We Don't Have To Walk Down This Violent Path.
By now, you have heard of the assassination of Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and the attempted assassination of Representative John Hoffman. As I write, Hoffman and his wife are in stable condition. My prayers are with the family and friends of these two families.
Late last night, the suspect was apprehended after a massive manhunt involving federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. Many charges have been filed against him, and more could be filed in the coming days.
News reports state the suspect is a "devout Christian" and an ardent supporter of the pro-life cause. Needless to say, his actions do not represent the views of millions of pro-lifers, nor the beliefs of billions of Christians across the globe.
I don't care to hear theories attempting to shift blame to the other side of the political aisle. Nor do I care to hear him try to justify his actions. Downplaying his murderous rage is as disgusting to me as those who claim Luigi Mangioni has a point.
We have a political violence problem in this country, and we'd better lower the temperature before it spins out of control.
I've said on Peach Pundit The Podcast numerous times that it feels like our political climate is a pile of dry kindling that could burst into flames from the smallest spark. I pray this event is not that spark.
Crimes and even murder in support of political aims are not new to our country. I was too young to remember, but the decade of the 1960s began with President Kennedy's assassination and ended with his brother's and Martin Luther King's murders following a decade of protest against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights. Candidate Trump narrowly survived not one, but two attempts on his life just last year. I shudder to think what would have happened in our nation if he had been assassinated.
Riots, violent protests, damage to property, assassination, and assassination attempts are all indicative of people who have given up hope that our political system can produce results. As Yuval Levin wrote following the first attempt on Trump's life:
We have grown more divided in this century, we use more militant rhetoric, and political violence has escalated. In the last 15 years, there have been shootings of members of Congress of both parties, a foiled assassination attempt of a Supreme Court justice and his family, a mob storming the Capitol to disrupt the certification of a presidential election, and rising levels of threats against public officials of all sorts. A near assassination of a once and perhaps future president might seem like all too natural a next step.
And yet, this moment feels like a sharp break. Maybe because it was by far the highest profile act of domestic political violence in this century, directed at the highest profile figure in our politics, in front of television cameras, that it struck even our cynical culture as a shock. It gave us a terrible glimpse into what it would feel like to live beyond the bounds of our constitutional republic.
We have tested those bounds pretty aggressively in the last few years. Our leading politicians have called each other fascists and enemies of the people, deployed or threatened to deploy the justice system against their opponents, declared that election results were illegitimate, and insisted that our society’s very existence would be imperiled if the other party were in power. Donald Trump himself has been the worst offender on this front, but his opponents and critics have frequently come close. Both sides have seemed incapable of criticizing one another’s violations of essential norms without engaging in their own. All of this has shown contempt for the character of our republic.
The answer to our present circumstance lies in recommitting ourselves to the principles and boundaries outlined in our Constitution (as Levin outlines in his book "American Covenant").
More Levin:
Our constitutional system exists to help us disagree well—and its degradation has meant we have gotten much worse at disagreeing. Our parties have lost sight of their proper work. Politicians want nothing to do with the kind of bargaining and competition that our system of government requires and prefer instead to traffic in extravagant displays of vicious bile. Congress has turned itself into a venue for their performative hysterics rather than an arena for negotiation.
The constructive reform of these institutions demands a reacquaintance with their purpose, and the purposes of our constitutional system. One of its primary purposes is to facilitate our disputes. And those disputes are bound to be intense and passionate.
Taking the Trump assassination attempt seriously does not mean censoring ourselves so we don’t argue with each other or criticize politicians we think are unfit to lead. We do need to do that.
Rather, it should reaffirm both the necessity of the boundaries of our politics, and the necessity of the politics that happens within those boundaries. We need to refocus our political debates on tractable public problems. And we need to lower the temperature of those debates by revitalizing the institutions that keep their stakes relatively low—making sure that no person or institution has all the power, no majority gets everything it wants, and no election is the final one.
Political violence is not the inevitable conclusion of the path we have traveled in our politics. It is a choice we risk making, and which we must now rise to reject by recognizing the options before us.
I pray we as a nation, and each of us as individuals, reject the path of violence, rebuild our political institutions, and solve problems within the Constitutional boundaries...before it's too late.
