We must come to grips with political violence
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., July 13, 2024. Few Americans have high confidence in the Secret Service's ability to keep presidential candidates safe after last month's attempt on Trump's life. That is according to a new poll conducted July 25-29, 2024, from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only around three in 10 Americans are extremely or very confident that the Secret Service can keep the presidential candidates safe from violence before the election. Credit: AP/Gene J. Puskar
In Alaska this week, a man was arrested for threatening to torture and kill six Supreme Court justices.
It was a blip on our national news feeds.
Yet the bulletin out of Anchorage was not an oddity. It followed by a few days former President Donald Trump’s survival of a second assassination attempt, and Elon Musk’s subsequent comment on X about the strangeness that “no one is even trying to assassinate” President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
It came as members of Congress expressed willingness to boost funding for the Secret Service, not just because they want to protect presidents, former presidents and would-be presidents, but because many of them have received death threats, too.
It followed the June conviction of a California man on charges he threatened to bomb an FBI field office, and the guilty plea in May by a Queens man who threatened to kill a congressional aide.
It came as election officials in Durham County, North Carolina, are preparing to move into new offices outfitted with bulletproof glass and as Cobb County in the Atlanta suburbs is installing concrete bollards in front of the glass doors of its board of election headquarters.
These spasms of violence, actual and threatened, have given rise to a new bromide: Political violence has no place in America.
But it does. It always has. It has been as much a part of our national DNA as most anything else viewed as quintessentially American.
Four presidents have been killed in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan was shot and survived. Andrew Jackson’s would-be assassin missed his target. Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts. Theodore Roosevelt was wounded after leaving office. Robert F. Kennedy was killed while running for president.
Wikipedia lists 58 American politicians who were assassinated, which doesn’t include failed attempts on elected leaders like former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, paralyzed from the waist down by a shooting while running for president in 1972, and former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who suffered a severe brain injury in a 2011 assassination attempt.
It’s difficult to write off this violence as the work of disaffected loners, especially nowadays when there is at least a tacit degree of acceptance of the tactic among many Americans. A new Public Religion Research Institute survey reports that 16% of us agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That’s tens of millions of people.
Comparisons across eras are tricky, but it feels like more people than ever are endorsing and, sadly, embracing this reprehensible resolution — even compared to the turbulent 1960s. Either way, it’s time we start embracing a solution.
That begins with admitting and understanding our propensity for political violence. Saying simply it has no place in our country is dismissive — good messaging but lacking corrective value. Viewing something as an anomaly rather than part of our very fabric alters the urgency to combat it. You bemoan an anomaly, and carry on.
Toning down our heated political rhetoric — the most commonly proposed antidote — and stating clearly that political violence is not acceptable are good starting points, necessary though not sufficient.
We should listen to moderate voices, cease reflexively blaming the other tribe on every issue, and quit dehumanizing those with whom we disagree. All parts of our society, including the media, should stop analyzing every development as a partisan win or loss for one side or the other. People are complex. So are issues. When you see things only in white and black, it doesn’t take much for that to morph into good and evil. And then you’re heading down the road to wanting to eradicate evil.
We must break this fever. It starts with admitting we’re sick.
n COLUMNIST MICHAEL DOBIE’S opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.