Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. July 16, 2024 |
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When US Politics Turn Violent |
The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has stunned the nation, roiled a presidential election watched closely by the rest of the world, and highlighted the dangerous history and recent trend of political violence in America.
The suspected shooter’s motivations remain unknown, so it is not possible to conclude with certainty that politics caused this assassination attempt. But as Nahal Toosi writes for Politico Magazine, foreign diplomats are looking on with concern for the state and stability of the US political system. At The Wall Street Journal, David Luhnow, Bertrand Benoit and Ian Lovett write that the failed attempt on Trump’s life “is reinforcing an impression outside the U.S. that the world’s pre-eminent superpower is entering an unusually turbulent and unpredictable period, prompting allies to question its reliability and foes to gloat.”
The problem of American political violence, however, isn’t new. As CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf notes, events in recent years have proven that. For instance, Wolf notes the foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in 2020, the Jan. 6 storming of the US Capitol in 2021, a foiled 2022 plot to assassinate conservative Supreme Court justices, and the attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in their home in 2022. At Foreign Policy, historian Julian E. Zelizer writes that political violence is engrained in American history. Noting KKK violence in the Jim Crow South that disenfranchised Black citizens, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981, among other episodes, Zelizer writes: “The attempt to kill Trump should be a chilling reminder of how easy it is for some Americans to trigger a lethal tradition. Americans have seen the ugliness too many times before to act like this doesn’t usually happen here. It does.”
Polling has reflected the problem’s salience. Soon after the attack on Pelosi’s husband in 2022, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found 88% of respondents were concerned that political divisions might have increased the risk of political violence. This month, Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats wrote, of a survey the organization had conducted in June: “About 40 percent of Americans share at least one attitude reflecting deep distrust of American democratic institutions—such as elections will not solve America’s fundamental problems and political leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties are the most immoral people in America—and this deep distrust is shared across the political spectrum. … From April 6, 2023 to June 26, 2023, Americans agreeing that ‘the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency’ increased from 4.5% to 7% … Public support for the use of force to coerce members of the US Congress grew from 9 percent in January 2023 to 17 percent as of June 26, 2023, effectively doubling.” |
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What conditions make political violence more likely? At Foreign Affairs, an interview with Johns Hopkins political scientist Robert Lieberman—who cowrote a Foreign Affairs essay on political violence in 2020 with fellow political scientist Suzanne Mettler—sheds some light.
“There are four features that help cause democratic crises,” Lieberman tells senior editor Daniel Block, examining democratic crises generally but not violence specifically. “The first is political polarization, the second is conflict over who belongs in the political community, the third is high and growing economic inequality, and the fourth is excessive executive power. At least one of these forces has been present at every moment of democratic turmoil in U.S. history.”
Of the Trump shooting, Lieberman notes that it “happened at a moment when polarization is so intense that it is quite worrisome, because when polarization becomes very extreme, it is no longer a game between electoral antagonists. It instead becomes something like mortal combat, where people believe if the other side wins, it’s a mortal threat to their values and to the very existence of the country as they understand it. And it’s not that far a leap from that kind of polarized politics to serious violence.” |
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Conspiracy Theories Follow |
It’s difficult enough to understand this moment, but making matters worse, misinformation and conspiracy theories quickly followed the shooting, The Economist writes.
“Some on the left described [the assassination attempt] as a false-flag operation staged to make Mr Trump look invincible and bolster his election prospects,” the magazine writes. “Within minutes of the shooting, media mogul Elon Musk endorsed Mr Trump and later suggested to his 190m followers that the failure of the Secret Service to stop the shooter may have been ‘deliberate’. … Conspiracy theories about a shocking institutional failure often take hold when an alternative explanation—incompetence—is unsatisfying.” |
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The History of Violence in American Politics |
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What JD Vance Could Mean for US Foreign Policy |
Before being selected as Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) was best known as a fierce Trump critic—and author of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”—turned loyal Trump ally. He “once called Donald Trump ‘America’s Hitler,’ likening him to ‘cultural heroin,’” notes Bloomberg columnist Patricia Lopez. Since then, he has morphed into what Lopez calls a MAGA-base-rallying pick for Trump.
In Politico Magazine in March, Ian Ward asked if Vance signified something more “radical” than MAGA, writing: “Vance has emerged as the standard-bearer of the ‘New Right,’ a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump—including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles—in an even more radical direction.”
When it comes to foreign policy, Vance has become something of a champion of Trump’s “America first” principles. In a Financial Times op-ed in February, Vance articulated GOP opposition to extending help to Ukraine, writing: “[T]he time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet. That doesn’t mean it has to stand alone, but it must not continue to use America as a crutch.” (Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vance had said he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.”) At Foreign Policy, Jack Detsch wrote in 2021 that Vance was among a new vanguard of GOP China hawks.
To others, Vance is an ambitious ideological shapeshifter. The former George W. Bush speechwriter and The Atlantic staff writer David Frum writes that Vance penned op-eds for Frum’s former website, FrumForum (which operated from 2009 to 2012), as Frum sought to sketch a center-right future for the GOP. Since then, Frum writes, Vance has turned 180 degrees from “anti-populist conservative” to an “angry-white-male persona,” tailored to different audiences that could allow his career to rise. |
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For Russia, Could the Middle East Become a Mess? |
What does Russia want in the Middle East, exactly? In a Foreign Affairs essay, Hanna Notte nods to Russia’s military bases in Syria but answers more directly what Russia doesn’t want in the region: a wider war.
Moscow certainly enjoys seeing its adversaries, most notably the US, drawn into diplomatic and military quagmires. But amid ongoing danger that Israel and Hezbollah could begin a new Middle East war, one that could easily draw in Hezbollah’s patron Iran, Notte writes that “a wider war in the region would carry major risks for Moscow. If Israel began to fight Hezbollah or Iran, the Kremlin would have to contend with three dangerous outcomes: the entanglement of its ally Syria, a weakening of Iran’s capacity to supply Russia with weapons, and a complication of its relations with the Gulf Arab states and Iran.”
Notte continues: “[A]s long as it is fighting Ukraine, Russia will want to ensure that Tehran can help replenish its [weapons] stocks while also partnering with Moscow in developing new kinds of drones.” Moscow would rather reap those benefits than expend its own weapons stockpile helping Iran in a Middle East conflict, Notte points out. “If the Middle East explodes, it will hurt Russia’s enemies—but it will hurt Russia, too.” |
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