Unity and calm: This has been the overriding message from both Republican and Democratic Party leadership in the aftermath of Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that killed one rally-goer and hospitalized two others.
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock centered his Sunday service on this point at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Democrat has been a senior pastor for almost 20 years.
“We pray for the American family beset by a moral crisis and spiritual sickness so much deeper than partisan politics,” he said. “The puny language of red states and blue states will not save us now. This is not about red and blue, this is not about right and left, this is about right and wrong.”
Whether we as Americans embrace this appeal is up to us. The temperature in politics right now is high, as is a general sense of anxiety, while the specter of further political violence hangs over us — fueled by those who might view Saturday’s shooting as a license to escalate further.
Now is the time for temperance, and to think twice about what we post on social media and say in our political discourse.
An assassination attempt on a U.S. president or leading contender to the presidency is an event with profound implications. It’s also not the first time we’ve been here. Trump is far from the first president to be shot at by a fellow American: He joins the ranks of Andrew Jackson (1835), Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Franklin Roosevelt (1933), Gerald Ford (1975), and Ronald Reagan (1981), who all survived the attempts on their lives.
Then there are those who didn’t: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963). If we also count major presidential contenders, there’s Robert F. Kennedy (1968), who was shot dead, and George Wallace (1972), who was left paralyzed, both while campaigning for president.
That’s ten presidents out of 45, more than one in five. All that is to say: Political violence isn’t new in America, but the country has generally moved past it well.
This can be a turning point in an acrimonious campaign season when we pause to ask ourselves what values we want to reflect in our country.
We would do well to remind ourselves why actual political violence, or any rhetorical escalation towards civil war, is a bad idea.
My first reporting assignment was in Cambodia, a country that went through a self-inflicted genocide and decades of civil war. The scars and ghosts of that violence and bloodshed, which left around 2 million dead, are still evident to this day.
The horrors of what happens when leaders start categorizing citizens as “enemies of the people” — a phrase coined by former Cambodian ruler Pol Pot’s chief ideologist Nuon Chea — were presented to me in excruciating detail every day for over a year as I covered Chea’s 2015-2018 trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
Rebuilding from that kind of trauma is slow. The Khmer Rouge were toppled and their genocide ended in 1979, but civil war dragged on until the mid 90’s. In 1997 there was a coup d’etat and Cambodia’s politics remain troubled to this day. Just three months into my life there in 2015, two opposition lawmakers were dragged from their cars and beaten by a mob. The following year, Cambodia’s most popular political radio personality, Kem Ley, was shot dead while drinking his morning coffee at a gas station.
But don’t just take it from me.
The emblem of Atlanta is a reminder of our past: A phoenix rising from the flames. It’s a memorial to the fact that the city was set ablaze in the Civil War, a conflict which cost nearly as many American lives as all other U.S. wars combined. And while resurgens — “to rise again” — is a great motto for the city, it’s not an experience anyone should want to repeat.
