I asked some of the world’s leading experts on democratic breakdown what was next: How might the seeming crisis of American democracy end? Many of them warned of an increase in political violence. The more people hate and fear their political opponents, the more likely they are to go outside the law to try to stop them.
And when someone on one side is attacked, the other side is more likely to respond. The ultimate fear is a cycle of violence similar to Italy’s “Years of Lead”: a roughly 15-year period beginning in 1969 in which far-left and far-right militias carried out bombings and assassinations.
At the time, I wrote that the “likely flashpoint” for the violent escalation was “a presidential election.”
Political violence tends to be emotional, perpetrated by angry individuals with poor emotional control. In this country, our political passions never run higher than presidential contests — especially when both sides believe the fate of the republic depends on the outcome.
To be clear, we still don’t know if the shooter was motivated by political anger. We could be in a scenario similar to John Hinckley’s shooting of Ronald Reagan, an assassination attempt Clinically misleading bid To catch the attention of actress Jodie Foster.
But we can say, the danger of something like this happening during the election was clear. As such there will be a risk of serious, unintended consequences — up to and including further violence.
Indeed, the very conditions that make political violence more likely in America today make our political system incapable of handling its consequences.
Extreme polarization makes cooperation difficult and suspicion normal. Some Republican members of Congress already to blame Democrats to try on Trump’s life. sentence “inner workings” is currently trending on Twitter.
And it’s not as if either party’s leadership is particularly credible at this particular moment. President Biden has clearly declined with age and is struggling to maintain his role as the nominee. Trump is a victim now, but he is still the same person he was before. Biden is a steady leader but in a weak position to deal with the crisis; Trump is a demagogue who can raise tensions rather than lower them.
The United States is an extraordinary country: the richest and most powerful in human history. But it is plagued by what could be its biggest internal division since the Civil War. The gravity of that particular comparison would underscore both the danger and the uncertainty here.
A gunman’s bullet has just plunged the country into the abyss. The only question now is how far we have fallen.
