Lesser-evil politics make assassination attempts more likely

Is Trump the problem, or a symptom of the problem?

Another month, another attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and another round of Republicans blaming Democrats for it. Ever since suspect Ryan Routh was arrested near a golf course where Trump was playing, the right has seized the opportunity to spin just about any line of criticism against the former president imaginable as calls to murder him. On Monday, for example, the NRCC sent out a press release accusing Gabe Vasquez of “incendiary rhetoric” for calling on voters to “remove the national threat [Trump] from office.”

The last time this happened, I noted the profound irony of the 2nd Amendment Party getting mad at Americans for exercising what Sarah Palin once called their “second amendment remedies.” It’s also pretty rich to see a party that’s built so much of its modern rhetoric around opposition to cancel culture beelining towards the oldest cancel culture trick in the book: pretending that heated criticism creates some kind of “permission structure” for violence. That’s something you expect to see in a 5000 word Medium essay from Jude Doyle, but it’s surreal to see this kind of whining in the mouths of macho media personalties and rich grandpas.

Instead of going down that road again, however, I’d like to pose a question.

A common objection to lesser-evil voting holds that winning a single election is pointless if we never address the underlying systematic problems that give us dangerous candidates. In the case of Trump, for example, one might argue that he is just the logical consequence of decades of rightward drift in the GOP. One can also argue that the GOP has been drifting right, at least in part, because lesser-evil voting prevents the American left voters from maintaining any standards for Democrats, who are supposed to be the opposition party. Without an effective opposition party advancing a left agenda that radically changes political norms in this country and makes reactionary politics too toxic to win, candidates like Trump will always emerge to take advantage of their weakness.

The standard lesser-evil rebuttal to this kind of reasoning is that while all of this may be true, a Trump win is still an intolerable risk. Democracy itself is at stake, fascism is on the march, so now is not the time to start building support for a third party or to discipline Democrats by withholding one’s vote.

Fine: but if we take that response seriously, what exactly is the lesser-evil argument against assassination?

Obviously this point holds for Republicans as well. If you think that Kamala Harris is just the latest example of a Democratic Party that has been taken over by communists then it makes sense that you would want to support Libertarians or Constitutionalists or some other third party that’s willing to adopt radical measures against the left. But if you see Harris as some kind of aberrational once-in-a-lifetime threat that demands an emergency vote for the GOP, why wouldn’t you be plotting more drastic measures?

To be crystal clear, I am not a lesser-evil voter, so I completely reject these lesser-evil arguments for assassination. I think that if someone does manage to knock off Trump we will probably just get a Vance or a DeSantis or a Thiel or someone else who’s equally sinister instead. The only way around this, as far as I can tell, is to advance a socialist agenda that’s so popular that no one can possibly win against it without adopting it.

But Republicans are right that the current Democratic rhetoric about Trump is hopelessly confused. One moment he is an unusually dangerous threat, one so outside of the Republican mainstream that even prominent Republicans are backing Harris, and for this reason it would be completely unconscionable for the left to even consider voting for anyone else. The next, however, Democrats tell us that he should only be stopped at the polls, and that if he wins we should accept it graciously.

Catching the major parties in contradictions like this is so easy that it’s tempting to dismiss an argument such arguments as just another exercise in political point scoring, but I do think this one has consequences. When the two major parties spend decade after decade hyping up opposition candidates as unique threats to America, all so that they can make the lesser-evil argument, they give voters two choices. One is to simply become cynical and stop believing what politicians say, which is the path that most Americans seem to have taken. The other is to become an increasingly radicalized partisan whose adrenaline kicks into overdrive every four years. It’s not surprising to me that these kinds of state-of-emergency politics end in gunfire; what’s surprising to me is that we don’t see even more of it.