I have violent fantasies and probably you do too.
But they need to stay in our heads.
The Trump shooting has led to Joe Biden and all the country’s other responsible leaders saying the things that responsible leaders always say: Violence has no place in our politics, and so on. That’s great; I completely agree.
But one thing needs to be said that I’m not seeing anywhere: I believe that just about everybody, at one time or another, fantasizes about doing violence to someone who symbolizes absolute evil to them. I know I do, and I try not to feel guilty about such fantasies. As long as they stay in our heads, they’re relatively harmless indulgences.
The problem comes when you start to think seriously about bringing those fantasies into reality. Where would I do it? What supplies would I need and where would I get them? Do I need an escape plan, or am I going out in a blaze of glory? Stuff like that.
If you ever find your thoughts drifting in those directions, I want to remind you of something: Violence seldom turns out the way you picture it, and History has a way of rolling right on even after you remove someone who seemed central to it. Killing Caesar didn’t stop the decline of the Roman Republic or delay the onset of Empire. Killing Lincoln didn’t improve the lot of the post-war Confederate states. I doubt killing Trump would stop MAGA either.
This individual or that one may (from some point of view at some point in History) personify the evil of that era. But the individual didn’t create all that evil. He or she simply channeled and focused it. If that individual dies, those forces will just find a new vessel, and History will keep rolling.
Trump didn’t conjure MAGA out of the void the way God created light in Genesis. He pulled together forces of resentment, entitlement, and bigotry that have been rattling around in American history for decades or even centuries. (Ask Rick Perlstein or Rachel Maddow.) They won’t go away just because something happens to Trump.
So if you ever find your violent fantasies starting to run away with you … I get it. I sympathize. Everybody wants to be the hero. Everybody longs to perform that one great feat that saves the World.
But don’t. Just don’t.
It won’t work. History doesn’t offer those kinds of short cuts. If the World is going to be saved, it will have to save itself through some much longer and more complicated process. Try to find a place for yourself in that process. Maybe a humble one, like most of the rest of us have.
The Weekly Sift 
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I can’t help but think IF the gunman had been successful then Biden would have the opportunity to step down and it would have made for a very interesting R & D convention(2) with 2 new candidates and a very short campaign season. My biggest gripe with Trump (especially) is he has never stopped campaigning …even when he won the presidency he immediately went out campaigning..that and golf. I really wish we had a max 6 months of campaigning.
Wise words.
Affecting the social constructionism of humanity is a vocational passion of mine. It’s a very difficult nut to crack.
There are reams of discussion about how well the Confederate states would have fared if Lincoln wasn’t killed. As it was, about a decade or so after his death, the South rose again with Jim Crow.
Thanks for that very wise observation, putting things in perspective.
I love your take on this! Interestingly, this weekend, I happened to see the play ”9 to 5,” which I found out was based on Jane Fonda learning that 60% of female secretaries and other such workers in an organization set up to organize them had a fantasy of killing their boss.
I happened to be reading Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (Discworld series), and this was the passage I was on that night:
“Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.”
I find comfort in Terry Pratchett’s wisdom.
In reading your Sift today, I am reminded of an important insight about change I picked up from Adam Gopnik’s “A Thousand Small Sanities.”
He argues that liberalism is resilient in the face of repeated attacks from authoritarians because it is built of thousands of small compromises bent on achieving just outcomes for each individual in society based on the emotional anchors of empathy and sympathy.
Believing that anyone can bend the arc of history toward justice with a single act by a single individual is the route to certain failure because it doesn’t anchor itself in the basic human advantage of the ability to express empathy and sympathy, and their natural outcomes of shared social values, laws, regulations and the like that aim to elevate our human condition.
It’s that often obscured march of human aspiration to justice and shared material security, obscured by the clatter and chaos of political conflict, that makes liberalism superior to conservatism, and resistant to destruction by autocracy, and other forms of forced conformance to any code that seeks to suppress individual progress.
Assassins waste our time and divert us from the work of making life better for all and each of us.
Jim Wavada
Spokane, WA.
People immediately started talking about this as political violence, even people on the left, with no evidence beyond the fact that the target was a political candidate. All of the little evidence since then points to a marginalized young white man wishing to go out in a blaze of glory (from his point of view), as we know a too-common occurrence. It seems to me that Trump was the target because he was famous and appearing in a hour’s drive. What needs to be done, to my mind, is damp down the urge to see this as politics, and respond in a political way, violent or not, focusing on the epidemic of lost young men and the culture that breeds them.
Thankfully Trump was spared, otherwise we would be subject to literally thousands of conspiracy theories for the rest of our lives. Think JFK assassination times 2.
It’s the eternal argument between the “Great Man” and “populus” theories of history. In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy put the Great Man theory to rest. Nobody embodies the Great Man theory than Napoleon. Tolstoy imagined what would have happened if, the night before the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon had gathered his generals and told them he’d changed his mind and called off the battle. His generals would simply have killed him and done what they already had planned.
Another example is Columbus. If he’d never made his voyage (and if Ferdinand and Isabella’s courier hadn’t caught up to him to tell him they’d changed their minds and would finance his voyage after all), the pressure of the need for a faster route to China along with advances in shipbuilding technology would have meant someone else would have reached the Americas within a few years.
Violence doesn’t turn out like you think it will; killing figureheads doesn’t extinguish larger trends. I think a guy named Paul I don’t remember his last name wrote something like that once… something like “our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly realms”?
My first reaction on hearing of the attempt on the convicted ex-President’s life was to think of Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. Time travelers manage to prevent Adolf Hitler’s birth, only to have a more ruthless and more competent leader take control of Germany in the 1930s.
My second thought was that if you are a promoter of stochastic terrorism, you shouldn’t be surprised when it comes to bite you on the ass.
The single person most responsible for promoting a rhetoric of violence and pushing his followers to use violence as their preferred political tool is Donald J. Trump. One of the most defining and prevalent characteristics of MAGA is the constant, oozing threat that unless they get what they want, they’ll use violence to command compliance from anyone who gets in their way.
Perhaps on January 6th “they weren’t here to hurt me” as they built their gallows for his VP (which he approved of) and did battle with LEOs defending our nation’s Capitol and our Congress, but finally the day came when one showed up who was.
You reap what you sow.
For an extended version of this argument, see Ben Elton’s excellent novel / “historical fiction”, Time and Time Again.
“The Trump shooting has led to Joe Biden and all the country’s other responsible leaders saying the things that responsible leaders always say: Violence has no place in our politics, and so on.”
Has Trump said that? I haven’t heard it, but I might have missed it.
As much as I agree with the rational presented about a ting alone against figureheads, I see the categorical rejection of conflict part of what allows Liberalism to slip into creeping fascism. From my “on the ground” perspective: last month someone mugged a young man in broad daylight, in a crowded area. The mugger picked up an armful of decorative rocks and stoned his victim till the guy didn’t get up, took his wallet, and trotted off. The 100ish liberal DC people watching? I’m sure a bunch called the cops. No one bothered to intervene. Someone likely died because no one’s willing to actually take a stand against violence.
I think that you’ve misunderstood the point. There is nothing in Doug’s post that argues against intervening to help a victim of violence.
Well said!!
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