The Assassination of American Political Life

The Shining City on the Hill, as Ronald Reagan once called America, has lost its luster and its direction, even as political violence increases

Witnessing the United States convulse through this political moment has been like watching a coyote caught in a trap, chewing off its own leg to break free. Really grisly stuff.

Both political parties have lost trust and faith with huge swaths of the American people, who have become democratic bystanders to a seemingly never-ending American dream-turned-nightmare in which the Friday the 13th horror movie assailant keeps rising again and again.

On the one hand, you have the Doddering Democrat, Joe Biden, who I think has been the best president the US has seen in many years, but due to the natural aging conspiracy of the human body is no longer the man he was four years ago. I am sympathetic to the plight of the elderly. I have lived through the awful experience of having to take away the car keys from my nonagenarian father. It feels like you are betraying someone dear who deserves better in his final years. Nevertheless, we have all seen reality with our own eyes -- it’s time for Democratic leaders to take away the car keys of the nation from Uncle Joe.

While I still believe that Biden has much wisdom and experience that could be invaluable as a senior statesman, unfortunately he no longer has the ability to articulate either a defense of his administration’s impressive political accomplishments, or to prosecute the case against his opponent. A presidential candidate who cannot communicate is no candidate at all. He’s an incumbent who’s willing to roll the dice that not enough people will care about his visibly declining state because voters hopefully would still prefer him over…

The Despot Republican. How has America, Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on the Hill, fallen so low that it is edging closer to electing a man who is both a dangerous demagogue and a rotten human being? Donald Trump is one of the most intriguing politician celebrities of my lifetime, with a remarkable Teflon ability to blunder through scandal after scandal that would have deep-sixed any other politician’s career. He’s a walking talking Rorschach test for America’s soul, the dark blot that reveals something even darker lurking in the American psyche.

“By their fruit, you shall know them,” says the Bible, and so we are invited to take Trump at his word. When he told Fox News interviewer Sean Hannity that he would become a dictator “only on Day 1,” and told Hannity that he would lock up his political opponents and suggested that his top military general should be executed, and shouted that he will conduct the largest mass deportation effort in US history, and have his legal allies develop a plan to strike the Justice Department’s independence from the president, are we really supposed to pretend, as his rally participants seem to, that Trump is merely a political comedian playing to his audience?

And now that the US Supreme Court has given a legal “Stay Out Of Jail” card for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official” duties, i.e. virtually anything a president does, that question becomes perhaps the most crucial to the future life of the Republic. Is this our 49 BC “crossed the Rubicon” moment?

Grandstanding by attacking the vulnerable, then turning around and portraying himself and his followers as the victims, Trump has taken public discourse into the sewer of tribal disunion and Us vs Them bile. He plays to the basest instinct of the human being. As Heath Ledger’s Joker creepily croaked, “I am an agent of chaos.” Amid dozens of outrageous gutter comments in which Trump manages to continually find a new bottom to scrape in the lowest part of the barrel, he has revealed his contempt for most of his fellow humans, and invited their contempt in return.

Again and again, he has displayed his utter inability to be a unifying leader in the land of E Pluribus Unum. His fervent followers see him as some kind of savior, especially now that he has escaped an assassin’s bullet, which appears to have magnified their slavish obsessions. At the RNC nominating convention, the nearly-deified Trump called for unity…and then promptly attacked the Democrats for a long-winded hour and a half, displaying his Fidel Castro chops. The man truly has no idea what unity means, except “Support me or else.”

So here’s what it comes down to: it’s the Despot vs the Doddering. That’s what the US political system is offering to voters this November. The coyote chewing on its own leg trying to get out of the trap. It’s sad and pathetic, and more than a tad scary. One side will win only if the other side loses. It’s a zero-sum game in which the winner will take all, but at the end of the day the winner will take nothing. Because the Shining City on the Hill will have lost its shine and been thrown from the hill, lying in a heap of ruins at the bottom.

Life in the Foodchain: the assassination attempt

Some of the dust has cleared on that shocking series of events on Saturday, July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Yet much is still unknown, and what is known doesn’t add up to a coherent picture.

The young, 20-year-old would-be assassin was…a Republican? Say what?

His murderous action was just the latest in a years-long rise of political violence and threats in the US which has mostly been perpetrated by people on the American right, according to a Reuters analysis. Between January 2021 and August 2023, there were 213 documented cases of political violence, the largest, most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.

So let me see if I can understand this: a Republican shooter shot a Republican presidential candidate even as the GOP has furiously opposed any measure of gun control, including killing legislation that would have made it more difficult to obtain an AR-15, the type of sniper weapon used in the attack?

Gun violence is part of the sickness plaguing the soul and psyche of our nation, and the GOP has done nothing to help stop it. Apparently it never will, even in the aftermath of this near-assassination of their political god.

In the meantime, this historic tragedy has kicked off an Internet craze-fest of kooks and conspiracy theories coming out of the woodwork, each with their version of some subterranean truth. I have seen at least four wildly different conspiracy theories floated as the connect-the-dots explanation for the unexplainable.

Conspiracy #1. Biden and his deep state tried to take out Trump in order to win the election. Shadow of Ezra, an anonymous conspiracy theorist account on X, wrote that “The Deep State tried to assassinate Donald Trump live on television” in a post that received over a million views. A follow-up, describing the shooting as “the price you pay when you take down elite satanic pedophiles,” was viewed more than 2.5 million times. Based on this theory, some compared Biden to Hitler. Others said Iran did it.

Conspiracy #2. The whole thing was fake, a false flag operation, to ramp up sympathy for Donald Trump. The “blood” on Trump’s ear was from a theatrical gel pack; Trump’s fist pump was staged, and so on.

Conspiracy #3. The young 20-year-old conservative was a lone wolf disgusted with the freefall of his chosen political party, the GOP, into the embrace of a right-wing populist extremist who poses a threat to the country’s democracy. This young man, acting out his own version of virtuous Cincinnatus, was trying to do what moderate Republicans never did effectively -- stand up to a bully.

Conspiracy #4. My favorite: on 8Chan, the far far far-out rightwing digital chat media for extreme bottom feeders, there was rabid discussion that this was an attempt by the assassin to instigate the race war they are longing for. By taking out Trump, that would launch a nationwide violent outburst from his rabid devotees, many of whom are armed to the teeth. Perhaps Trump’s successors would like a martyr to hang on their cross?

All these theories have been swirling around each other on digital media, amplified by algorithms designed to grab eyeballs by ramping up sensation and extremism. Facebooked, Googled, Twittered, TikTokked to a foaming frenzy. Can anyone really believe anymore what they see or hear on “anti-social” media, amidst all the deep fakes, fake bots and Musk-ian manipulation? Faces now can be faked, voices can be mimicked, close enough to fool even relatives so that crooks can swindle them out of money. With just a text-based prompt you can create a graphic video replica of yourself or anyone else. You can write professional-sounding songs and lyrics in which no musicians have played or sung. We are witnessing the slow takeover of something that feels like it should never have been taken over.

Representative democracy as we have known it for the last century and a half is built on top of information technology. That’s because democracy in a mass society requires debate on a broad scale to foster agreement over common rules, standards and laws among millions of individuals, most of whom do not know each other and will never meet. Which is why every change in information technologies inevitably shakes up democracy. The new communication technologies known as digital or social media are feeding the spasms of a violent death culture edging closer to the cliff’s brink. As a society, as a political economy, we seem incapable of rejecting new technologies that have “DANGER” written all over them.

So yes, it’s happening. It’s a scary, unnerving world. We are losing the center of any kind of unifying truths. And then Boom! an assassination attempt, from somewhere out of the black and blue mis- and dis-information fog. What were his motivations, everyone asks, like they asked after the last mass shooting. With a lack of details from law enforcement and Secret Service, online partisans fill in the gaps based on their own obsessions. Snippets of video clips and photos, and trails of evidence – why did he do it, why??? – float in and out of the public consciousness. I guess the Secret Service’s snipers were better shots than the would-be assassin, who only dinged his quarry but still managed to kill an innocent man and critically injured two others. To them and their families, we can only offer our condolences. They are drive-by victims of this Frankenstein monster we have all collectively unleashed.

Life in a "winner take all" society

We are not the first country to be racked by political violence, and in fact our own country has a long previous history of it. A quarter of all US presidents have been targeted by assassins, most of them in the 20th century, with four murdered. Last year, federal lawmakers received more than 8,000 threats of violence, a tenfold increase since 2016. Once threats, assaults and actual killings of leaders and political candidates become embedded in a nation’s culture, neither figures on the left nor the right are safe. Journalists could soon become the next quarry. In Mexico, hundreds of journalists have been killed over the last two decades, with 15 murdered in 2022, one of the deadliest years ever for Mexican journalists.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, has identified four factors that elevate the risk of election-related violence: 1) a highly competitive election that could shift the balance of power; 2) partisan division based on identity; 3) electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages; and 4) weak institutional constraints on violence, leading perpetrators to believe they will not be held accountable.

Kleinfield says that “Winner-take-all elections are particularly prone to violence, possibly because small numbers of voters can shift outcomes.” A handful of swing voters in a handful of swing congressional districts, or in a handful of battleground states in the presidential election, will decide the winners and so that dramatically raises the stakes. America’s winner-take-all system of elections says author Joe Mathews, “does not permit power sharing or proportional representation.”

Two-party systems are more correlated with violence than are multiparty systems, says Kleinfield, perhaps because they create Us vs Them dynamics that deepen polarization. Although multiparty systems allow more-extreme parties to gain their share of proportional representation, such as Alternative for Germany or Golden Dawn in Greece, they also limit their influence to their small share of the vote. And that enables other parties to work together against a common threat, in effect quarantining their impact.

But the U.S. system is much more brittle. “Because party primaries tend to be low-turnout contests with highly partisan voters,” writes Kleinfield, “small factions can gain outsized influence over a mainstream party. If that happens, extreme politicians can gain control over half of the political spectrum—leaving that party’s voters nowhere to turn.”

For example, Kleinfield says, “In India’s winner-take-all electoral system, mob violence can potentially swing elections. Though fueled by social grievance, mob violence is susceptible to political manipulation. This is the form of electoral violence most like what the United States is experiencing, and it is particularly dangerous.”

No wonder then that one study found that nearly 25% of Americans agree that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” and another study found one in three Americans believe that political violence could usually or always be justified. Support for political violence grows “among those who said they were recent firearm purchasers and grew even more among those who admit they always carry a firearm outside their home.” So on any given day, thousands of armed Americans are walking around who think that political violence is justified.

Gulp. With political extremism and disinformation having been weaponized through the media landscape, we should be deeply worried that it may well presage even more political violence and social instability to come.

The search for decent men and women

Cicero, the Roman senator who gave his life opposing the Caesar dictator, once said, “Nothing is more destructive to civilizations, nothing is so contrary to law and justice … than governing through violence in a Republic.” This is a lesson that has been tragically learned many times in the human past. This is a truism that one would hope an assassination attempt on the life of a presidential candidate would serve to shake Americans out of their current shock state, and re-inspire their sense of dignity, pride and love of country.  

As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Look at the choices before you, my fellow Americans. To a large extent, they are a reflection of yourself, as well as your broken winner-take-all political system.

Political reform would certainly help. Multi-party democracy based on the bedrock of proportional representation would lower the temperature on the winner-take-all incentives. Ranked choice voting for electing presidents and governors would incentivize the building of cross-partisan ranking and coalitions. Public financing of campaigns would reduce the impact of billionaires and corporations and allow more voices and viewpoints to be heard.

Those changes are fundamental, but there is another essential ingredient. This country also will be saved by good and decent people who find their own moral and ethical compass based on a balanced appreciation for what is at stake. A democracy requires high levels of decency, empathy and compassion. That really can’t be legislated. But it can be encouraged by good leadership.

That’s what’s on the ballot this November. Decency and good leadership. I pray the American people can tell the difference. I pray they make a good choice among the bad choices available.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776