The attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally represents a new level of public danger and evil. It is both shocking and not: The rhetoric of politics going back years now has turned increasingly angry and violent in ways that are intolerable.
The event, which the former president apparently survived only by the slight turn of his head, also presented the world with a picture of former President Trump’s personal stamina and strength. This is something to admire regardless of one’s politics.
It should also inspire wide reflection on the potential evil of violent approaches to political activism.
It is to forestall exactly these sorts of violent means that modernity has constructed relatively new and different systems of government. Any attempt to reverse that is not just directed at one man but an entire system by which societies have attempted to manage the transition of power.
Since the ancient world, violence has been a main means for replacing one leader, one form of government, with another. This was typical in the age of what we can call the personal state: Replace the head and you replace the whole. This was the story of Julius Caesar, of course, but also of countless others.
As modernity was born, so too were systems of government that were more decentralized. There was a move away from the personal state toward different systems that do not tempt would-be assassins to create mayhem.
This is how kings gradually came to relent to the rights and powers of the people and their representatives. The essence of the Magna Carta in 1215: King John of England signed a charter that limited his own power and granted powers and rights to other sectors in society. What began with the assertion of the rights of the landed aristocracy gradually grew to ever-wider circles, until democratic forms were born in the 18th century.
America led in this respect. The Founders imagined that they could construct a system of government that was constrained and restrained by parchment but also mechanisms of democratic voting. They had deduced that the problem that they were trying to solve was not only that of a far-away imperial government, taxing them without representation, but also the very institution of the king.
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy,” he wrote. “It first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.”
Paine concludes from his sweeping summary of the relevant history that “monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes. ‘Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it.” He wanted it replaced by government by the people. And he wanted this not through war but through a peaceful separation.
Eventually, the American project was born, with the head of state as an elected president, not king, and the succession guaranteed on regular cycles of elections. In the 18th century, many intellectuals and regimes around the world predicted that this new system cobbled together by the Americans would fail. But as time went on, and the United States grew ever more prosperous, and multitudes of people sought to immigrate, the respect for the new system grew.
There is this fascinating irony about the American Revolution. The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not want war. They wanted independence, peacefully. But the British Crown would not grant it. The Americans entered the war only as a last resort. But it was war to end wars: a struggle to form a new kind of government that would no longer require violent means, ever.
By the end of the 19th century, democratic forms of government became the norm around the world. Kings still survived and ruled, but they took on mostly ceremonial roles. Their power became cultural and not political. That remains true today in most of the Western systems in which royalty is still around.
Gradually over time, however, the fundamental case for democracy took on a firmer cast. It was not only that the vote and the expansion of civil rights to the population ennobled the citizenry. The main point in favor of democratic systems is that it makes the transition of power peaceful rather than violent.
Following the Great War, writing in 1919, economist and historian Ludwig von Mises had this to say about democracy:
“There can be no lasting economic improvement if the peaceful course of affairs is continually interrupted by internal struggles. A political situation such as existed in England at the time of the Wars of the Roses would plunge modern England in a few years into the deepest and most dreadful misery. The present level of economic development would never have been attained if no solution had been found to the problem of preventing the continual outbreak of civil wars. A fratricidal struggle like the French Revolution of 1789 cost a heavy loss in life and property. Our present economy could no longer endure such convulsions. The population of a modern metropolis would have to suffer so frightfully from a revolutionary uprising that could bar the importation of food and coal and cut off the flow of electricity, gas, and water that even the fear that such disturbances might break out would paralyze the life of the city.
“Here is where the social function performed by democracy finds its point of application. Democracy is that form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.”
Acquiescing to such a system requires something of a culture-wide consensus: We will conduct elections, the elections will be fair and transparent, and the people will respect the results. We will not resort to other means of dealing with political problems because doing so would attack the very core of what it means to be civilized in a modern sense.
The rhetoric in this election season has indeed been shocking, even indescribable, potentially violent, even from otherwise respectable sources. The assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, broadcast live across the globe, has stunned the world. We can only hope and pray that it is a wakeup call to rethinking precisely who we are and re-understand the systems under which we live.
The fundamental principle of democracy, for all its problems and issues, is to guarantee the peaceful transition of power and spare the population violence and war. Without that, we may really plunge back into a form of ancient despotism with all of its attendant suffering, poverty, and brutality. It is time for everyone, regardless of one’s political bent, to recommit.
