Maurice Macartney is the author of Combinations: Denominations, democracy and the politics of nonviolence, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024
Donald Trump, blood streaking his face, rises above the security agents trying to rush him to safety and raises a fist in defiance. Above the group, against a blue sky, flies the flag of the United States of America.
Like it or not, this is going to be the defining image of the US election of 2024, and indeed of this historical moment.
While acknowledging the personal tragedy of the spectator who was killed, and those critically injured, we can already conclude that the gunman who took a shot at him on Saturday, whatever his background or motives, probably just put Trump back in the White House.
First, there will be a surge of support. Already ahead in the polls, Trump will gain extra momentum from this. His already struggling opponent will be forced to come out of the wings in the wake of this assassination attempt, while Trump is centre stage, and play a bit-part, a weak second fiddle, condemning the attack.
Trump gets up and stays up, defiant, strong, triumphant even. They tried to kill him; they failed.
Then there is the message he will take from here all the way to November: the danger to the country, the danger to US democracy, is not a would-be autocrat with a criminal record and a penchant for locking up opponents and storming Capitols; it is the ‘emboldened radical left’.
The left has called for violence against Donald Trump and Republicans for YEARS pic.twitter.com/EyC5yFg8Hh
— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) July 13, 2024
And the left extends pretty far – exactly as far, his supporters will now believe all the more fervently, as Donald Trump says it does. AOC and her squad emboldened the dangerous radical left, goes the logic. Nancy Pelosi emboldened the dangerous radical left. And above all, on this view, Joe Biden emboldened the dangerous, anti-American, murderous, radical left, who just tried to assassinate Donald J Trump. They are Trump’s enemies, they are America’s enemies, and, according to the politics of hostility, the enemy must be fought until the enemy is destroyed.
Just as the gunman on Saturday projected the cross-hairs of his rifle’s reticle on Donald Trump, Trump will now project a reticle and offer his supporters a whole range of enemies towards whom anger can be directed. They will have all the evidence they need: the left – this will be the claim – tried to kill Donald Trump.
As all of this starts to unfold, and as most of the world’s media are magnetically drawn to the scene, other around the world will perhaps be relieved of scrutiny and pressure. Also on Saturday, before the assassination attempt, Israel’s latest strike on a so-called ‘safe zone’ in Gaza reportedly killed 90 people and injured hundreds more. The widespread condemnation that was beginning to build will now be relegated to the middle pages, or to a scroll-down sub-story. In fact, everything else will, for a time, be a scroll-down story, just when we need it to be top of the page.
Before we even get to a second Trump presidency, and all the rolling back of democratic norms, corporate and environmental regulation that will entail, there will be ripple effects across the world.
In the US itself, it is hard to see how anyone can campaign now on any vaguely ‘leftist’ issue without running a much higher level of personal risk. Anyone organising a protest about Gaza, for example, or a Black Lives Matter march, or a Pride march, will need to factor in the possibility that they will face violence.
When he stood up after the shooting, Trump could be seen, fist in the air, shouting “Fight, fight, fight”. Immediately afterwards, Eric Trump posted on social media: “This is the fighter America needs!”. Fight, fight, fight. Alongside that injunction comes the diagnosis: Democrats are responsible for this violence. So fight, fight, fight.
That pretty well encapsulates the circularity and contradictions of the politics of hostility – the violence, according to this logic, always originates with ‘them’, those we denominate as ‘our’ enemies; I am thus not just permitted, but duty-bound, to offer my violence in ‘our’ self-defence.
There was already a lot of roiling anger in US politics – this will both expand and intensify it. And anger wants an outlet, a target. I condemn the attempt on Trump’s life even as I call him out for doing more than anyone else to stoke and direct that anger, spreading the kerosene of hostility as a fuel for his own ascent to power.
Our long-term and overarching aim must be to dismantle the politics of hostility that has grown ever more intense, not just in the US but in many other countries too – the UK and France have only just fended off insurgent far right parties, for now. But those who consider themselves democrats and leftists must put themselves under scrutiny too, must resist the temptation to splash a little kerosene of their own around. Presumably, after all, the would-be assassin thought he was doing a good, patriotic thing, trying to rid America of a danger – an enemy.
Not only was it ethically indefensible, but by reiterating the logic of hostility, it could only intensify the dynamic of the sort of Trumpian politics of violence to which, perhaps (though who knows?) the shooter objected. You don’t dispel hatred by hating back, tit for tat. We saw where all this went in Northern Ireland over thirty bloody years – and in the end what dismantled it was not the victory of ‘our’ side over a destroyed ‘enemy’ but the difficult, prolonged task of building democracy together.
Sitting down and going through the hard grind of talking, negotiating, debating with others, not just ‘our own’, not just ‘ourselves alone’. Deciding on a complex and fragile set of institutions designed to work out a way in which we could all live together, for all our differences (yes, we can and will still have our differences) as nonviolently and equitably as possible. Not perfect, but better than before. Not finished, so that we could dust our hands and move on to other things, but ongoing, always ongoing. Not with a view to ‘destroying’ our enemies, but with a view to creating nonviolent routes to empowerment for all of us, as neighbours in the one neighbourhood, local and global, wherever the state borders lie. With a view to overcoming both the fast-moving violence of hostility and the slow, unfolding violence of a market logic indifferent to the disempowerment and suffering it metes out to the marginalised. With a view to expanding democracy and nonviolence street by street, from the ground up.
TIME’s new cover: Donald Trump survives shooting with nation on edge https://t.co/eQxgKW1ezt pic.twitter.com/SwfZcm3V2z
— TIME (@TIME) July 14, 2024
What should Democrats in the US (and democrats elsewhere) do now? Avoid the trap of the politics of hostility: don’t denominate any of your neighbours as ‘enemies’ to be destroyed; rather, set yourself, where necessary, to address and overcome their political project, while making room for them in a future, more inclusive democracy. Talk to your neighbours as neighbours; expand democracy in your neighbourhood. Winning back the White House is now all but impossible. Perhaps, in a sense, democracy itself is all but impossible. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to try.
SOURCES
Al Jazeera, 13 July 2024, ‘At least 90 killed in Israeli attack on al-Mawasi ‘safe zone’ in south Gaza’, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/13/at-least-50-killed-in-israeli-strike-on-al-mawasi-safe-zone-in-south-gaza
BBC, 14 July 2024, ‘Spray of bullets shatters nation’s illusion of security’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1vdq5wy4kwo
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