Trajectory towards assassination - Debasement of political discourse is to blame

Kevin Andrews I 19 July 2024 I The Spectator Australia

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a campaign rally highlights the deadly trajectory of modern political discourse. No longer do many people disagree with their political opponents and seek to persuade their audience by rational argument; they seek to demonise those they oppose. For these people, it is insufficient to disagree. Their opponents are not simply misguided; they are morally repugnant.

This trajectory has been visible for many years. But it takes an event such as the attempted assassination to clarify the real consequences of the debasement of language and the substitution of political differences with moral certainty and condemnation.

Opponents are not simply politically misguided, they are illegitimate. Politics is less about a contest of ideas than an endeavour to cast opponents as reprehensible.

If opponents are viewed as morally evil – not simply misguided – they are not worthy of debate, perhaps even of their existence. ‘Americans want a president, not a dictator,’ tweeted President Biden. An image of Mr Trump superimposed on one of Hitler featured on the cover of a leading journal of the left. ‘Let’s put the bullseye on Trump,’ Mr Biden tweeted on another occasion. These statements – and many more from others –feed an environment where the dignity of the individual is subjugated. Should we be surprised when some take these messages seriously and endeavour to carry them out?

When the philosopher Alistair McIntryre, the author of?After Virtue, wrote in 1981 that ‘modern politics is civil war carried out by other means’, most took his reference to be literary, not actual. The events of the past four decades now suggest that his statement has become more than an allusion.

There are many causes of the present malaise. One is the absence of an agreed or shared moral truth. All views now represent the individual’s own ‘truth’. As Jonathan Sacks observed, ‘Lacking a shared language – we must attack the arguer, not the argument.’ There is less reasoning together, replaced by unreflected assertion and untested statements. Indeed, a feature of the new wokeness is intolerance of any debate. This situation has been compounded by the echo chambers of social media. This phenomenon has spread beyond the political system. Individuals condemn others on social media posts or in chat rooms, often creating an atmosphere of suspicion, but are unwilling to discuss the issues openly and personally. Their response is often abuse or a refusal to engage, neither of which contribute to rational, civil discussion and understanding. The political virtue of compromise is lost.

The new intolerance is on display every day. Protestors infiltrate events to shout down speakers with views and opinions with which they disagree. Some of the worst examples have been on university campuses, places historically dedicated to the pursuit of truth through open discussion and free discourse. Many organisations cannot hold an event without it being disrupted. This is fascism. There are so many events now where the organisers will only disclose the venue to attendees on the day. It is an appalling state of affairs where the electorate office of the Prime Minister has been subject to siege for months.

As Jonathan Sacks observes, some opinions are ruled out of order, ‘not because they are untrue – there is no moral truth –but because they represent an assault on the dignity of those who believe otherwise. So: Christians are homophobic. People on the political right are fascists. Those who believe in the right of Jews to a state are racist. Those who believe in traditional marriage are heterosexist. Political correctness, created to avoid stigmatising speech, becomes the supreme example of stigmatising speech.’ These observations were prescient, made almost two decades ago.

Secondly, the liberal achievement to decouple politics from religion is being undermined. The political virtue of toleration is being turned on its head. What a person was permitted to do has been transformed into what he or she has a right to do. And having become a ‘right’, the law can now be employed to penalise anybody who disagrees with that ‘right’. Moral relativism has replaced toleration. There are many instances, for example, the insistence that faith-based schools should not be permitted to insist that teachers share the faith.

Thirdly, the rise of identitarians has reinforced these trends. It rejects the shared values necessary for the health of a nation.

Fourthly, much contemporary political rhetoric fuels polarisation rather than encourages unity. Ever since Aristotle, the aspiration of many political philosophers and practitioners has been to find a practical answer to the question ‘How can we live together?’ This pursuit necessarily involves what we have in common, what binds us together. In John Howard’s well-known expression, ‘that those things which unite us as Australians are infinitely greater and more enduring than the things which divide us’.

As the renowned US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter – hardly a conservative – once observed, ‘Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.’ Even the Aristotelian notion of happiness has been replaced by the cult of instant gratification and individual expression. The idea of ‘we’ has been subjugated to ‘me’.

Reclaiming a set of shared national values is critical. History is replete with examples of nations failing once they suffer internally. As the writer of Proverbs noted more than two millennia ago, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’.

The attempted assassination of Mr Trump is not an isolated event. Four of the 46 US presidents have been assassinated, with attempts on another three. This is a dreadful record. America has not always been united, but the circumstances of the modern polity reinforce the fractures we are now witnessing. Regretfully, these events have not been confined to the US. Two British members of parliament have been killed in recent years. The time has arrived to call out the statements and actions of those who are destroying the very values which underpin a democratic and free society.

AUTHOR Kevin Andrews