Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, July 15, 2024
“… when the entire focus of the arguments of one end of the political spectrum is based on treating opponents as illegitimate and their leader as the second coming of Adolf Hitler—as the Democrats have treated Trump–it isn’t good enough to respond to an act of violence with bromides about lowering the temperature.”
At what point does angry political discourse cross the line between legitimate impassioned advocacy and direct incitement to violence? It’s a question that’s been all too common in both the United States and Israel for the past generation.
It’s one that would be difficult to answer for even the most objective observers. But given that few of us are truly objective about the issues and disputes that generate the greatest amount of heat, most tend to respond along self-interested lines, treating our own positions as inherently legitimate and those of the people with whom we disagree as clearly beyond the pale.
That is why acts of political violence—such as the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump this past weekend—can just as easily exacerbate the tensions within societies rather than help heal them. In seeking to understand how Americans can transcend their political divisions and recover some sense of national unity, we need to remember that two things can be true at the same time.
One is that the responsibility for acts of political violence belongs to the perpetrators alone and not to those who may share some of their political positions. That’s especially true when one realizes that many if not most such crimes tend to be committed by lone extremists whose motivations are often complicated by their own struggles with mental illness.
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