Had Donald Trump tilted his head the other way, the bullet that clipped his ear would have killed him. America was half an inch away from a major civil crisis.
We don’t yet know the full details of this assassination attempt, but it is clear that Donald J Trump has been demonized by his opponents for years.
Of course, in politics you sometimes say negative things about your opponents. But the rhetoric aimed at Trump has often gone far beyond normal political back-and-forth. Trump’s opponents have set out to delegitimize him.
After losing to Trump in 2016, Hilary Clinton described him as an ‘illegitimate’ president. Spurious allegations emerged suggesting he was somehow a Russian agent. Every effort was made to undermine his administration, often from within.
When Trump began to re-emerge as the Republican frontrunner in this election cycle, a number of prosecutors suddenly started to bring cases against him. Odd, that.
It seems to me that as in a Banana Republic, he was being persecuted through the courts for political reasons, as much as he was being prosecuted for breaking the law.
Now comes an assassin’s bullet, which narrowly missed Trump but did kill a fifty year old father attending a political rally.
We don’t yet know what motivated Trump’s would-be assassin, but we do know enough to ask where this growth of political extremism comes from.
The decline of religion means that politics has become, for many, a substitute belief system.
“When men choose not to believe in God” my fellow Englishman, GK Chesteron, once observed, “they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
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People need a sense of purpose, a framework that explains the world and their place in it. Without religion, many have adopted a belief system called climate change. Others have a system called intersectionalism. Their place in the cosmos, they start to imagine, is defined in terms of where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood.
Once you think this way, those who share your world view seem virtuous. Those that don’t become the ‘deplorables’. Anyone who just happens to have a different point of view is suddenly a moral affront. Such people must be no platformed.
Instead of viewing elections as a process for deciding who holds office, they are seen as a Manichaen struggle of good against evil. Once you think this way, the ends begin to justify the means, with calamitous consequences.
Too many Americans are willing to always think the worst of fellow Americans, and it’s not just progressives who look for the worst in conservatives.
Take what happened in the wake of the attempted assassination. Many commentators appeared to almost want to find evidence of incompetence, or worse, conspiracy.
An apparent hesitation by Secret Service marksmen in engaging the gunman was somehow sinister, it was suggested. Commentators without much experience of close personal protection were quick to inform us that the female Secret Service agents could not handle their weapons properly.
Really? Why assume the worst? Why not start from the position that what we witnessed were professionals under intense pressure, making life and death decisions, and doing the best they could?
I’m an immigrant that looks at America as an outsider. Born in Britain, and raised in Uganda, I came to America by choice (and good fortune).
I don’t look about me trying to find fault in my new home. I see instead an extraordinary country that it is a great privilege to be part of. I see the most hospitable, friendly, and innovative people on the planet all around me. I believe so strongly in the things that make America special so much, I even wrote a children’s book about it.
Each time I meet an American for the first time it never occurs to me to wonder if they vote Republican or Democrat. To me, they are just American, and all the better for it.
We need to stop looking at each other through the prism of politics. It’s not good for us, for our politics or for America.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
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