Presidents Biden, Trump and Political Violence: A Horse Long Bolted

 

I have a good deal of respect for President Joe Biden, despite the speculation about his fitness for the office of President. The recent assassination attempt on his rival, Donald Trump, was a truly shocking event and Biden, to his immense credit, speedily condemned the attack. Following the attack, however, Biden addressed his people and made a statement that I found odd. After acknowledging past political shootings and assaults, he said: 

“In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box," he said. "At the ballot box. Not with bullets."

Thankfully, of course, that applies to the majority of the American people, but the USA has a long history of political violence, dating back to the American Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. This is well known, but the first attempted  event happened in 1835, when one Richard Lawrence tried and failed to kill President Andrew Jackson. In 1865,Lincoln was the first US president to die by assassination. He was followed by James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley (1901) and, of course, John F. Kennedy in 1963. Three presidents have been injured in attempted killings: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Ronald Reagan (1981) and, as of this year, Donald Trump. And, of course, there have been many other incidents, lethal and non-lethal, such as the vicious attack on the husband of Nancy Pelosi and the notorious January 6 attack on the US Capitol building in 2021. 

All these occurrences seem to point to one thing: political violence is an American tradition. As the 60s radical, H. Rap Brown said :

"Violence is a part of American culture.  Violence is as American as cherry pie."

Brown ought to know. He is now a Muslim convert with the name of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin and serving time for the murder of two police officers. If he is right, he has embraced that culture. A penetrating article by Time magazine has focussed on the problem of US political violence and come up with some disturbing statistics:

"In a December 2021 survey by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland, 1 in 3 respondents said they thought violent action against the government can be justified, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in the 1990s. In an April PBS/Marist poll, 28% of Republicans and 12% of Democrats said they believe Americans may “have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.”

The article goes on to say:

"More people are bringing guns to demonstrations. Every politically charged event, from Supreme Court decisions to Trump’s trials to congressional hearings, elicits menacing warnings and talk of “civil war.” The last presidential election ended in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by an angry mob that left five people dead and 140 injured. The vibes feel even darker this time,.."

The young man who tried to assassinate Trump was only 20 years old. During his short lifetime, Thomas Crooks grew up in a nation where high-profile attacks against elected officials became increasingly common. He was 7 when Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords was shot, meeting with constituents in a supermarket car park in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. He was 13 when Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a left-wing extremist during a GOP congressional baseball team practice in Virginia in 2017. When Crooks was 17, federal authorities foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer that was hatched by a right-wing militia group that posted violent anti-government pamphlets online. Crooks was in high school when America was shocked by the attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Even if we do not believe that political violence is an American tradition (and I don't), we can see that Crooks might have believed that attempting to kill a major political figure was entirely normal.

As I said, I do not believe that political violence is an American tradition. If it is, then it is a British tradition also. Spencer Perceval, pictured above, was our Prime Minister when he was killed in 1812 by John Bellingham. Including Perceval, eight British MPs have been murdered, the most recent being Jo Cox (2016) and Sir David Amess in 2021. There have been targeted killings by foreign intelligence services - Georgi Markov, Alexander Litvinienko and Dawn Sturgess are examples of this. There was the murder in the street of the soldier, Lee Rigby, together with the 7/7 bombing  the murderous attacks on London and Westminster Bridges and the Manchester Arena Bombing by Jihadi fanatics. We, it would appear, are not immune to political violence. But perhaps we in Britain, and the USA, should remember, as The Hill comments:

"Any decent citizen abhors violence and its presence in the political system. But can we ever eradicate it? No major European country can boast a history free of assassination or attempts. Heads of government have actually been killed in Serbia, Israel, Lebanon, Sweden, India, Egypt and South Korea just in the last 50 years."

That is a very good point and a question that no-one seems to want to answer. Presidents Biden and Trump have called for all Americans to unite. Similar calls are made here for people of strongly differing views to engage in dialogue and learn to tolerate each other. Sadly, dialogue and debate do not achieve much when people who hold views antagonistic to others return to those views once the dialogue is over. When at university, I attended debates between Jewish and Palestinian students. The debates were lively, but resolved nothing. No-one from either side of the debates changed, or even modified, their views. I do not hold out much hope for such approaches. Anyone keyed up to carry out an assassination is not going be dissuaded by a chat and a cup of tea. Political violence is an international plague, always has been and is unlikely to improve. There's no point in closing the stable door for a horse that has long since bolted.