The recent killing of a Minnesota lawmaker by an ardent Trump supporter has many wondering whether America has devolved into a place where political violence is the norm. However, the truth is we’ve always been this way.
The death of a Minnesota lawmaker at the hands of a Trump-supporting, anti-abortionist who almost killed another official before being caught is cause for grave concern.
However, unlike those pundits who opine from fainting couches on whether the recent spate of political violence is inspired solely by Trump’s violent rhetoric, I don’t think it is.
Sure, he riles up weapon-wielding goons who commit violence in his name, then blames mental illness on the killings and not the fact that guns are easier to obtain than the permit needed to build a gazebo in your own backyard.
But Trump is not the inventor of political violence in America.
We are.
Throughout our almost 250-year history as an independent nation, and even well before then, political violence has been a mainstay of the American Experience.
A violent rebellion, turn-revolution against the British monarchy marked our birth, followed by nearly a hundred years of festering hatred and bouts of violence over our Original Sin: slavery.
The Civil War is an example of political violence writ large and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
And even when the conflict ended, and slavery was eradicated, the issue was far from settled. White Southerners committed acts of political violence against Blacks that went largely unpunished until the 1960s Civil Rights era.
But what about all the political violence of late? You may be asking.
Isn’t that new?
Hardly.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of numerous incidents of partisan violence. Here are but a small fraction of those:
- The JFK assassination
- Violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago
- Kent State
- Oklahoma City bombing
- Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head
Coupled with the more recent (again, only a tiny sampling:
- An arsonist’s attack on the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania
- The deaths of two Israeli embassy officials in DC at the hands of a pro-Palestinian gunman
- A Colorado march firebombed over the conflict between Israel and Palestinians
Again, these are just the few I can rattle off this morning while facing a tight deadline for this column. With more time, I could provide you with a major metropolitan area’s phone book worth of violent acts based on our inability to reach a civilized, political compromise.
Hell, we’ve killed 4 of our 47 presidents, with many of the rest having narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet.
We are a nation born out of political violence that is showing no signs of figuring out how to “do democracy” without resorting to bloodshed.
Despite that depressing realization, it’s not as if the rest of the world is doing much better.
Before I founded Postindustrial in 2018, I spent the greater part of my 30-plus years in journalism covering political violence in other countries, much of which was far more gruesome than the horrors we’ve witnessed of late.
Still, that’s no excuse for our abhorrent behavior now and stretching back to the days of muskets and powdered wigs.
We must do better if we are to ever live up to “the better angels of our nature,” as political violence victim Abraham Lincoln best put it.
