“A fairy tale soaked in blood” is how someone once described Demons, Dostoevsky’s novel about a collective political breakdown. America is a fairy tale soaked in blood. It is a beautiful tale of freedom battered and disabled by freedom’s special Furies.
More presidents have been assassinated in the US – four – than in any other modern democratic country. And not just presidents. Individuals from just about every realm of life have had their lives taken by others, with striking frequency. It’s no wonder that some Americans insist on the right to own a gun, and that other Americans abhor that they do. Assassination sometimes seems like the apogee of the country’s penchant for plain old murder.
Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, are so prevalent in America’s recent history that it is natural to see the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday as a continuation of American political violence, especially during the late Sixties, when the country was struck by the killings of Martin Luther King Jr, Robert F Kennedy and Malcolm X. But this moment is nothing like that decade.
Back then, chaos was in the streets, seemingly flowing back from the American carnage in Vietnam into the American atmosphere, and out again. Race riots burned down urban neighbourhoods. Soldiers brutally beat protesters, especially women, who had gathered at the National Mall in Washington to protest the Vietnam War. Police pounded protesters in the streets outside the 1968 Democratic convention. “The nation is sick, trouble is in the land,” said King in a speech. He was shot the next day. The violence was shocking. But everyone knew it was coming, and everyone knew what forces – racism, poverty, war, the abuse of American power abroad and at home – made it inevitable.
America is sick now, and trouble is in the land, but why? There is no mass movement against US presence in Ukraine; the campus protests over Gaza, now on summer hiatus, failed to ignite anything like a mass movement. When students took over Columbia University in 1968, they protested not just university policies but also the Vietnam War and the grinding structural racism of the Sixties (a world away from the abstract 21st-century idea of systemic racism). That organised and broad solidarity movement did not exist during these recent American campus protests.
There is no ideological stand-off now, as there was in the late Sixties. Right and left buy the same smartphones, drive the same cars, stream the same cable TV shows, pursue the same almighty buck. Unlike in 1968, nearly everyone goes to university. Even the woke absurdities of the 2010s (that bifurcated the world into liberals and everyone else) have abated significantly, and never really touched the lives of those in Republican states.
On a granular level, the ideological differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden are negligible. Both are wedded to a free-market ideology, despite Trump’s strident populism and Biden’s calm, smiling version of the same. Both are committed to preserving welfare and Medicare. Both are big spenders and borrowers, with, surprisingly, 77 per cent of President Trump’s borrowing approved by bipartisan consensus, and only 29 per cent of President Biden’s. Trump threw $2.3trn at Covid, Biden $1.9trn. Both men want to hit China with high tariffs. Biden ardently supports Nato; Trump, for all his anti-Nato disruptions, provoked the organisation into increasing defence spending – just in time for Ukraine – and pushed it into a more serious reckoning with China. Both men are too cognitively challenged to be president. Both men cling desperately to power. Biden says Trump is a threat to democracy; Trump says Biden is a threat to the idea of America.
The extreme reactions of right and left mirror each other. Trump’s callousness toward women, blacks, disabled people, wounded veterans was unprecedented when he was president. Rousing large crowds to chant “lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton brought American demagoguery closer and closer to violence. It was rhetoric – yes, rhetoric that posed a threat to the social order, that needed to be denounced – but it was rhetoric. Meanwhile, the liberals’ four-year hysteria over Trump, during which he was preposterously compared to every bloodthirsty tyrant in history, was emotion in excess of the occasion.
Right and left hate each other beyond ideology, beyond economics, beyond politics, beyond historical context. “The sympathetic heart is broken,” as Saul Bellow once paraphrased DH Lawrence. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.” Bereft of communal bonds, pressed on every side by commerce, haunted by money, disheartened by examples of unreal wealth and power as remote as the stars, disappearing into screen-holes, numbed by opioids and psychiatric drugs, terrified of school shootings, of predation and exploitation among the highest authorities – cast out of history, as it were, Americans scrape against each other, like bone without cartilage. Every-day hatred recast as political sentiment comes as a therapeutic relief. The last social, historical, communal thing you can do.
There is no other explanation for Trump raising his fist after being hit by the bullet, or by fragments of plexiglass shattered by the bullet, and shouting “Fight! Fight!” The next day Melania Trump sent out a statement saying, “Beyond the red and blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight [emphasis mine] for a better life together.” Every Trump supporter has burned into their mind the memory of Trump exhorting protesters at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 to “fight like hell!” The word “fight” is a secret incitement to the elect. There will be no quarter.
And there was Biden using his precious time to address the nation on Sunday night and to fumble and misspeak his way through a petty subtext whose purpose was to incite anger and fear, not to dispel them. Cursorily wishing Trump well, he swung into references to 6 January, a right-wing plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, and the beating by an intruder of Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, in the Pelosis’ San Francisco home. “Hate has no harbour” in America, he said, an echo of “hate has no home here,” a common anti-Trump lawn sign. As he urged Americans to “compare and contrast the character of the candidates”, he proclaimed that the choice made in November will “shape the country for decades to come”. Instead of cooling passions, he kept them at a steady boil, with an inflammatory stump speech meant to save himself. Trump will respond in kind at the convention. The two men are despicably selfish. And yet, as of now, one or the other will lead the country into the future.
Aristotle once wrote: “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.” Such fine and noble refinement of anger is necessary, though, especially at the highest levels of democratic politics. But it is impossible in a country where the sympathetic heart is broken, where more and more people stink in each other’s nostrils.
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