“This kind of violence has no place in America,” President Joe Biden said Saturday saidAfter a shooting at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania that injured the former president and killed an audience member.
But the fact is, American politics has a long history of such violence: four US presidents have been assassinated in office, and virtually all of them, in the modern era, have been targeted by various levels of serious assassination plots.
With the general climate of political unrest in recent years — Trump himself, Covid, police violence and, as a result, January 6 — attacks targeting public officials from both parties in the United States seem to be becoming more common.
Recent examples include 2017 shooting Rep. Steve Scalise was seriously injured by a left-wing extremist at a Republican congressional baseball practice; Supporter of Donald Trump Those who sent mail bombs to more than a dozen prominent Democrats in 2018; A right-wing militia Kidnapping conspiracy Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020; Those who support abortion rights tried to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in this house in 2022; And the QAnon follower who attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, While trying to notice him, In 2022.
This violence is having a clear impact on how American politics is conducted. Security spending by House and Senate campaigns 500 percent increase Between 2020 and 2022, according to the Washington Post.
Nor is this just an American phenomenon: there has also been a global wave of recent killings. The UK has seen two MPs murdered in recent years: Jo Cox, a Labor MP, was murdered Right-wing extremists Days before the Brexit vote in 2016 and David Ames, a Conservative MP Fatal stabbing by an Islamic State Supporters in 2021. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Survived a stabbing During his campaign for president in 2018. In 2021, the Prime Minister of Haiti is Jovenel Moise Killed by mercenaries.
I saw it last year Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio assassinatedand the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In January of this year, South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung Dr Survived being stabbed in the throatWhen Robert Fico was the prime minister of Slovakia Shot and almost killed in May In Mexico, where political violence is more widespread than in other countries, At least 36 candidates are seeking the office According to the New York Times, killings have taken place across the country ahead of the country’s recent elections.
Then there are numerous alleged conspiracies Aimed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Increasing death threats
Despite this, it is difficult to say with certainty whether political killings are on the rise. There’s a data problem: assassinations are still relatively rare compared to other forms of political violence — violent protests, terrorist bombings — and attempts that succeed in killing their targets, or even come close enough to succeeding, are even rarer.
But there’s data that suggests they’re becoming more common. According to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which includes incidents of political violence from 1970 to 2020, Assassinations around the world Dropped dramatically from more than a thousand per year in the early 1990s to less than 100 per year in 1999, then began to rise again, to more than 900 in 2015. This trend roughly coincides with the global increase in international armed conflict , which dipped in the 1990s before rising more recently.
Threats of violence increased even more rapidly. In the United States, the Capitol Police 9,625 threats were reported against members of Congress in 2021, compared to just 3,939 in 2017.
What could be driving this trend? Rachel Kleinfeld, political violence researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace arguing Political violence, including assassinations, becomes more common in countries where there are highly competitive elections that can shift the balance of power, where party politics becomes a dominant social identity, and where there are weak institutional constraints on violence. All of these factors align with the United States now, which is why Kleinfeld suggests that the country is particularly vulnerable to an increase in political violence.
Kleinfeld also notes that there is a difference between today’s political violence and previous period Where this was common – such as the high point of terrorist violence in the US in the 1970s, with more than 1,470 attacks compared to 214 in the decade following 9/11 – today’s perpetrators are more likely not to belong to a formal organization, but rather through online engagement. Self-radicalization.
Georgetown University terrorism researchers Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Weir make an argument Article Two years ago it was revealed that political assassinations were becoming more common around the world as part of the rise of so-called “accelerism” – the deliberate attempt to hasten political chaos or social decline – as a more prominent tactic. Extremists They write, “For extremists to sow chaos and accelerate some catastrophic social collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target” because they embody the political order that these extremists are trying to destroy.
Previous waves of political violence occurred in an era when security was more lax and politicians more accessible. John F. Think of Kennedy’s open motorcade in Dallas, something no president would think of doing today. But Hoffman and Ware also point out that even as politicians and governments invest more in security, new technologies are making assassination attempts easier. consider The gun used to kill Abewhich the assassin combined with parts and instructions found online, or attempted to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Using explosive drones In 2018.
In an email to Vox, Hoffman said the effort on Trump “fits a trend … where attacks on elected officials are becoming more common and, dare I say, even accepted as the norm in our politically polarized/divided country.”
what next
Political violence is a phenomenon that feeds on itself. Attacks justify further attacks, leading to longer periods of violence, such as Italy’s infamous “lead year“From the late 60s to the 80s, when killings, kidnappings and bombings by right-wing and left-wing extremist groups were disturbingly common.
Another very inconvenient truth about political assassinations is that when successful, they often achieve their political goals, if not always in the way the assassin might have intended: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and his replacement by the states’ right Andrew Johnson completely changed the South. Reconstruction after the Civil War. Right-wing Israelis who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 in the wake of the historic Oslo Accords dealt a serious, perhaps fatal, blow to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Aber’s murder led to a dramatic political reckoning in Japan With the killer’s primary target: the controversial Unification Church.
We still don’t know the specific motivations of the gunman who tried to kill Trump or what impact the upcoming election or American politics in general will have. But it’s safe to say the effect, whatever the shooter’s intent, would have been much greater if he had adjusted his aim just a few inches.
As political rivalries begin to turn more existentialist, and all forms of political violence become more permissible, an increase in assassination attempts—in the United States and abroad—seems almost inevitable.
