Political violence must not happen in the United States.
The horror of our politics starts with two duopolistic factions’ embrace, over a number of decades, of their extreme wings’ rhetoric to oppose each other. A strident rhetoric of difference has cast “the two sides” (we assume no others could exist) as identity groups. Politics has, naturally enough, escalated from competition over how best to serve America to a mutual fight for ideological survival. It would be interesting to see a study of the frequency of use of the word “fight” in political rhetoric since, say, 1968.
A great majority of Americans decry violence, as a matter of common decency. So partisans address violence by blaming the other side for “their” violence and lawlessness, and trying to explain away violence or disruption by “our” followers.
Reactions to Saturday’s attempt to assassinate Donald Trump still exhibit this partisan blame-shifting, on all sides. Within the hour, even a casual social media user saw comments: anti-Trumpers’ that “this was obviously staged;” Senator J.D. Vance’s that the shooting was Biden’s fault. The right-wing editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, pointedly ignoring fears raised by the January 6 insurrection, called
… leaders on both sides … to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. … Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions … We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: ‘The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.’ …
And from a left-leaning Facebook post (not linked): “Well, (Trump) brings out the best in people …” It’s not just the politically active who carry our divisions.
Partisanship, in short, is highly resilient in our discourse. As columnist Edward Luce puts it:
A high-trust society would have awaited the facts of the shooting before leaping to conclusions. By that yardstick, America is close to the edge … Violence was already implicit in much (campaign) rhetoric. Now it is explicit.
No matter who wins in the November elections, both sides see losing as an existential threat. January 6, and before that the Democrats’ politically pre-determined impeachment of Trump, remind that, either way, civil disorder is all too possible in the aftermath.
The Wall Street Journal calls for faith in our institutions, but institutions are run by people, and our bipolar politics has extended partisan conflict into what had been relatively clinical bodies, not just the Supreme Court but the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and election overseers. The politicians will mouth pious calls for unity, to “lower the temperature,” or to respect the Constitution, but actions will still mirror divisive habits.
The very environment of our public discourse is stuck in partisan trench warfare. It would be alarmist and destructive to paint scenarios of where politics could go after the election. But America needs, urgently, by any means possible, to defuse our polarization. If we cannot, we must then establish bedrock from which to recover.
America has such a bedrock, which should also inspire people to defuse polarization and pre-empt disorder and violence. If even the Constitution gets treated as a battlefield for partisan dispute, we do have something deeper.
America conceived itself in the Declaration. The Constitution established the second state for the nation created in 1776. The Declaration first gave voice to this people, identifying us as “we” who hold certain “Truths.” Those Truths, of course, are that all humans are equally and inherently endowed with unalienable rights, and, not to forget, that governments are instituted “to secure those rights … (by) consent of the governed.” There had been no unified “nation” before this expression, and there has been no other unified definition of American identity since.
The idea of a nation based on such an abstract and at the time radical premise was a novelty, and still differs from normal bases of “nation,” of blood, soil, confession and/or tongue. Whether a premise that is still so odd can stand up, whether free people can actually govern themselves and stay free, is an open question, an experiment.
In our history, ridden though it is with contradictions to the Declaration’s Creed, we have developed, however fitfully, toward its principles. Still, this experiment is a perpetual test, and every outcome will tell whether a nation, “so conceived” in Lincoln’s phrase, “can long endure.” All Americans have a true existential stake in this. Anyone’s win or loss in any election is, in itself secondary – if the stakes seem existential, the reasons must be examined. And though they are the polarizing agents, we elect the politicians. They still need to find trends to pander to – most of them are followers. If we show them only our contentious impulses, they will voice contention. If we put our common founding first, and put our disputes in that context, they will try to mirror that priority. It falls to us, each and all, to see that we share a bedrock premise, and show that we embrace that, first and at bottom.
Common Conviction 