Empathise with a victim of violence, but do not let up on opposing the violence he fans
Being shot at has, indeed, boosted Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and wrong-footed his rival President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
Trump supporters rage loud in righteous anger. “After this, I don’t want to hear another word about the January 6 riots,” declared Donald Trump Jr.
Much of the American media would appear to share the sentiment that to criticise Trump now, in the wake of the assassination attempt that he hasnarrowly survived, would be indecent and politically counterproductive.
What is the right response?
What is the right response, when a proponent of violence becomes a target, albeit inadvertent, of his own advocacy? Should the opponents of violence abandon their criticism out of sympathy for the victim?
That would be irrational. Natural sympathy for an individual victim of violence cannot and should not disrupt sustained opposition to efforts to entrench generalised violence in society.
The shot heard around the world – the phrase was originally coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe what he imagined to be the opening shot, fired by armed farmers, in America’s War of Independence. It became even more apposite when borrowed to describe the shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which triggered World War I, and took a toll of an estimated 40 million lives, before the war ground to a halt.
Shots heard around the world
When a quiet, 20-year-old white man positioned himself on the roof of a building within rifle range of the podium in Butler, a small town in Pennsylvania where Trump was holding a campaign rally, and squeezed off a number of shots from his father’s semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle from a distance of some 410 feet, he also produced shots that were heard around the world.
The shots were literally heard around the world. Broadcast media that were covering the event captured the sound of the shots, and relayed it over radio and television.
The shots would be heard around the world figuratively, as well, if these give Trump a decisive edge in the polls to defeat his Democratic rival.
Stage presence
Even as Secret Service bodyguards rushed him off the podium, Trump had the stage presence to stop, stand erect, and with blood streaming across his face from the wound he received on his right ear, pump his fist up and down, in a gesture of defiance familiar to the Black Panthers of a bygone era.
He is indomitable, a fighter – so signalled his raised fist and shouted call to fight. Never mind that he had dodged the Vietnam War draft, claiming to have bone spurs on his feet.
Going by Biden’s bloody-minded determination to bleed Russia as much as possible, keeping the fight going to the last Ukrainian, and support for Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza, it is easy to conclude that it matters little whether Trump or Biden wins.
Deficiencies in democracy
Quite apart from their external policies, which have an overt impact on war and economic fortunes in the world outside the US, their policies inside the US have an indirect impact on the rest of the world, via the impact these have on the nature of American democracy, such as it is, and on vital green-technology funding enabled by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
In India, we are long used to the narcissistic description, the world’s largest democracy; but we know the serious deficiencies in our political system too well to take the praise at face value.
America’s claim to be the oldest democracy is, similarly, a gross exaggeration – not in terms of the vintage, but in terms of the democratic content of its political system. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black Americans have faced discrimination and disprivilege in politics, education, the job market, asset ownership, police scrutiny of citizen behaviour, and life in general.
Religion’s regressive role
While the American constitution mandates strict separation of church and state, in practice, religion has played an explicit, and increasingly regressive role in American public life, particularly in the matter of women’s rights.
American society is, at large, disengaged from politics — so much so that a sizeable section of voters blame Biden for a decision by the Supreme Court, of whose conservative contingent of six, three are Trump appointees, to strike down an earlier ruling that had deemed the right to have an abortion a constitutional right for all American women.
This, despite Biden and the Democrats’ strong criticism of the ruling and the Trump camp’s exultation over the decision that now takes a woman’s right to decide what should happen to her own body away from her and hands it over to state-level politicians.
And those who are not disengaged from politics and public life are sharply polarised, locked into their own echo chambers, and bereft of a shared pool of news and views.
Bad to worse
Donald Trump, if elected President of the United States once again, would deepen and darken every one of the American polity’s flaws.
White supremacists would be emboldened and enabled; so would Christian nationalists. Christian nationalists have already succeeded in mandating compulsory Bible lessons in public schools in some states. They drive a public discourse that makes a literal reading of the Bible the touchstone of virtue and truth for every facet of public life. They and the discourse they create are intolerant of alternative approaches to spirituality.
Expect an increase in the number of attacks on Muslims, Sikhs, people of colour, and even Jews, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, if Trump is elected to office again.
One of Biden’s most consequential policies has been to provide significant funding for green technologies, as part of his signature Inflation Reduction Act. Trump would shut this down, as he is a climate-change denier, who, as President, took the US out of the Paris Accord of 2015 in which countries had collectively resolved to bring down their emissions of greenhouse gases, so as to limit the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the level in pre-industrial times.
This would deprive the world of potentially-transformative technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which increasingly emerges as the most critical component of halting climate change.
Trump vs Biden
Trump is committed to egregious injury to American democracy, society, inter-community amity, the climate, and the global economy in multiple ways that Biden is not.
It would be a big mistake for the Democrats to dial down their criticism of Trump because of an event, with himself at the centre, that foreshadowed the violent future he would inflict on America and the world.
It is natural for opponents of violence to have empathy for a victim of violence. But it would be irresponsible for empathy for the individual to dilute opposition to the violent project the individual continues to advocate.
The challenge ahead
How to manage these twin tasks — of showing compassion for a victim of violence, while opposing what the individual stands for, especially when the individual in question is the embodiment of what has to be opposed?
To separate out the flesh and blood individual from the embodiment of an ideology of hate and harm is not logically complex, but difficult to articulate in a fashion that the man and woman in the street, or church, can comprehend. Biden is not up to the task.
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have the mental acuity and the felicity with words to accomplish this task. They should abandon any fear of upstaging Biden, and get down to the job. So should any young leader who aspires to replace Biden as the Democrats’ candidate in the November election, if they have in them the stuff of which leadership is made.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
