The failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has occasioned much soul-searching and even more vitriol. Republicans are blaming the Democrats for the shooting, pointing to the left’s relentless attempts to paint Trump as an American Hitler. Except for their most demented netizens, who have lamented that the assassin did not have better aim, the Democrats, overwhelmed by events, have hunkered down behind the wall of civility.
From the summit of power, President Joe Biden set the tone shortly after the shooting: “Look, there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”
In a speech to the nation broadcast on Sunday, Biden reiterated, “We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America. There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”
Vice President Kamala Harris said the same thing more or less word for word. “Violence such as this has no place in our nation. We must all condemn this abhorrent act and do our part to ensure that it does not lead to more violence.”
Former President Barack Obama, still a messianic figure to many in the Democratic Party, said, “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy.” He called on Americans to “use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.”
Even the erstwhile quasi-communist Bernie Sanders, who has openly advocated a revolution—that is, political violence—joined the chorus, saying, “Political violence is absolutely unacceptable. I wish Donald Trump, and anyone else who may have been hurt, a speedy recovery.”
At National Review, Noah Rothman passed convincing judgment over this lachrymose orgy: “Neither side in this drama can countenance their roles in this escalating series of horrors.”
There is certainly a great deal of truth in this. Although they do not want to hear it, there is more than a little hypocrisy in the Trumpists’ outrage. Trump, after all, has built his entire political career on insult, defamation and at times incitement. Civility, let us say, has not been his calling card.
At the same time, however, those on the right have more than a few points to make. For example, they rightly point out that the left is denouncing political violence even though it did nothing to stop and at times actively encouraged the looting and burning of American cities during the Black Lives Matter protests.
There may be more than enough blame to go round but, for American Jews, it is the lamentations on the left that ring most hollow and hypocritical. The left may suddenly decry the rise of political violence in America, but for the past year, it has collaborated and colluded in an unprecedented wave of political violence against the American Jewish community.
This movement, spearheaded by the pro-Hamas Red-Green Alliance of progressive leftists and Muslim antisemites, has employed brutal and at times murderous political violence from the moment it began its campaign of protester-terrorism. Yet even Biden and Harris were either painfully tardy to condemn the violence or engaged in craven apologetics on its behalf. As for those further to the left, they sat on their hands and did nothing or enthusiastically participated in the violence.
In other words, notwithstanding Biden’s admonitions, political violence became normal because the left normalized it.
We do not know the motives of the would-be assassin involved in the attempt on Trump’s life. He may have had no motives at all beyond his own derangement. However, we have a right to suspect that when he saw the government of his country permit and at times encourage the Red-Green Alliance to run rampant across the land, the would-be assassin may have felt, at long last, license to unleash his most barbaric instincts.
If this is the case, then in a sense the outrage the left now faces from the right—however hypocritical it may be—is a type of justice. The chickens, as the protester-terrorists themselves love to say, always come home to roost. The cult of political violence the left fostered in its academic manufacturing centers and then used to intimidate, defame, ghettoize, harass, assault and murder American Jews reached out and tried to strike down the object of the left’s most ferocious hatreds. The nation has reacted with revulsion and horror. For this, the left has no one to blame but itself.
In the end, of course, the entire sordid affair serves to indict all parties involved. Rothman is right in saying, “Few even remember which aggravation or insult inaugurated our slide into the abyss, of which the latest episode of violence and terror is only a reprisal for the last. Events like Saturday’s beget a few half-hearted hours of reflection on the reckless state of modern political rhetoric, but whatever resolve those moments produce dissolves into an ocean of recriminations from partisans who decry the false moral equivalence in observing that both sides of the American political spectrum are increasingly acclimated to violence. Thus, men and women of conscience stifle their concerns, and we go on as before tripping languidly toward catastrophe.”
If this catastrophe is to be avoided, the two sides cannot simply lay down their arms and start being nice to each other. They must agree to root out the cults of political violence they have allowed to fester in their ranks. If they wish to overcome the barbarians, and Americans should hope that they do, they must overcome all of them, including their own.