At what point does angry political
discourse cross the line between legitimate impassioned advocacy and
direct incitement to violence? It’s a question that’s been all too
common in both the United States and Israel for the past generation.
It’s one that would be difficult to answer
for even the most objective observers. But given that few of us are
truly objective about the issues and disputes that generate the greatest
amount of heat, most tend to respond along self-interested lines,
treating our own positions as inherently legitimate and those of the
people with whom we disagree as clearly beyond the pale.
That is why acts of political
violence—such as the attempted assassination of former President Donald
Trump this past weekend—can just as easily exacerbate the tensions
within societies rather than help heal them. In seeking to understand
how Americans can transcend their political divisions and recover some
sense of national unity, we need to remember that two things can be true
at the same time.
One is that the responsibility for acts of
political violence belongs to the perpetrators alone and not to those
who may share some of their political positions. That’s especially true
when one realizes that many if not most such crimes tend to be committed
by lone extremists whose motivations are often complicated by their own
struggles with mental illness.
Bromides aren’t enough
Yet there are also times when the tone and
content of political discourse can rise to a level of white-hot
intensity that can create an atmosphere in which violence is easier to
imagine, even if not necessarily inevitable. This is probably more the
case in the third decade of the 21st century than ever before, when
extreme sentiments can be magnified by mainstream corporate press
groupthink and amplified by social-media platforms that tend to
reinforce their users’ sense of self-righteous indignation and
intolerance of anyone who disagrees with them.
And when the entire focus of the arguments
of one end of the political spectrum is based on treating opponents as
illegitimate and their leader as the second coming of Adolf Hitler—as
the Democrats have treated Trump–it isn’t good enough to respond to an
act of violence with bromides about lowering the temperature.
So, if you’ve been nodding along with
those calling Trump Hitler and the half of the country that’s planning
to vote for him as fascists or “semi-fascists” who want to end
democracy, then maybe your reaction to the attempted assassination ought
to be one of sober self-assessment rather than an attempt to ignore the
context of contemporary political discourse with “both sides are wrong”
arguments.
Those who are currently calling for
civility, after having spent the last few years declaring that Trump
didn’t warrant that sort of respect, spewing contempt for anyone who
supported him and warning that the world as we know it would end if he
returned to the White House next January, aren’t just a little late to
the party. Members of the chattering classes who’ve done the most to set
the national discussion on fire need to be honest about what they’ve
been doing and the potential implications of their speech.
They especially need to look in the
mirror, since most of those now playing the “both sides” game have never
hesitated to assign blame to their opponents for acts of political
violence.
Different standards
For the Israeli left, the accepted
narrative about the most traumatic moment in their country’s political
history is that the heated rhetoric of the right, and specifically
current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, killed Yitzhak Rabin in
November 1995. In the same way, most liberals, especially liberal
American Jews, regarded the tragedy of the Oct. 2018 Tree of Life—Or
L’Simcha Congregation mass shooting in Pittsburgh as Trump’s fault.
Both claims were false. There’s no doubt
that the debate about the Oslo Accords led to irresponsible rhetoric by
some of Rabin’s opponents, though not Netanyahu. It’s also true that
Trump’s hyperbolic public comments and social-media posts helped coarsen
political discourse. But the desire to blame Netanyahu and Trump was
rooted primarily in partisanship. Their political opponents sought to
link them to actions they had nothing to do with in order to discredit
them.
The shooter’s motivation and so much else
about the attack on Trump remains yet to be determined. The failures of
the Secret Service to safeguard him against the sort of threat that most
Americans assumed would be accounted for is particularly troubling. Yet
there is always a double standard when it comes to judging such sad
chapters in history. The mainstream media, which is dominated by the
political left in both Israel and the United States, never hesitates to
assign guilt for political violence on the right.
One of the most egregious examples took
place in 2011, when Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) was targeted by a lone
gunman in Tucson. Six people were killed and the congresswoman suffered
permanent injuries that forced her to give up her career. While the
shooter was a deranged individual with no discernable political
ideology, the editorial page of The New York Times linked the
crime to former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose
political action committee had circulated a list of districts
represented by Democrats, including that of Giffords, which they wished
to defeat for re-election with cross-hairs.
Were the media now to use the same
standards employed at that time, President Joe Biden—who once claimed
that Republicans like Mitt Romney would put African-Americans back “in
chains”—would be blamed for the attempted assassination of his opponent,
since only a week before the shooting, he told Democratic donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Incidents like the 2017 shooting of
congressional Republicans and the attempt on the life of U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 were both politically motivated.
Those crimes could also have been blamed on the left’s demonization of
the victims far more easily than Trump was for the Pittsburgh shooting.
Democrats aren’t the only ones who need to
be careful about inflaming their supporters. Trump’s comments about the
2020 election results certainly set the stage for the Jan. 6 Capitol
riot, even if he also cautioned those who had come to the “Stop the
Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate “peacefully and
patriotically.”
When some of them didn’t follow that
advice and, instead, fought with police and broke into the Capitol
building, Trump didn’t speak as quickly or as forcefully about that as
he should have. He has also sometimes downplayed it since then, even as
Democrats inflated a disgraceful riot by a few hundred people into an
“insurrection” in which much of the Republican Party was falsely
implicated.
Yet the Democrats who cried foul about
Jan. 6 had not been as scrupulous about condemning violence the previous
summer. That’s when the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots
spread across the country, resulting in attacks on government buildings
and far more violence, including deaths, than that which occurred on
Jan. 6. To the contrary, many of them excused or rationalized the
rioters.
The same can be said about the way much of
the liberal media has normalized the violence against Jews and the
surge of antisemitism that has taken place in the last nine months since
the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Pulling back from the brink
There are signs that both parties
understand,in the wake of the assassination attempt, that the public
won’t be as receptive to angry rhetoric and incitement as they have been
in the past. It’s likely that Trump and Republicans realize that it is
to their advantage to rise above the mud-slinging that has been directed
at them, rather than to angrily answer back.
That was also reflected in the decision of
the Democrats to withdraw their political advertising that targets
Trump, and Biden’s attempt to calm the waters in his speech to the
nation on Sunday, even though his remarks were carefully written to try
and cast as much blame on Republicans for the current atmosphere as
possible.
Another was the decision of MSNBC to take their “Morning Joe” program off the air for
the week following the attempt on Trump’s life. “Morning Joe” is
reportedly Biden’s favorite television show, though the program was once
actually quite friendly to Trump during the early months of the 2016
presidential campaign.
But it has been a perpetual in-kind
contribution, not just to Biden’s re-election campaign, but to the
effort to demonize Trump as a criminal authoritarian. While, as social
media revealed, the move outraged its fan base who felt it deprived them
of their daily fix of Trump-hatred, the network clearly thought that
allowing it to air under these circumstances would bolster criticisms
that its programming had incited violence against him.
If, indeed, the temperature is about to be
lowered in public discourse, it’s all to the good. But it needs to be
understood that the current political climate in the United States is
unique in American history. Democrats have derided the right for what
they’ve termed a “narrative of victimization.” But their campaign of
lawfare directed against Trump, with its attempt to both bankrupt and
imprison him, is unprecedented and redolent more of banana republics or
totalitarian and authoritarian states than that of American democracy.
While each successive president of both parties in the last three
decades has inspired their own derangement syndrome, the one surrounding
Trump has been the worst.
The extreme invective against Trump hasn’t
come from marginal figures. The “Trump is Hitler” meme has been driven
by liberal political commentators on mainstream and cable-news networks
and legitimized by publications like The New Republic, which featured a portrait of the former president as Hitler on the cover of its June issue devoted to smearing the GOP as attempting to inaugurate an era of “American fascism.”
Contrary to Times opinion writer
David Firestone, this isn’t merely “sharp language” or “normal
political criticism.” Once you go down the rabbit hole of Hitler
comparisons, discussions about the legitimacy of violence not only
become more prevalent; they are rendered defensible, since they invoke
counter-factual fantasies of how history could have been changed for the
better had only someone been able to kill the Nazi leader prior to his
launching of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Nor did the assassination attempt entirely
damp down this kind of toxic commentary. Beyond the gaslighting from
liberals about everyone’s being guilty for making the crime possible, a
willingness to view the event through the most cynical of lenses was
also not confined to the political fever swamps. The day after the
shooting, the leftist Jewish paper The Forward’ published an article devoted to explaining the attempt to murder the former president as a “Reichstag Fire” event in which the GOP, like the Nazis, was using a crime to justify its suppression of democracy.
That a supposedly responsible Jewish newspaper, edited by a former Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times,
would bolster a conspiracy theory in this manner isn’t just outrageous.
It’s a sign of how difficult it will be to dial down the rage on the
left even after the shooting.
Still, we should hope that the reality of
political violence will tamp down the impulse on the left to justify its
own “insurrection” against the election results, whether by riots, such
as those that occurred in the summer of 2020, or legal machinations, if
Biden is defeated.
Trump’s narrow escape from death, and
triumphantly defiant attitude after it, may well solidify the trend that
had him leading Biden even before last month’s debate, an advantage
that only grew after the Democrats turned on each other, as many of them
sought to replace the president on their ticket. If a Trump victory in
November is now more likely, the events in Butler should stand as a
warning that it’s time to stop treating contemporary America as a replay
of Weimar Germany, as Jewish Democrats did in one 2020 anti-Trump ad.
Their warning that “Charlottesville” —a
reference to the 2017 neo-Nazi rally—”was happening all over America”
under Trump was ironic, since on Biden’s watch, the surge of Jew-hatred
has reached a point where one could say with justification that we’ve
experienced thousands of Charlottesville-style moments of antisemitic
violence and intimidation.
In the next four months, we will see
whether it is indeed possible to pull back from the brink and return to a
more normal political life in which disagreements or even controversial
candidates are not treated as an excuse for a “Civil War,” as one
dystopian Hollywood liberal film fantasy that came out earlier this year
illustrated.
I remain convinced that most Americans
don’t view the world from the same perspective of “Morning Joe” pundits
or the op-ed page of The New York Times—or even the most rabid
pro-Trump conservatives. The fact that Trump is leading a race that many
Democrats have said all along he has no right to participate in may be a
sign of pushback against the legitimization of that point of view and
the accompanying lawfare campaign, as much as a judgment on the
qualifications and positions of Trump or Biden. If Butler can put an end
to the “anyone I don’t like is Hitler” style of political commentary,
then at least some good can come out of a tragic moment in American
history.
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