Gunshots in America: A politics of violence

An expert brings order to the debate. And a novel on a country's collective trauma

Jul 15, 2024

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The Big Story:

Gunshots fired at Donald Trump merely grazed the 2024 presidential candidate’s ear ahead of his Republican Party’s national convention. But they may have achieved something more fatal, finally shattering the world’s view of America as a nation engaged in vibrant and peaceful democratic deliberation in the run-up to Election Day, November 5.

Experts say the alarming rise in political violence in the US in recent years is the deadly blowback of years of hate speech by politicians.1 America is not alone in this troubling surge of extreme behaviour:

In June, Denmark’s prime minister was physically assaulted on a Copenhagen street.
Slovakia’s populist prime minister was shot four times in May, but survived to promise vengeance and retribution.
South Korea’s opposition leader was stabbed in the neck in January.
In Japan, a former prime minister was shot dead in 2022.

This Week, Those Books:

Why the rich world is not immune from political violence.
An award-winning writer on the trauma of living in a country constantly faced with death.
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The Backstory:

Four serving presidents and one candidate for president have been assassinated since the founding of the United States in 1776. However, incidents of political violence, routinely described in news reports as “unprecedented”, have been occurring in the US for at least 15 years. The January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election is a case in point. The mob at the Capitol threatened to hang vice-president Mike Pence. Other scary incidents include:
- In October 2022, an intruder in then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house beat her husband with a hammer.
- In 2020, a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer was foiled.
- The 2017 shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise during a baseball practice session.
- The 2011 near-fatal shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
Polarised societies are particularly susceptible to political violence when politicians use hate speech, according to political scientists. Examples include 1920s and 1930s Weimar Germany,2 where left-wing politicians were assassinated and Argentina’s so-called Dirty War of the 1970s3 when government-backed right-wing groups fought the left. Inflamed political rhetoric can even incite mass violence, such as the genocide in 1990s Rwanda.

This Week’s Books:

The Landscape of Political Violence (chapter)

By: Stathis N. Kalyvas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Year: 2019

My rating: Penetrating insights

This first chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism is very useful in categorising and explaining a phenomenon as chaotic, destabilising and “ill-defined” as political violence. Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas4 starts by acknowledging that political violence can be stretched “almost infinitely” because of the popular quip “the personal is political” and because the definition of violence has kept expanding. (Poverty and inequality, for example, can be said to be the result of structural violence.)

The professor, who also co-edited the Handbook, proceeds to narrow the definitions of violence to “the actual infliction of physical harm” and of politics to “an action that explicitly and directly aims to impact on governance”. Within these circumscribed bounds, he is able to bring some order to types of political violence as in the table (below) provided in the chapter:

The big takeaway from this chapter, especially in the context of today’s United States, is as follows: “Some types of political violence ‘thrive’ under war, authoritarianism, and poverty, especially in ethnically divided societies. But even if we were able to suddenly get rid of war, autocracy, poverty, and ethnic divisions, we would not be able to guarantee peace, because political violence can be observed in prosperous and peaceful democracies as well…”

Choice quote:
“Among the ‘highest-profile acts of political violence’…the assassination of heads of states, high government offcials, and public figures for political reasons is a practice that spans history: from Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin...This type of political violence should not be bundled under the category of terrorism, because its objective is not merely to terrorize the population at large but to produce a direct political effect”.

The Sound of Things Falling

By: Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated into English by Anne McLean)

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Year: 2013

My rating: Gripping

In this novel by one of Colombia’s finest authors, the violence of the country’s past weighs heavily on the present. Award-winning writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has constructed a story based on Colombia’s tragic history of the drugs trade, the regularity of political violence and the resulting trauma induced in a whole generation.

At the outset, the narrator, young Bogota university law professor Antonio Yammara, notes the habitual violence “that transcends the small resentments and small revenges of little people, the violence whose actors are collectives and written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front”. He mentions presidential candidates killed…sometimes, live on TV and how the regularity of such news flashes “had provided the backbone of my life or punctuated it like the unexpected visits of a distant relative”.

This troubling backdrop is the canvas for an evocative exploration of the toll taken by a culture of impunity. Vásquez is often said to have taken the psychological novel and made it political. So, Yammara is driven to investigate the mysterious life of a now-dead former aviator and ex-jailbird Ricardo Laverde, whom he had met in a billiard hall in the capital Bogota. In the process, Yammara starts to reconstruct his own buried memories of narco-related violence and its deep echoes in every corner of Colombian society.

Vásquez once challenged the portrayal of Latin America “as a magical or marvellous continent” and said it was marked by the “disproportionate…violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics”. This theme also suffuses a subsequent novel, The Shape of the Ruins, in which Vásquez investigated two political assassinations in Colombia.

Choice quotes:
“I was nineteen and already an adult, although I hadn’t voted yet, on the day of the death of Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate, whose assassination was different or is different in our imaginations because it was seen on TV: the crowd cheering Galán, then the machine-gun fire, then the body collapsing on the wooden platform, falling soundlessly or its sound hidden by the uproar or by the first screams”.
“Nobody asked why he’d been killed, or by whom, because such questions no longer had any meaning in my city, or they were asked in a mechanical fashion, as the only way to react to the latest shock. I didn’t think so at the time, but those crimes (“magnicides,” they called them in the press…”
“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life — sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans — tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate”.

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