U.S. political violence erodes democracy’s reputation

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This article was published 29/07/2024 (775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rare bipartisan calls for national unity followed the near killing of Donald Trump earlier this month. “We have to treat one another with dignity and respect,” said Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. “Violence has never been the answer,” U.S. President Joe Biden echoed in an Oval Office address.

But this messaging — while necessary — ignores a deep-seated reality. “It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence ‘has no place’ in American society,” conservative intellectual David Frum wrote in response to the groundswell of positive rhetoric. “Assassinations, lynchings, riots and pogroms have stained every page of American political history.”

Indeed, authoritarian regimes gleefully insist this is proof that democracy is inherently flawed. It breeds polarization and disorder, they claim, based on the U.S. experience. Autocrats’ own governance models are supposedly superior — systems that conveniently grant them ultimate power while denying their people civil liberties.

Despite zero facts indicating the Trump shooter’s motivation, Chinese state media swiftly exploited the incident. “This violence indicates that many people no longer believe that democratic processes can address their concerns,” gloated an editorial in the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The highest rated comment on coverage by the People’s Daily tabloid: “America the free, every day a shooting.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin routinely accuses liberal democracy of being degenerate and chaotic. According to him, the West’s so-called “decadence” is destroying traditional religious and family values. Tehran has said that Western countries “lack the moral credibility” to criticize Iran.

These countries and others are now aligning in what some experts have labelled an “axis of upheaval.” There is no shared ideology or vision uniting this nascent alliance. Instead, Chinese communists, Iranian theocrats, North Korean dictators, Russian imperialists, African juntas and Latin American socialists all simply want to dismantle liberal internationalism.

It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when America — and by extension, the West — lost its ability to effectively promote its values abroad. Foreign adversaries have also stoked America’s fratricidal rage by deploying mass disinformation campaigns.

Yet, for people everywhere, the desire for democratic values — basic freedoms, human rights, functional institutions and the wish to choose how they are governed — still exists. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has underscored, in graphic terms, the profound benefits of preserving a rules-based international system. War is ruinous and expensive.

Such principles are harder to promote when America’s global image and leadership is being undermined from within. In the words of Canadian author Stephen Marche, the assassination attempt on Trump is just the latest evidence of how the U.S. is being “overwhelmed by its pathologies.” Be it hyper-partisanship and the collapse of faith in national institutions or environmental degradation and the rise of enormous inequality.

Corroborating evidence comes from a recent poll that found one in five U.S. adults views political violence as valid if it can “get the country back on track”. In other words: restore the primacy of their preferred social and political tribe. After going underground in 2021, far-right extremist militias are now reanimating ahead of November’s election. And many aren’t even bothering to hide their recruitment efforts, which are openly occurring across dozens of Facebook groups.

This should come as no surprise given events over the past eight years. The attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the most glaring example. Aside from that, a California man attempted to murder conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Maryland in June 2022. Two months later, an intruder broke into the home of then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer.

A group of men in 2020 were barely foiled in their plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. A gunman shot up an annual congressional baseball game for charity in Virginia in 2017. Politically motivated mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 and a grocery store in Buffalo, New York in 2022 explicitly targeted visible minorities. Today, local election officials and volunteers face constant death threats.

And this is nowhere near an exhaustive list.

Appearing on CNN the morning after Trump’s brush with death, political scientist Ian Bremmer cautioned, “No one in the world admires the U.S. political system anymore, and that’s destabilizing.” For the past three decades American soft power has underpinned an international system that — while deeply imperfect — has been more peaceful and prosperous than any other throughout history.

But America cannot exercise leadership when it is experiencing violent decay at home. Expect democracy’s global reputation to suffer as a result.

Kyle Hiebert is Winnipeg-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.