Political Violence; Only When We Say It Is

Breaking down the contradictory use of the term ‘political violence’ after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

On the 13th of July, an attempt was made to assassinate Donald Trump. If the details weren’t made clear: at a rally in Pennsylvania, a twenty-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15 rifle, prone on an adjacent roof, shot approximately three rounds toward the former president. The bullet grazed Trump in the ear, causing some bleeding, and at least three audience members were hit, killing one. The shooter was killed by the secret service seconds after the shots were fired. The shooter was identified as Thomas M. Crooks, a white registered republican who lived about an hour away from the event. An exact motive isn’t apparent yet; both the shooter and the failure of the secret service are still under investigation. 

This type of event is obviously not new to America or the world in general. At least two other attempts were made on Trump’s life in the past, none coming close to shooting him. This being such an incredible historical moment, it's likely this event will be seen as a monumental turning point. The image of Trump holding his fist up in defiance will probably be enough to tip some uninformed voters toward him and lock up any doubters in the GOP. This group of low-propensity, disconnected voters have a shorter-term political memory as much of their emotions do not get caught up in every news event. For these people, the long list of Trump controversies and the events of January 6th have faded enough for them to ‘forget and forgive’ per se. Trump is now intensely focused on attacking Biden and has seemingly reunited the party, where even disenfranchised ‘Never-Trumpers’ may be willing to forgive the whole coup incident. This assassination attempt really couldn’t have come at a worse time; just as Biden slides in the polls and democrats have finally woken up to the reality that they need to get a new candidate, they now have to focus on defending the media barrage republicans are sending. Also, this comes right before the Republican National Convention, where Trump just picked his vice president and milked wearing a bandage on his ear to thunderous applause. Republicans are entirely dominating the media coverage this week and will continue until democrats make a move. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has temporarily pulled ads as democrats politely wish their bitter rival well in public statements. It is getting desperately more urgent each day that Biden drops out. Polls consistently show he is losing in every swing state, five of which the democratic senator is leading. His vice president, Kamala Harris, often polls the same or better than Biden, sometimes even leading Trump. The generic ballot poll average currently shows democrats leading by about one point, suggesting a standard non-Biden democrat would be leading without the added risk of embarrassing gaffes and failures. It will be even more pathetic if democrats lose in November during a political crisis they call ‘the most important election ever’ and blame this assassination attempt. Will we then ask if it would have literally taken Trump being killed for democrats to win? How hard is it to motivate Americans to vote against someone who wants to limit abortion access, give tax cuts to corporations and gut workers rights?

Some of the gross hypocrisy is beginning to weigh on the Republican Party, but it's hard to tell if it will be enough to force a total collapse before it's too late. The first contradiction is that republicans relentlessly fight against gun control in the wake of countless mass shootings. The policy of banning assault style weapons has been on the table for years and is supported by 65% of Americans. The weapon that almost killed Trump was an assault style AR-15, which is one that would have been banned by such a law. The second glaring irony that came out is that the shooter was a registered republican. His classmates described him as conservative, neighbors account that there were Trump signs outside his house and he was a member of a local gun range. The third hypocrisy is the right drawing gross false equivalencies with Biden and Trump’s rhetoric, crying out that Biden has incited the violence. They say that since liberals and leftists compare Trump to Hitler, they helped incite the assassination attempt. But why shouldn’t we make this comparison? In the words of Justice Sotomayor, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” Is pointing out that Trump accidentally quoted Hitler inciting? Is pointing out when his rhetoric reflects fascist⁺ rhetoric inciting? Is reiterating that Trump said that Hitler ‘did some good things’ inciting? The assertion that Biden was behind the attempted assassination luckily deteriorated quickly once it came out that the shooter was a republican, but many people won’t care about this fact. Much of Trump’s base has been trained to not trust any media that isn’t Fox News, so what’s stopping this narrative from inciting a revenge plot?

One thing about this does go without saying– Trump cannot claim victim status after himself inciting so much violence. If you believe that ‘you reap what you sow’, you couldn’t write a better example. Trump has exploited the fear of the republican base, built a radical cult willing to die for him. Many of his religious followers consider him on par with Jesus Christ. In countless speeches, he rallies against ‘the other’, whether it be the unemployed, criminals in need of rehabilitation, the homeless, Muslims, trans people, black people and especially immigrants. By making his followers feel as though they are fighting a moral battle for the future of the country, he is able to convince them to carry out political violence on his behalf. All this reached a boiling point at both Charlottesville in 2017 and at the Capitol in 2021, neither of which Trump condemned. From the very start, he has sowed political violence.

The real problem in the broader context is really that– we shouldn’t have any political violence. Economic capitalism and political liberalism together enable political violence, both directly and indirectly. It is the electoral college that put Trump in power, the winner-take-all system that allows for minoritarian rule, capitalism that incentivizes rich donors to control politicians, and the judicial system that failed to hold Trump accountable for inciting a coup. It is not just conservatives either; both parties uphold the status quo where over half a million people are needlessly homeless, where half of the country struggles to afford healthcare coverage, and where 2.2 million people are incarcerated. On a global scale, America, in a bipartisan fashion, has devastated nations in the Middle East, scarred nations for decades, and allowed corporations to exploit the global south for labor and resources. When democrats show their sympathy for Trump, observe their utter hypocrisy as they support the genocide⁺ in Palestine and take money from super-PACs from corporations that exploit labor overseas. Both supported the state using violence against student protesters on college campuses this spring. Biden himself in 2020 ran on the policy of increasing police militarization, which is used to suppress protest. The bipartisan 2001 AUMF joint resolution has allowed every president since to carry out aggressive military force at will, which has been used against ten different countries and has not been repealed to this day. The most obvious use was in Iraq and Afghanistan, where an estimated half a million people were killed, over $5 trillion was expended, and over 7,000 American troops were lost in combat. If you don’t want to talk about direct political violence, then we can discuss the indirect violence that the capitalist state exerts on its people. If a person is incapable or fails to contribute by working, the state provides no guarantee they will have a home or food. People who can’t afford insurance are at risk of being burdened for life by medical debt if they develop a crippling medical condition, subjecting them to an undignified life of poverty. People that grow up in poor areas receive worse public schooling since their funding comes from property taxes. Both parties fail to provide a robust solution to homelessness and are apathetic to it being criminalized. To finalize this; if you protest, if you get into medical debt, if you unionize to protect your rights, if you lose your job, if you can't pay your rent, if you find yourself without a support network to provide for your basic needs, you too will be subjected to political violence by the state. It is the state that uses the police to enforce the interest of private property before individual rights in our system, which is controlled, supported and enabled by capital. The right to life defined in the Declaration of Independence has never been actualized; the principle of competition, even for your own survival, has instead reigned supreme. If this is not the case; I ask how, in the richest nation on Earth, we have not solved these humanitarian problems. 

I find protecting human life to be our highest priority. No human should be subjected to an undignified and miserable life when we have an abundance of resources to support them. Che Guevara, in 1960, articulated just this point in a speech:

“In the course of the armed struggle, the respect we had for the sacrosanct ownership of those ten thousand head of cattle was lost, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. And we learned it there, we who were not sons of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we shout to the four winds that now we are the superior ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn. It demands they understand that pride in serving our fellow man is much more important than a good income; that the people’s gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate.”

So understand that ‘political violence’ does not happen in a vacuum; it is a feature of the system, not a bug. It’s just that the ruling class doesn’t call it violence when the state is the one committing it. When it comes to fighting the system, non-violence isn’t a pillar, it's one of many different tools. We must continue to develop creative and effective ways to pressure and compulse our systems into changing while growing a bottom-up movement. Revolution can’t happen without unity and we must uphold a commitment to protect human life. 

---

★ Source Archive