America is not ready for what comes next

Someone just attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump. We don’t know who, and we don’t know why, but we know they came terribly close to succeeding.

We should all be terrified about what comes next.

American politics has recently become trapped in a state of simultaneous stability and instability. It is stable in the sense that there are clearly defined and seemingly unshakeable partisan divisions. It is unstable in the sense that those divisions have grown so deep and so bitter that they threaten the basic faith in political coexistence that any democracy needs to survive.

Two years ago, I asked some of the world’s leading experts on democratic breakdown about what comes next: How might the seeming crisis of American democracy end? Many of them warned of rising political violence. The more people hate and fear their political opponents, the more likely they are to go outside the law to try to stop them.

And when someone on one side is attacked, the other becomes more likely to respond in kind. The ultimate fear is a cycle of violence akin to Italy’s “Years of Lead”: a roughly 15-year period beginning in 1969 in which extreme left and extreme right militias perpetrated a spree of bombings and assassinations.

At the time, I wrote that the “most likely flashpoint” for violent escalation was “a presidential election.”

Political violence tends to be emotional, perpetrated by angry people who have poor impulse control. In this country, our political emotions are never higher than during a presidential contest — especially when both sides believe that the fate of the republic depends on the outcome.

To be clear, we do not yet know that the shooter was motivated by political grievance. We could be in a scenario akin to John Hinckley’s shooting of Ronald Reagan, an assassination attempt motivated by a clinically delusional bid to capture the attention of actress Jodie Foster.

But we can say it was clear that the risk of something like this would rise during the election. As would the risk of serious, unpredictable consequences — up to and including further violence.

In fact, the very circumstances that make political violence more likely in today’s America are the same ones that render our political system ill-equipped to handle its consequences.

Extreme polarization makes cooperation hard and suspicion natural. Some Republican members of Congress are already blaming Democrats for the attempt on Trump’s life. The phrase “inside job” is currently trending on Twitter.

And it’s not like either party’s leadership is especially trustworthy at this particular moment. President Biden has clearly declined with age and is fighting to maintain his role as nominee. Trump is a victim now, but he’s still the same man he was before it happened. Biden is a steady leader but in a poor position to handle a crisis; Trump is a demagogue who is more likely to raise tensions rather than lower them.

The United States is an extraordinary country: the wealthiest and most powerful ever to exist in human history. But it is riven by what might be its greatest internal divisions since the Civil War. The gravity of that particular comparison should underscore both the dangers here and the uncertainty. 

A gunman’s bullet has just sent the country hurtling into an abyss. The only question now is how far we fall.