Violence has been the backdrop of the entire arc of US history

When momentous events happen in a media-saturated society, one of the first casualties is any sort of historical perspective. This became clear in the wake of the July 14 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

“An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation,” said President Biden in a White House press briefing the day after the attempt on Trump’s life. It’s true that in a liberal democracy, ballots, rather than bullets, are supposed to resolve political differences. But one would have to blind to history to accept that idea at face value.

Violence has been the backdrop of the entire arc of US history. The country was built on the violence of chattel slavery, the extermination of the native population, and wars of conquest. It fought a bloody civil war that killed the equivalent of seven million people, in today’s population.

There have been 46 U.S. presidents in the almost 250 years of the republic. Four of them have been assassinated in office. And others—for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford (twice!) and Ronald Reagan—have survived attempts on their lives. Combining assassinations and attempted assassinations, that’s almost one in five US presidents.

While certainly not the norm, it’s a distortion to say that political violence is a rarity in US history. And that’s just referring to assassination attempts against the US president.

We should also remember that assassination claimed the lives of three of the leading figures of the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s—the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Other lesser-known civil rights workers, such as Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Mickey Schwerner, or Viola Liuzzo, died at the hands of white supremacists. In 1963, the Klan bombed a Birmingham, Ala., church, killing four young girls attending Sunday school.

Trump’s supporters are fanning out to accuse the “left” of fomenting a climate in which a 20-year-old man, armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, felt encouraged to take a shot at Trump. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, tapped on July 15 to be Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, wrote only hours after the shooting: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said the assassination attempt was “aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.” Leave aside that the now-dead gunman was a registered Republican and a weapons enthusiast, his “motive” may not be any more scrutable than those of the disturbed young men who, in 2022, killed 21 at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school, or seven at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill.

Trump’s supporters’ attempts to blame “the left,” are calculated to cow Democrats and liberals into swallowing their criticisms of Trump. This seems to have already had the desired effect, with the conservative Democratic Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) stating: “We can start by dropping hyperbolic threats about the stakes of this election. It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism, or a battle against fascists or socialists bent on destroying America. These are dangerous lies.”

What are we to make of right-wing politicians’ celebration of political violence against the left? It’s hardly ancient history to recall that Trumpists made a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, the (at the time) 17-year-old vigilante who killed two Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisc., in 2020. Or that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently pardoned Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing an Air Force veteran acting as a peacekeeper at a 2020 protest against police brutality. And when mobs of rightists attacked peaceful Palestinian solidarity encampments at UCLA in May, virtually no one from the political establishment – either from the right or the Democrat side – spoke out against it.

And that’s not even to mention other mass shootings and atrocities that individuals, clearly influenced by far-right ideas that Trump has fanned, have committed. The attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The racist shootings of Black and Latino shoppers, going about their business, in Buffalo (2022) and El Paso (2019). The mass shooting at the LGBTQ Pulse nightclub in Tampa in 2019. The mass shooting at a drag show in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 2022.

These are more recent manifestations of an undercurrent of violent far-right activity that has festered for decades before coming “above ground” in atrocities such as Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 murder of 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Or in Dylan Roof’s 2015 white supremacist murder of nine African American bible study participants in Charleston, SC.

“This is not America” pundits and politicians say after each such incident. It’s not what the country should be, but it is what the country is.

Trump’s mainstreaming of far right and violent rhetoric provides a “permission structure” that makes these kinds of right-wing attacks more likely. He regularly encourages his rallygoers to rough up protesters or members of the press. He mocked an attack on the elderly husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in what was a failed assassination attempt on Pelosi herself. If elected, he promises to pardon members of the violent anti-democratic mob that rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s election.

But Biden is hardly an untainted messenger for unity, peace, and civility. In his Oval Office address on July 14, he said “we can’t allow this violence to become normalized.” But if he and other political leaders are worried that U.S. society has become inured to violence, they should consider what the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1967. In his groundbreaking 1967 speech announcing his opposition to the Vietnam War, King noted: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam?”

Certainly, the would-be Trump assassin has nothing in common with the “angry young men” that King was referencing. But politicians who speak of violence as something alien to U.S. political culture might want to ponder the question “what about Gaza?” While the U.S. political system—from Biden on down—is focused on an individual who almost killed Biden’s challenger (and did kill a rally attendee), it continues to fund, arm and support the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians in Gaza.

Within minutes of the appearance of the photo of a bloodied Trump raising a defiant fist as Secret Service agents maneuvered him off the rally stage, pundits and politicians were declaring the election over, with Trump and the Republicans winning in a landslide.

Yet it’s far too early to tell what impact the assassination attempt will have on the overall trajectory of the race, and there will be many more events that will shift it in unexpected directions. What hasn’t changed is that American society remains highly polarized. Both major party candidates remain extremely unpopular, and ordinary voters wish they had different choices. Most Americans view major political institutions—the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court—with distrust. In conditions like these, it’s folly to make confident proclamations about November from the vantage point of July.