How Americans Justify Political Violence
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.
I was surprised by how many people expressed the sentiment "too bad it missed" after the assassination attempt last weekend. People I know to be well-meaning.
But why am I surprised?
In my twenties, I was in a conflict resolution masters program, a program I was inspired to enroll in after I was the victim a physical assault (in which I was beaten because I was gay). In classes, each a deluge of nonviolent rhetoric, I was often the sole advocate for the effectiveness of violence. (I was not an advocate for violence itself, but for the fact that it is indeed effective at making change. To ignore that empirical fact is dangerous, as inconvenient as it might be.)
I don't regret that stance, and I largely still feel the same as I did then. Violence, often perpetrated by the state, is indeed effective, and it might very well be the only way we are able to resolve some of the intractable issues we face.
But the implications of it are terrifying. I'm shocked those aforementioned well-meaning people don't grasp is what would've happened had Trump been killed. This country would be on the brink of a civil war. We're already teetering a little too close to that edge, but Trump's murder would put us right over that cliff.
Violence (and the effectiveness of it) in theory and in study is one thing, but when faced with the reality, it's quite another.