The following are loose, dirty and fragmented thoughts about the attempted assassination of Trump just hours ago.
1. It’s shocking, certainly – but surprising? I’m only surprised an attempt wasn’t made sooner. The man has, obviously, aroused great fear and loathing – and his prospective return to the White House has been described, repeatedly, as guaranteeing the death of American democracy.
And, sure: if we’re discussing rhetoric and the temperature of the US Republic, it’s impossible to ignore Trump’s own: “Over the past two weeks, Donald Trump said shoplifters should be immediately shot, suggested the United States’ top general be executed and mocked a political opponent’s husband who was beaten with a hammer,” wrote the AP in October last year, capturing just a sliver of Trump’s warring tongue.
2. There have been spasms of murderous right-wing violence in America this past decade. The violent siege of the Capitol, the murderously driven car in Charlottesville, the home invasion of the Pelosi residence, the Charleston church shootings, the attempted kidnapping of the Michigan governor. Now, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but of the above Trump inspired the first, equivocated about the second, and has joked about the third.
We might pause on that.
But in casual conversations with progressives today, I sensed their belief that the right had a monopoly on political violence. Forgotten were the Congressional baseball shootings of 2017, or the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh two years ago.
The most intense period of domestic terrorism experienced by the United States in modern history can be found in the 1970s – bombs were being detonated weekly, and far-left groups like the Weather Underground were responsible for the heavy majority of them.
Now, it may seem churlish to attempt a sum here. But I write the above for a very simple reason: the left have become self-defeatingly smug, cocooned, and righteously militant – and either don’t understand their own potential for violence, or are quick to justify others’.
Now, were US elections ruled by the end of a gun – and were there no moderate constituency to appeal to – then militancy and righteousness might make sense. But I’m convinced that there remains a broad constituency for whom both sharp ends of the ideological spectrum are repellent. And yet militancy reigns, and it has infected journalism too – there are too many journalists who have the same mistaken assumptions about the state of America: that it’s Good v Bad. It’s an assumption that obscures the moderate millions; an assumption that encourages militancy and the degradation of the profession.
3. If you’re convinced that Trump is a radical threat to democracy, then you might also struggle with the knowledge – if you can bear to face it – that your conviction has done little: that it has not vanquished Trump, cured racism, or protected the polar ice caps.
And so those with the conviction have become, I think, hysterically obsessed with it – tonguing their righteousness as if it were a painfully weak tooth. The litany of Trump’s sins and the dangers he posed was recited like the Rosary – increasing in pitch and urgency, but still failing to expand the numbers of its adherents.
One reason for this is that support for Trump is still not understood as being anything other than intractable racism and stupidity. In other words, eight years after Trump’s election, an insistence upon the righteousness of opposing Trump is still overwhelmingly preferred to understanding the country, and examining one’s own tactics and assumptions.
That their conviction has mattered so little, and that Trump was coming back, did not invite those to better understand their political foes, but merely to make them marvel bitterly at their stupidity. That the violent siege of the Capitol, civil liability for a sexual assault, and multiple criminal convictions for fraud might not preclude a man’s viability for the Presidency is, yes, quite astonishing – it’s also an opportunity for those of the left to question unsentimentally just what it is that they’re offering and just how it is that they’re seen.
Of course, it might be said that being reasonable with such an unreasonable man is foolish – but what’s the alternative? Well, we’ve seen it: double down on militancy, ignore your own deficits, keep telling yourself that you’re morally unimpeachable.
Humility made politically practical is impossible when you’ve become obsessed with your own sense of rectitude. What’s more, Trump is seen as such a monstrous figure – so malicious and threatening – that his shadow blocks all light. Self-examination is unimportant when practiced in so great a danger. The excuse not to practice humility, but instead histrionic despair, is justified on the grounds that nothing is worse than Trump.
And so, what happens? Well, for one, many journalists begin overlooking Biden’s deficits, lest they help – or are seen to help – Trump’s return. For another, foes are treated contemptuously – which deepens resentments and the sense that a good swathe of America have been ignored and condescended to by self-pleased elites.
You want a taste of this condescension? Of this contemptuous dismissiveness that Trump successfully exploited eight years ago? One is that only the right might both manufacture and credulously absorb “disinformation” – and that noble-hearted progressives must protect themselves and others against the psychic pollution of deranged conspiracies.
“Deranged conspiracies” like Hunter Biden’s laptop (real, but ignored by plenty of news organisations) or the lab-leak theory for the origin of the coronavirus (which remains contested, but enjoys credible support and is very far from being the racist and insanely dubious notion as it was first described).
[As an aside, Scott Morrison may have been clumsy in pursuing China for accountability on the virus’s origins – but he was emphatically right in principle. But such was anti-Morrison Derangement Syndrome, which I confess afflicted me for a time, that his insistence that the country responsible for a catastrophic pandemic might be held accountable for it – and that the world might be given some straight answers – was treated like an act of hysteria.]
My point is basic: if you refuse to look at yourself because you’re drunk with outrage, then you condemn yourself to subtle corruptions, the repeating of mistakes, and your own obliviousness to how well you alienate those you need to persuade. Trump’s re-election was never guaranteed, though now it appears to be.
4. I can’t be alone in wondering how Biden might have responded were it him being targeted by a sniper today. It wouldn’t have been like Trump — rising quickly from the floor, defiantly pumping his fist and screaming “fight!” as blood poured from his head. The man frightens me, and is unfit to be President, but what I published a few weeks earlier was dramatically confirmed today:
Trump remains, like it or not, a freakish force of nature: it won’t matter to those who will decide the election that he’s only four years younger. What will matter is that, in his pungent charisma, he seems 20 years younger. The man projects a fearsome energy, part mob boss, part extreme poster, part demented Rodney Dangerfield.
5. I’m also thinking of Francis Fukuyama, and his theory that history ended in the late 1980s – that the long and bloody dialectics of history had resolved themselves in favour of liberal democracy. Samuel Huntington’s famous theory of “A Clash of Civilisations”, proposed in 1993 just a few years before Fukuyama’s book, was radically confirmed when passenger jets melted into those great towers of Manhattan.
In Putin, Russia found a tyrant motivated by the lost influence and territory of 1991 – not the democratic reformist Fukuyama’s theory presumably would’ve assumed. Putin never saw himself as leading a new Russia at the “end of history”, but as a Czar-like figure who would recover past glories.
And now, in America, there are echoes of ’68 – the year the presidential incumbent shockingly declined to renominate, when MLK was murdered, and the man who eulogised him before angry crowds in Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy, was himself shot dead just months later. I don’t want to make too much of the comparisons, enough to say that there are faint but uncomfortable echoes and the knowledge that history never ended.