We won’t preserve American democracy through silence and timidity
When I saw Donald Trump walk into the Republican National Convention on Monday night, with his ear still bandaged from the wound he suffered on Saturday, I had two thoughts at once. First, I could see Trump’s obvious exhaustion and emotion, and I had compassion for him. If you’ve ever had a near-death experience, you know that it can have dramatic emotional effects. No one should have to endure such terror. At the same time, I retained my conviction that he should not be president of the United States. He was and remains a morally corrupt and dangerous man. And by keeping hold of both our compassion and our convictions, we can navigate this hateful and polarized moment in American life. We do not yet know the shooter’s motive for attempting to assassinate Trump (he reportedly was collecting information on President Biden as well), but we do know that we’re living in a time of extraordinary tension and menace. On Wednesday, The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins published a powerful reported piece, called “America’s Political Leaders Are Living in Fear.” Coppins focused on threats and acts of violence directed at national political figures, including Gabby Giffords, Brett Kavanaugh, Mike Pence and Mitt Romney, but that same reality applies to local political figures. Reuters has published deeply reported analyses of threats against election workers and school board members. And while MAGA is reeling from the attack on Trump, its own extremists are responsible for a pervasive campaign of threats and intimidation against Trump opponents nationwide. While it’s virtually impossible to trace any given threat or act of violence to a specific politician’s rhetoric — and wannabe assassins often strike for reasons that have nothing to do with politics — we can feel in our bones the rising tensions in our nation, and we know that overheated political rhetoric is playing its part in turning us against one another. After all, if enough people believe that an election was stolen or that democracy itself is dying, some percentage of those people may take matters into their own hands. In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, for example, the potential for violence was obvious. In December 2020, I remember hearing the popular evangelical writer Eric Metaxas tell Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, that the 2020 election outcome was “like somebody has been raped or murdered.” “This is like that times a thousand,” he said. Metaxas was but one voice of many. The drumbeat of catastrophic rhetoric from right-wing politicians and media figures led me to write, in December 2020, that we were encountering “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.” And it did. Many of this newsletter’s readers may have heard of the term “stochastic terrorism.” The best concise definition I’ve read comes from an Australian academic and researcher named Todd Morley. Writing in the Small Wars Journal, he defined it as “a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts of terrorism and the perpetuation of hateful rhetoric in public discourse, accompanied by catastrophizing and fear generation in media sources.” The reality works like a math problem: Hateful rhetoric plus widespread dissemination eventually equals violence. Think of it like this: If five people hate you, then the chances that any one of them would try to hurt you is low. But what if 50,000 people hate you? Or 50 million? Stochastic terrorism describes something real, but there are few good methods of dealing with it. The desire for peace can lead to calls for censorship. Solutions are elusive. When you’re talking about problems with something as big and amorphous as “public discourse,” what are realistic ways of changing the tone? Individual accountability is elusive as well. The disconnect between any specific person’s rhetoric and a specific shooter’s violent acts can be so tenuous as to be useless. The night of the attack on Trump, I wrote a short post that ended like this: “There has rarely been a better time to love our enemies, to pray for our nation and to remember — during one of the most fraught political campaigns in generations — that each and every one of us is a human being, created in the image of God.” As soon as I wrote those words, several sharp readers raised the key question: Sure, that’s a fine sentiment, they said, but what if you are genuinely alarmed about a candidate, for very good reasons? Should you hold your tongue for fear that telling the truth could lead to violence? Let’s return to my two thoughts at the start of this newsletter: I can have compassion for a person, but I can still possess a genuine conviction that he’s corrupt. There is a difference between dehumanization and disagreement. I am not dehumanizing Trump when I say that he’s been found responsible for sexually abusing a woman and then defaming his victim. It’s not dehumanizing to say that he defied the lawful results of the 2020 election and instigated an ultimately violent attempt to change the outcome. Nor is it dehumanizing to say that it was morally grotesque for him to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star. If the truth about a person is terrible, then the moral responsibility is on the person who committed the bad acts, not on the people who inform the public of the truth. Nor is it dehumanizing to argue that Trump policies are dangerous. If you believe that a politician’s proposed policies will harm vulnerable people or put national security at risk, it’s imperative that you speak out. At the same time, however, we must not resort to cruelty, and our call for peaceful remedies should be just as clear as our loudest alarms. And at no point should extremist rhetoric from one side justify extremist rhetoric from the other. Truth and reason are the answers to extremism, not a competing extreme. A different way of putting it is that we can argue both that Trump is a threat to the American constitutional system and that American democracy has all the tools it needs to defeat Trump. We must still treat Trump (or any other opponent) as a person, mindful that there is a profound difference between critiquing his actions and ideas and diminishing his fundamental worth. If all of this sounds abstract, let me share some of the concrete ways that I try to temper my own worst instincts. In my first year out of law school, a retired federal judge pulled me aside and said, “David, when you’re angry about something, write with a tone of regret, not outrage.” Outrage might engage and inflame your friends, but it alienates your enemies, and it tends to exaggerate the stakes of any given dispute. Regret, by contrast, communicates both seriousness and compassion. I also try to maintain a sense of historical perspective. We don’t face a single injustice as grave as the injustice of Jim Crow. No one can claim that Martin Luther King Jr. minced his words in condemning the evil of racism, but his philosophy of nonviolence also respected the humanity of his opponents. To understand the depth of the commitment to nonviolence, I frequently turn to the contents of a commitment card distributed to King’s Birmingham volunteers in 1963. In the face of great evil and terrible violence, it tells members of the movement to “Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love,” to “observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy” and to “refrain from the violence of fist, tongue or heart.” We should always maintain the hope of reconciliation and frame our words and conduct around that objective. I’m fascinated by the admonition in that same commitment card that “the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory.” If we’re to continue as a united nation that seeks to live up to its founding ideals, both of those objectives are mandatory. Justice dictates that we protect our people from corruption and authoritarianism. Reconciliation is what makes friends of foes (or at least keeps opponents from becoming outright enemies) and maintains the cohesion of our families and communities. Nothing about this formulation is weak or compromising. In fact, it calls us to a higher form of courage — it’s difficult to speak the truth in a toxic political environment when doing so can expose you to a torrent of anger and abuse. It’s even more difficult to speak the truth (as best as you can discern it), endure the slings and arrows in response, and still seek reconciliation with the people you oppose. We won’t preserve American democracy through silence and timidity. It is still necessary to publicly state the facts about Trump and make arguments about the consequences of his potential second term. At the same time, we should remember that our words can shape our society in deadly and dangerous ways. Stochastic terrorism does exist, and my conviction that my political opponents are wrong — even seriously wrong — should not overcome my compassion for them as human beings. Some other things I did I’ve been busy! As I mentioned, over the weekend I wrote about the assassination attempt against Trump, and I centered my thoughts around the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming.” The poem contains these famous words: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I think of Yeats’s words often. By “center,” he’s referring not to some kind of moderate political middle but rather to the moral center of civilization. When the moral center gives way, nations fall. I thought of those words again when I saw the blood on Donald Trump’s ear on Saturday. Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’s words, the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed in our land. On Monday, I joined my colleagues Frank Bruni, Michelle Cottle and Patrick Healy to reflect on Republican conventions past and present. Patrick asked how we thought the assassination attempt would change the convention. Here was my response: The key change will be in the intensity of the gathering. Expect to see an immense amount of anger and pride. Republicans are rightly proud of Trump’s immediate response to the shooting. His presence of mind to raise his fist to the crowd to signal that he was very much alive and defiant was an impressive act of leadership. And we should all feel angry when someone tries to assassinate a former president and current candidate. We also know, however, that anger can be dangerous, and we’re already seeing conspiracies emerging, including claims that Joe Biden is responsible for the assassination attempt. Our great national challenge will be responding to that anger, to keep it from spiraling out of control. Also on Monday, I responded to Judge Aileen Cannon’s order dismissing Jack Smith’s documents case against Donald Trump. I was not impressed: The conservative legal movement has long prided itself on following the text of the Constitution and federal statutes. Originalism and textualism are both legal philosophies that prize the plain language of the words on the page. Any other approach has been derided as “living constitutionalism,” a philosophy that makes the law subject to the judge’s own preferences. Yet we’re now seeing conservative judges issue rulings that seem to defy the text. Judge Aileen Cannon’s lengthy opinion dismissing the special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Donald Trump is yet another example of this disturbing trend. Her ruling contradicts the clear language of the Constitution and the relevant statutes. Finally, I joined a round-table discussion with my colleagues Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg to discuss Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, J.D. Vance. My bottom line: From the beginning of the selection process, the real question was whether Trump was going to select someone who could perhaps reach the middle or someone who would help him double down on the MAGA ethos and MAGA ideology. Trump’s obviously chosen to double down. This is the choice of a man who’s confident he’s going to win. Thank you for being a subscriber If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here. Have feedback? Send me a note at French-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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