In the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, there have been calls from Democrats and Republicans alike to “lower” the “heated rhetoric.”
At the same time, as far as I can determine, these very same people whose livelihoods as politicians, bureaucrats, media personalities, entertainers, and activists are predicated upon convincing the country that their partisan rivals pose the gravest of existential threats to the United States and beyond—who, in other words, depend for their life blood upon rhetoric, and the hotter the better—have yet to assume any responsibility for the shooting of the one person who more than any other public figure has been the target of the most combustible of the white-hot rhetoric of his enemies.
Perhaps this is because, in one and the same breath, these same public figures, of both the left and right, deny that anyone other than the shooter himself is responsible for his actions.
So, the would-be assassin who, in addition to clipping Trump, critically injured two rally attendees and murdered a third, is depicted as having acted within a vacuum.
This isn’t just Individualism.
It’s not even Radical Individualism.
It’s Total Individualism.
Actually, it’s…Monadology.
Gottfried Liebniz, an 18th century German philosopher and, to hear both his friends and enemies alike tell it, among the most brilliant, the most prodigious, of men to have ever lived, contended that what accounts for the surface appearances that we perceive with our senses is that which we cannot perceive with our senses: an infinite number of “monads.” These are indivisible spiritual unities each of whose operations are, thanks to God, in a “pre-established harmony” with those of all of the others. Each monad is like an atom, but more basic than an atom, for the latter, being physical or material, is, in principle, infinitely divisible.
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Since monads, self-enclosed immaterial substances, are indivisible, this means that they can’t have any causal relations with each other. Rather, they “mirror” one another. Like clocks whose alarms a human being synchronizes so as to go off at the same time, monads are “synchronized,” as it were, by God. Just as it may appear that the sounding of one clock’s alarm is causally related to the sounding of the other, we know that there is no such causal relation between the two. Similarly, it only appears that things in the world causally affect one another. In reality, God alone is the ultimate causal agent who makes each monad parallel all others in one grand “pre-established harmony.”
To hear the post-assassination attempt commentary, the assailant is the moral equivalent of one of Liebniz’s monads.
Though it may not be obvious, these same voices contradict themselves when they now call for “cooling” the “heated rhetoric.” Of what need is there for this if, as they claim, their rhetoric has nothing at all to do with violence?
Logically speaking, all of those who spared no occasion over the last nine years to cast Trump as evil incarnate have just admitted two things:
First, in calling for “both sides” to cool the rhetoric, they admit that they themselves, being, as they are, on “one side” of things, are indeed guilty of using “heated rhetoric.”
Second, in admitting that they have been guilty of resorting to heated rhetoric, Trump’s enemies admit that they have been…dishonest. Make no mistakes about it, this is an admission, however tacit, even inadvertent, that Trump’s haters have been lying when they’ve characterized him as “Hitlerian,” a “threat to democracy,” an “insurrectionist,” a “white supremacist,” etc.
That Trump’s rival partisans equate “heated rhetoric” that needs to be dialed down with dishonesty can be gotten easily enough by consideration of the fact that the “heated rhetoric” from which they’re encouraging their opponents to back away they insist consists of a bunch of lies.
Insofar as people, whether Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, believe that the “rhetoric” has gotten too “heated” on “both sides,” they concede, then, that Trump’s enemies have lied about him.
There’s no evading the logic of this reasoning.
One needn’t be a Trump supporter or particularly interested in politics in order to draw the inferences that are right in front of our faces.
And one needn’t deny that the shooter is ultimately culpable for the evil that he unleashed in Butler, Pennsylvania on that fateful day in order to maintain that moral responsibility for an action isn’t a zero-sum game, that responsibility admits of degrees.
But one certainly cannot be a remotely wise or morally serious human being and simultaneously deny that those who tirelessly besieged the American public over the better part of the last decade with “heated rhetoric” regarding Trump share culpability for the bloodshed in which that sustained character assassination campaign culminated on July 13, 2024.
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