In his response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Joe Biden declared: “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” Not for the first time, the US president was precisely wrong.
Far from being anomalous, the attack on Mr Trump felt immediately familiar; American history is suffused with violence. Four sitting presidents have been assassinated and numerous others have faced attempts on their lives. The year 1968 alone saw the murder of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy. Violent cults, gangs, mafiosos and lone wolves have shaped national culture. It was the late novelist Philip Roth who distilled this blood-strewn past into a single phrase: “the indigenous American berserk”.
The last US presidential election culminated in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Trump supporters. As Phil Tinline notes, the former president himself “has previously appeared to encourage supporters of the Second Amendment to attack Hillary Clinton, and joked about the near-fatal hammer attack on the husband of the former Speaker, Nancy Pelosi”. Whatever the outcome of the presidential election on 5 November, more violence is likely to follow.
There is a tendency among Britons to look at this febrile land with a sense of moral superiority. How antiquated the “right to bear arms” is; how barbarous the death penalty is. Both opinions are correct but they have no bearing on the UK’s own culture of political violence.
In 2016, the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right extremist. Five years later, the Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamist at his constituency surgery. Stephen Timms – now a Labour minister once more – narrowly survived a similar attempt on his life in 2010. The Liberal Democrat aide Andrew Pennington was killed in 2000 as he sought to protect MP Nigel Jones.
After each occasion, all parties vowed that British politics would change for the better. Yet matters have worsened. In the recent general election candidates were subjected to unprecedented levels of intimidation.
Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney, was forced to receive police protection after death threats including a letter vowing that she would be “smashed and killed”. Reform’s candidate in Truro and Falmouth, Steve Rubidge, was assaulted and suffered “severely torn ligaments”. Jonathan Ashworth, the former Labour MP who lost in Leicester South to an independent candidate, was forced to hide in a vicarage from “screaming” pro-Palestinian protesters and was labelled “Genocide Jon” by anonymous leaflets. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, recalls masked men disrupting a community meeting and “terrifying” those present. Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, had rocks thrown at him.
Other politicians chose not to continue. Mike Freer, the former Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, announced in February he was standing down after an arson attack on his office became “the final straw”.
As the House of Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, has recognised, these threats collectively amount to a “war” on democracy. The Home Office is conducting a rapid review of the election to assess the scale and nature of intimidation and examine the level of protection provided by the police and other agencies.
Under a new Labour government, this should be a moment for fundamental change. For too long, the tech giants have profited from the threats directed on their platforms at MPs and have sought to evade responsibility. Rather than being treated as “platforms”, they should be regulated as publishers (as traditional media is) and be held legally responsible for what is “published” on those platforms.
If MPs are to foster a more tolerant political culture, they must also lead by example. Robust and fierce disagreement is an essential component of British democracy. In recent years, however, MPs have too often abused and dehumanised their opponents.
If the political culture does not change, we will all be the poorer. Extremists will succeed in intimidating MPs into silence. Talented individuals will never enter politics. Worse, more MPs will lose their lives. Before we lament the US’s hyperpolarisation we must address the sickness at home.
[See also: The return of order]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk