US elections: In the shadow of political violence
Immediate impact of attempts on Trump’s life has seen ratcheting up of rhetoric
A volatile election campaign in America has disintegrated further with an alleged second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in just over two months. Reactions like the one by Kamala Harris — Trump’s Democratic opponent — that ‘violence has no place in America,’ or Biden’s words, ‘There is no place in America for this kind of violence — it’s sick, it’s sick, it’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country,’ however sound almost perfunctory.
After all, it is a country with a long history of political violence. And, with the sharp divide of the 2024 elections in the mix, events are shocking but are they equally surprising?
The phase that America finds itself in, is not new even if political pundits in the past were at pains to dismiss any resemblance to the violence that shadowed the political landscape of the late 1960s and 1970s. These decades saw an unprecedented surge of disdain for public lives. The country assumed fifty years was enough to bury its past. Its thinking was misguided.
Recent attempts on Trump’s life show that America is back at the inflection point where it has to confront its legacy of political violence. Moreover, it can no longer shrug it off as episodic aberrations. A flourishing gun culture on the back of a non-committal political will to rein it in has made sporadic acts of aggression, a pattern.
Take for instance, the 2011 attack on Democrat Gabby Giffords who was shot in the head during an interaction with her constituents and suffers from permanent brain damage and vision loss, or the shooting of Republican Steve Scalise during a Congressional baseball game in 2017.
Politically, the acts may have been in isolation but in a deadly cocktail, the jagged edges of polarisation have fused the daily threat of shootings with politics. Even if America lives in denial, the world watches, again, how a country that is first among equals cannot win an internal battle with its legacy of political violence.
Internalising a narrative
The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building was one such moment. It remains etched in the public imagination as the coming out party of a split wide open among voters. Its aftermath has been no less damaging.
‘They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. I’m just standing in the way,’ rhetoric such as this by Trump fuels a demographic section that has internalised a narrative of being threatened. It is a repeat of a discourse that is also found in India. Reuters says of the 14 fatal political attacks since the Capitol riots, 13 were right-wing assailants.
It is widely accepted that we are in an era where the march of right-wing governments globally has been contagious. Countries like India, Italy, and Brazil have all seen bitter campaigns in the lead-up to their elections yet nowhere did the debate plummet to levels where candidates’ lives were at stake. It is worth remembering though that two Indian prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv have been assassinated in the past as was Mahatma Gandhi.
The volatility in American politics on the other hand has seen as many as four Presidents assassinated while in office. The first killing was as far back as the 19th century when Abraham Lincoln was shot as he exited a theatre. The most pivotal of these attacks was the killing of John F Kennedy who was shot by a sniper while in a motorcade with his wife Jackie Kennedy. Four years later his brother and presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy met the same fate.
Politics as warfare
Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, George W Bush, and Ronald Reagan, the giants of American politics are a handful of names with one thing in common — they all dodged a bullet. President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a month and Washington Post reports that there have been at least 15 direct assaults on US presidents, presidents-elect and presidential candidates.
How does a country that promises new beginnings to a global diaspora reconcile with this violent streak? Can it continue to look everyone in the eye and say, it is still the ‘American dream’? The paradox is glaring. Americans may say they have no place for it, but missing in the text is the assurance that it will weed out violence embedded in its fabric — recall the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. By stopping at mere condemnation, words remain hyperbole.
The immediate impact of the attempts on Trump’s life has seen the discourse ratchet up many decibels. Its bearing on the polls is however unclear. There is one clarity, goalposts in American politics have altered once again. Where does gun culture end and political violence begin? And what destructive possibilities does its combination leave behind?
Even in a democracy fractured by ‘they’ and ‘us’, these events are an anomaly. The gulf between interpreting the electorate and poll promises by the Democrats and Republicans in America is widening. The enabling of the voter ‘who sees politics as warfare’ — to quote an American professor — and violence as collateral to his goal has made the US election a battleground which is willing to shed blood again for a win. The bloody 60s may not be over just yet.