Convulsions of political violence have a way of imprinting on the national memory. They become, in retrospect, the moments from which the rest of history seems to unspool. Yet they are forever intertwined with the possibility that things could have gone exactly the other way.
What if? becomes a haunting question. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would-be assassin had hit his target in Miami in 1933? What if John F. Kennedy had forgone the convertible ride in Dallas in 1963? What if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t walked onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968? What if the bullet that pierced Ronald Reagan’s lung in 1981 had been an inch closer to his heart? What if Donald Trump had shifted his weight just before a gunman shot at him during a rally in Pennsylvania in July? What if?
Maybe it is the collision of malice and luck that makes the outcome of an attempted assassination seem simultaneously fated and wholly random. But political violence is rarely random. In fact, those who study the subject most assiduously have been warning Americans for years that threats of violence are escalating.
Our experience of political violence—the shock of an assassination attempt, how the smallest details suddenly burn bright with meaning—can obscure its true nature. Violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideology, hatred, or delusions, is broadly predictable. The social simmer for years, complex but unmysterious. Again and again throughout history, and indeed today, periods of political violence coincide with ostentatious wealth disparity, faltering trust in democratic institutions, intensifying partisanship, rapid demographic change, an outpouring of de-humanizing rhetoric about one’s political foes, and soaring conspiracy theorizing. Once political violence becomes endemic in society, as it has in ours, it is terribly difficult to dissolve. Difficult, but not impossible.
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