Violence and The Presidency
Our policy for this “forum” is to avoid culture war issues, partisanship, and ripped-from-the-headlines breathless reporting. As we’ve said before: we want to see farther and deeper than the parties. But sometimes events occur that demand our attention. The near-assassination of a presidential candidate qualifies.
The immediate post-shooting rhetoric calling for resisting violence and pleading for unity lasted about a day before yielding to conspiracy theories (on both sides) and a return to the rhetoric that, whatever the direct effects, puts enough poison into the bloodstream of the body politic to compromise it overall health. Since both sides have repeatedly claimed that rhetoric matters, we would all do well to engage in some introspection. The impulse to think that bad behavior and speech is what the other side engages in is, in my judgement, one of the most toxic elements in our current environment. We’re taking specks out of our neighbor’s eyes while ignoring the logs in our own, and the desire for power tempts us to ignore this long-established truth.
None of which should prevent us from thinking, speaking, and making judgements. In our current hothouse we have an impulse to pass judgement quickly and unmercifully and to accuse others of bad faith. In a republican system of government, as opposed to a democracy, the instinct is to slow things down. Caution and restraint are the order of the day. Then, too, we must learn to look beyond symptoms, the purview of the media and most politicians who typically operate in reactive mode, to see the underlying causes. This work proves more difficult and pains-taking and doesn’t lend itself to 10-second sound bites. Right now, it’s as if our so-called leaders have conversations in a very loud restaurant, each raising his or her voice in a desperate effort to be heard, but only increasing the din. They are equally befuddled and obtuse and leave the rest of us with a headache and a desire for some peace and quiet.
A good political system mitigates violence, but can never do away with its perennial features. The calls to end violence, while welcome, obscure all the ways in which violence manifests itself in this most violent society and the ways in which violence resides just under the surface of order. We should wonder not that politically motivated violence happens, but at its relative scarcity. I’m reminded of a scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters: “You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn't it happen more often?’”
The framers of our Constitution were familiar with this problem. Government, James Madison wrote, is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature,” predicated on the fact that “men are not angels.” Thomas Hobbes had described a world without government as the war of every man against every man, where “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is civilization that keeps violence at bay, and when the veneer of civilization begins to crack, violence seeps through. Hobbes and others realized that the slow, fitful, and fragile process of creating civilization drew us out of that state, and that not tending to the health of civilization would drag us back to the primal abyss. Too often we don't appreciate either civilization's elements nor respect its threats; and neither do we see the cracks when they appear.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made this point forcibly during a different time that also involved competing conceptions of right. Addressing Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn had plenty to say about the totalitarian homeland that had imprisoned and then exiled him, but not to the credit of the liberal regime that had adopted him.
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
Nature, outside the softening forces of civilization, remains red in tooth and claw. As a society becomes less civilized, blood lust percolates ever closer to the surface. To what forces of civilization do we refer? The cultivation of the arts with an eye toward beauty. The cultivation of knowledge driven by the search for the truths concerning human destiny. The cultivation of leaders who embody our noblest aspirations. The cultivation of skills and habits that lead to building and maintaining human-scaled habitats. The recognition of and appreciation for real things, eschewing image manipulation and technological excess. Engaging the world and others with love and respect.
Civilization demands and produces the cultivation of virtue. Alongside the cardinal virtues that have anchored western civilization, there are adjacent ones such as patience, kindness, humility, generosity, fair-mindedness, and so forth. We efface these at our own peril, for our ignorance of virtue and our unwillingness to demand it of ourselves and our progeny strips away that veneer of civilization. Part of our civilizational heritage is to learn to live together peaceably in spite of our deep disagreements. Our liberal heritage eschews violence as a way of dealing with others, no matter how distasteful we find them.
This impulse toward violence gets mollified by the above-mentioned virtues. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words are what get people to think of sticks and stones as viable options. When we allow disagreement to devolve to demonization and argumentation to name-calling, we peel away the thin layers of restraint that contain violence.
None of this means that we should hide our disagreements or not prepare ourselves to identify threats to our personal and collective well-being for what they are; but when we keep ratcheting back the virtues of magnanimous engagement with those we find least attractive to us, and nonetheless must share a polity with them, we bring ourselves ever closer to the brink. During a genuine “existential crisis” over whether even to have a Constitutional republic, Hamilton began his media campaign by reminding his readers that “Candor will oblige us to admit that” those on the other side of the question “may be actuated by upright intentions” and that we often see “wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society.” This realization “furnishes a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy.” Both the limits of our knowing and the preeminence of our passions and interests mean that “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.” Underneath the surface lurks violence and its desire to coerce, but “in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” So not only the rhetoric of violence and existential threat need to be repudiated, but also our tendency to use the legitimate instruments of law to try to force people to think and act and speak like we do.
Elections require candidates to highlight differences, but governing demands that they minimize them. Given the vitriol of our campaigns, how can we expect people to work together once the ballots are counted? One doesn’t easily forget the name-calling that takes place in political campaigns, nor does that name-calling stop once the voting is over. The tendency to apply the most noxious labels we can think of to people who disagree with us has only intensified, as has the likelihood that we treat them as existential threats. What sounds reasonable or obvious to one side sounds like vicious hysteria to the other.
The perpetrators of such rhetoric will find plenty of justifications for the vitriol, including their conviction that they are, after all, simply speaking the truth. But that’s typically little consolation to those on the receiving end, who do not understand how the dark labels apply to them. We know from our childhood that under such circumstances the name-calling and the anger escalate, and the more they do so the more reason gets crowded out. The use of extreme rhetoric in our system — treating others as existential threats or as less human than us — is both intensifying and largely symmetrical. Anyone who can’t see the symmetry has partisan blinders.
Both sides have claimed that rhetoric matters. After all, "hate crime” laws specifically couple violence to speech. Democrats claim that Trump’s rhetoric fuels a hate that manifests itself in violence against especially vulnerable populations, while Republicans regard the accusations that Trump is a fascistic, Hitlerian figure as encouraging someone just a little off his nut to take a shot at the former President. And how do you walk back such claims? Once the poison is released into the political environment, how can it be removed? Climate change affects a political ecology as much as a physical one. But now the would-be assassin's bullet has introduced something new into our politics: something real in the middle of the unreality of all the rhetoric. Our choice has also been circumscribed by two other unexpected intrusions of reality: Biden's doddering debate performance and Trump's instinctive fist-pumping. Otherwise all the political words have settled like a thick fog on our collective consciousness.
Court decisions concerning speech have emphasized that speech remains relatively benign so long as it doesn’t incite someone to immediate lawless action, but that too highlights the paradox that speech deserves special protection because of its ability to shape the public sphere. We want it both ways: to give speech its teeth but also to defang it. "Free speech for me but not for thee” is no recipe for democratic engagement, nor is the belief that the rhetoric of the other side alone contributes to violence.
The law remains a blunt instrument. It plays a role in determining the limits of speech but it provides little moral guidance for how to use speech wisely and to appropriate ends. The other instruments of civilization that teach us moderation and respect and self-control are essential here. The failure of our political leaders and their epitomes in the media to exercise those virtues testifies to the failure of our civilizational and civilizing institutions. The erosion of their authority from within is now producing catastrophic consequences without. One shudders to think what violence might have been unleashed had the shooter’s bullet been an inch to the right and how quickly that violence could spin out of control. The murder of Archduke Ferdinand plunged Europe into a senselessly destructive war, the consequences of which no one could see at the time. And as Lincoln said with regard to our previous civil war: “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.” But things are in the saddle and ride mankind. We can at least attempt to prevent those things, like the four horsemen, from taking their seat, but we must first resist the temptation to call them forth from the darkness where they lurk.
Image of President Ford Following the September 5, 1975 10:04 am[1] attempt on U.S. President Gerald Ford's life by cultist Charles Manson Family member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, Secret Service agents rush President Ford towards the California State Capitol in Sacramento.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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