The Only Kind of “Political Violence” All U.S. Politicians Oppose

Law enforcement officials at the scene of an attack that injured Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the shooting attempt on former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

Politicians swiftly coalesced around the language of “political violence,” rather than terrorism, to describe the assassination attempt, carried out by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead at the Western Pennsylvania rally. Taken together, the outpourings of condemnations betray a clear agreement on what constitutes political violence, and in whose hands the monopoly on violence should remain.

“The idea that there’s political violence … in America like this, is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate,” said President Joe Biden, the backer of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, with a death toll that researchers believe could reach 186,000 Palestinians. Biden’s narrower point was correct, though: Deadly attacks on the American ruling class are vanishingly rare these days. Political violence that is not “like this” — the political violence of organized abandonment, poverty, militarized borders, police brutality, incarceration, and deportation — is commonplace.

“Everybody must condemn it,” Biden said of the assassination attempt.

And condemn it, most everyone in the Democratic political establishment has: “Political violence is absolutely unacceptable,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on X. “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” tweeted former President Barack Obama, who oversaw war efforts and military strikes against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan with massive civilian death tolls; Obama added that we should “use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.” “There is no place for political violence, including the horrific incident we just witnessed in Pennsylvania,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

The chorus of condemnation was predictable and not in itself a problem: There’s nothing wrong with desiring a world without stochastic assassination attempts, even against political opponents. But when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, “Violence can never ever be part of politics,” the very concept of “political violence” is evacuated of meaning.

The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity — vices so common in politics that they hardly merit mention. The issue, rather, is what picture of “political violence” this messaging serves: To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

As author Ben Ehrenreich noted on X, “There is no place for political violence against rich, white men. It is antithetical to everything America stands for.”

Trump and his Republican Party will no doubt remain committed to a political imaginary of apocalyptic race war and paranoid tribalism, which the assassination attempt will likely only feed. Democrats are welcome to perform civility toward the man who has consistently called for their violent overthrow, but they cannot help themselves to the pretense that their well wishes to Trump actually constitute calls for an end to political violence.

Democratic leaders will call for civility and continue to fill the coffers of police departments nationwide, while sending billions of condition-free dollars and bombs to Israel. Within the U.S., these condemnations of political violence now set the scene for even greater violent repression and policing of protest movements and dissent.

“We will not tolerate this attack from the left,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who was present at the rally. Little is known about the suspected gunman’s ideology; he was reportedly a registered Republican who once donated to a Democratic PAC on Biden’s inauguration day.

Other Republicans meanwhile blamed Democrats for simply telling the truth about Trump’s far-right extremism. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

If centrist Democrats stating the obvious about Trump can be slammed by Republicans as irresponsible, it bodes ill for any actual leftists organizing against fascist forces going forward — especially at a time when left-wing and pro-Palestinian protest movements are readily criminalized by both Democratic and Republican leaders. This is what peace means in a world where the only event to invoke a bipartisan chorus decrying “violence” is an attack on a fascistic former (and potentially future) world leader.

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