Heated rhetoric is dangerous, but honest disagreement is necessary for democracy

Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on Saturday. The former president was addressing a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a 20-year-old carried a rifle onto a nearby roof. That gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, proceeded to fire several bullets at Trump, injuring the Republican’s ear, killing a male rallygoer, and wounding another. Security forces then shot Crooks dead. This is a tragedy for those directly harmed. Crooks stole life from a person and thus, a loved one from many other people. And he almost certainly traumatized many others, not least the Republican standard-bearer himself. Saturday’s events are also a nightmare for the country. While riven by increasingly bitter political conflict over the past two decades, the United States had managed to avoid deadly assassination attempts against presidential candidates. Keeping America’s “culture war” purely metaphorical is not easy. Fights over questions as fundamental as “Who counts as an American?” and “When does human life begin?” are not easily contained within the bounds of the democratic process. Occasionally, they get people killed. Erode the taboo against resolving these disputes through force, and you clear a path to mass death. It is therefore vital for all of America’s political factions to forswear political violence. In the wake of this weekend’s assassination attempt, however, some have called on partisans to do more than this: They have suggested that we must not merely condemn violence, but also avoid rhetoric that could hypothetically inspire it. Some of these calls are patently cynical. For example, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance argued Saturday that the “central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” and that this “rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” At the time of Vance’s statement, nothing was known about the shooter’s motives. Thus, the senator did not know whether what he was saying was true. And in fact, he appears to have been entirely wrong. Four former classmates of the shooter told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was a "conservative" and a "loner." As of this writing, Crooks had no discernible political motive. We have no evidence he was motivated by rhetoric on the left or the right or even by politics at all; it's possible he was simply a young man looking to give his life historical significance through violence. More fundamentally, though, it is absurd for an ardent supporter of Donald Trump to feign a principled opposition to incendiary rhetoric. The former president has likened his political enemies to “vermin,” accused Joe Biden of trying to “overthrow the United States” by orchestrating mass immigration, and said that if the Democrat wins, “our country doesn’t stand a chance.” Still, not all calls for cooler rhetoric were disingenuous. The great science writer Robert Wright, whose politics are decidedly left of center, posted on X Saturday, “Why don’t we just skip the argument about which side has used more extreme rhetoric about the other side, which side used it first, etc. There’s been way too much on both sides. If you agree, maybe the best thing to do is politely discourage people on your own side from using it.” This sentiment is understandable but imprecise. It is wrong to say things that are untrue, and when dishonest rhetoric is also politically incendiary, it is especially irresponsible. But we cannot have an honest and open debate about our political disagreements without saying things that an unhinged person might construe as a rationale for violence. Donald Trump really does present a threat to the norms of liberal democracy and the welfare of millions of US residents. Joe Biden truly supports the legality of medical procedures that some Christian conservatives believe to be murder. Rhetoric that describes in good faith our polity’s disputes will imply that our elections have life-or-death stakes — because they do. Political violence is not wrong because our conflicts aren’t profound. It’s wrong because it undermines democracy. Biden’s most heated rhetoric about Trump is defensible There is no question that Joe Biden has denounced Trump in explosive terms. In late June, the president posted on X, “Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.” Biden’s last sentence here was arguably hyperbolic, but the president’s other claims are defensible. Many Americans reasonably believe that people who are compelled to carry a pregnancy to term are not free. Through his Supreme Court appointments, Trump is personally responsible for the curtailment of reproductive rights in many parts of the United States. Although he has disavowed all intentions of further restricting abortion at the federal level, he is nevertheless closely aligned with a movement that aims to do so. Trump has also promised to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.” This policy would reportedly involve rounding up longtime US residents, confining them to detention camps, and then deporting them. Many undocumented immigrants were brought to the US as children and know no other home. It seems reasonable to say that Trump presents a threat to their freedom. That Trump poses a threat to democracy should go without saying. As president, he attempted to block the peaceful transfer of power by manipulating vote counts and instigating a riot on Capitol Hill. He has also outlined plans for undermining the independence of federal law enforcement while vowing to enact “retribution” on his movement’s enemies. It is highly unlikely that a second Trump administration would lead to the death of American democracy, as our nation’s federated system of government makes establishing an authoritarian regime exceptionally difficult. But it’s reasonable to say that putting an insurrectionist back into the Oval Office — after he’s had four years to assemble a cadre of loyalists to staff the executive branch — would pose an intolerably high threat to US democracy, even if that threat is remote. Most of us would not engage in any activity that came with a 1 percent risk of death if we could help it. Heated rhetoric is an inextricable feature of democratic life My point here is not to say that Democrats’ incendiary rhetoric is always legitimate while Republicans’ is not. What matters is whether a given statement is plausibly true. We cannot honestly debate our nation’s core political disagreements without saying things that could inspire intense passion in partisans. Political passion is the kindling for political violence, but public officials must not compound the unavoidable hazards of democratic life by saying explosive things that are untrue. In 2018, Donald Trump suggested that Democrats were orchestrating an invasion of the United States by violent “illegal immigrants” because they viewed such criminals as “potential voters.” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz argued that the Jewish, Democratic megadonor George Soros might be paying immigrants to “storm the US border @ election time.” Shortly thereafter, a neo-Nazi who believed that Jews were orchestrating an invasion of the United States by violent Central American migrants — as part of a broader plan to render the white race incapable of reclaiming power in the US — murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The fundamental problem with Trump’s and Gaetz’s claims was not that they were liable to inspire violent malcontents to commit such atrocities. The problem was that they were spreading baseless conspiracy theories. If it were true that Democrats were orchestrating an invasion of the United States as part of a plan to enact mass voter fraud, Trump and Gaetz would be right to say so, even though this could provoke acts of violence. But it wasn’t true. Falsely claiming that your political opponents are trying to steal an election through mass voter fraud is wildly irresponsible; implying that conservative Americans should see immigrants as threats to their democratic freedom is something even worse. By contrast, if a Republican were to say that Biden posed a massive threat to human life as defined by conservative Christian theology, they would be telling the truth. I do not believe that a fetus is a person, but many Americans subscribe to a worldview in which it is. There can be no simple, scientific truth about a question as philosophical as when human life begins. In a pluralistic democracy, conservative Christians must be allowed to articulate the implications of their theology, even if that means portraying Democratic supporters of abortion rights as would-be mass murderers. In a democracy with polarized politics, many legitimate forms of advocacy will imply that preventing an adversarial politician from taking power is of life-or-death importance. In a country with more guns than people, such political speech presents genuine hazards. If we find those risks unacceptable, we should curtail gun ownership before we constrict honest debate.