You don’t have to be Steven Pinker to notice a stark contrast: Despite our gloomy attitudes and “if it bleeds, it leads” news media, we live in a time of relative peace and prosperity. There is less violence (violent crime as well as war) than ever.
And despite our bellicose political rhetoric, this may be especially true when it comes to politics. “Between 1830 and 1860,” writes Yale professor Joanne B. Freeman in her book The Field of Blood, “there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds.”
That, of course, was just before Abraham Lincoln was killed.
Jump ahead a century, and America endured the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy—as well as attempts on the lives of numerous other political figures, including the near assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
In recent years, we have witnessed the horrific shootings of Reps. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, in 2011 and Steve Scalise, a Republican, in 2017 but these have been thankfully rare exceptions to the generally peaceful rule.
In some cases, we may have simply gotten lucky. Last year, Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton—as well as to CNN. Thankfully, his devices failed to detonate, and he was tracked down and arrested by the FBI.
Still, some perspective is in order. According to Time magazine, “In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.”
With a few notable exceptions, modern America has largely avoided the kinds of political violence that plagued previous generations.
That’s no sure thing to last, as we were reminded by Donald Trump’s racist rhetorical attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, with prominent Democrats going so far as to predict that her life was in “imminent danger” as the president’s words were “going to instill violence.”
Those warnings were not just more irresponsible hyperbole. Words may never hurt you, the children’s rhyme tells us, but they can inspire things that do. In a sentencing memo for the alleged pipe bomber, Cesar Sayoc’s attorney blames President Trump and Fox News for radicalizing him, arguing that “A rational observer may have brushed off Trump’s tweets as hyperbole, but Mr. Sayoc took them to heart.”
There is no doubt that the president’s rhetoric is testing the peace we’ve (mostly) maintained, perhaps along with his opponents’ conflating violent rhetoric with violence.
Just as 9/11 created a greater tolerance for surveillance, a serious attack now on a modern political leader who is seen to be in the middle of the culture war could lead to all sorts of constitutionally-dubious new laws and rules intended for our protection.
It’s worth talking frankly about the bad things that can happen, and how can we proportionally respond to them, because sooner or later one of them will happen and we need to be prepared for the emotional fallout.
We should not be fooled by a recency bias that suggests that political violence is a thing of the past that cannot return.
To keep political violence as rare as possible, we need to foster a less toxic political environment.
One step toward this is to realize and recognize the good things that we have in America today.
