A Fourth Tragedy of Political Violence | Neil H. Buchanan | Verdict

In the time since the shooting at a rally for Donald Trump this past weekend, some key facts have been uncovered, while many questions remain. Although one might hope that something we could call “the real story” will come into focus at some point, it was clear from the outset that there could never be any amount or type of evidence that would resolve to everyone’s satisfaction the issue of what truly happened.

This is a tragedy, because the hope of healing a divided nation rides in large part on everyone knowing what it is that we are trying to heal. The problem is that the very injuries that need to be healed will stop us from being able to return to robust health, as if a human body’s processes to heal its wounds only worsened the pain.

The Three Tragedies

In a Verdict column two days ago, “Three Tragedies of Political Violence,” I described three lessons that were immediately apparent after the shooting. The first tragedy is the most palpable, which is that there were real victims of the shooting. It is too easy to skip quickly past that part of the story, but we must never fail to remember the human cost.

The second tragedy is that our political system was already so damaged by violence and the threat of violence that even something shocking like this earth-shattering event seemed so unsurprising. The political system, like the legal system more generally, is the peaceful alternative to might making right and thus to cycles of violence and bloody retribution. The less we can count on everyone buying into the legitimacy of a system—especially when people do not achieve their immediate goals within that system—the more likely we are to see the entire system collapse.

Finally, I explained in Tuesday’s column why the toxicity of our political system will prevent us from reaching any agreement that would allow us to move forward in a trusting, good-faith environment.

In particular, I noted that we did not (and, as of this writing, do not) have any basis on which to say that this violence was in fact politically motivated at all. To be sure, the shooter’s violent acts have had immediate and profound political ramifications, and those will continue to echo for years if not decades into the future. Even so, and notwithstanding that the shooting has been officially deemed an assassination attempt, the word “assassination” does not necessarily imply a political component.

The website dictionary.com, for example, offers two definitions: (1) “the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person”; and (2) “the act of destroying or harming treacherously and viciously.” There is no doubt that the shooter attempted to do something fitting the first definition, and he unfortunately succeeded in an act that fits the second. But neither of those definitions involves politics, whether electoral or even ideological.

What I called the third tragedy, then, was that…