Institutional trust may be approaching rock bottom, but Americans don’t need to be coached into reverence for America’s civic conventions.
Institutional trust may be approaching rock bottom, but Americans don’t need to be coached into reverence for America’s civic conventions.
T he 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks occasioned an outpouring of pessimism about the country’s future from certain quarters.
“The United States is a far less confident and optimistic nation now than it was in September 2001,” said historian Michael Allen. Its “political class is more confrontational and enjoys less trust in a nation that has grown more divided,” he continued. “The net effect is to leave Americans less capable of reaching consensus on any problem we face.” A cynical but broadly shared outlook among elite opinionmakers from the time posits that, riven by partisan politics and the distorting effects of social media, Americans would not display the shared resolve to meet a terroristic threat today. As comedian Jon Stewart mourned, “all that unity is gone.”
This uncharitable outlook toward the American people proved mercifully unfounded in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump — a terroristic event on U.S. soil which, if it had succeeded, could easily have produced a collective psychological reaction akin to the reaction to 9/11. Yes, there were plenty of irresponsible actors on social media, in the press, and in the political class who engaged in conspiracy theorizing or blamed the victim. But the vast majority of Americans did not. The MAGA Right did not take to the streets set on vengeance. The anti-Trump Left has resolved to maintain a “family friendly” atmosphere at its events. A critical mass of the voting public has responded more with sorrow than anger.
Both the Biden and Trump campaigns have also taken the opportunity to sober up. The former president’s campaign stipulated in a memo to its staff that “we will not tolerate dangerous rhetoric on social media” in the wake of the attack. Trump and his surrogates have signaled the former president’s intention to tone down the rhetoric in the forthcoming speeches at this week’s Republican convention, which will be reimagined as an effort to “unite America.” Joe Biden is similarly focused on “unity,” which he called “the most elusive goal of all” but an imperative, nonetheless. “We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are,” he said.
Neither candidate can credibly claim to be capable of unifying the country. The good news is that it isn’t either candidate’s job to unify the country. They are promoting competing visions for America’s future, and their goal is to convince the most voters of the superiority of their vision. Campaigns are not built for unity. Indeed, they’re designed to highlight the distinctions between candidates and compel voters to evaluate them. To the degree that unity is a virtue, it is not unity around a candidate, campaign, or particular set of policy preferences; it is unity around the system itself. That’s why the public’s response to the trauma it experienced on Saturday has so far been heartening.
Americans are united around the idea that the rules of engagement should be fixed and universal, and that political violence is a violation of that covenant. Yes, the surveys have increasingly shown that a growing number of Americans are comfortable with such violence, but that abstraction become much more concrete on Saturday. What we witnessed in the aftermath of the attack on Trump was not an overwhelming torrent of Americans making excuses for the shooter, insisting that Trump brought the attack upon himself, or calling for retaliatory violence against his opponents. We saw widespread horror at what Attorney General Merick Garland rightly called an “attack on democracy.” The rules of the game had been broken, and the public’s response to that infringement was one of intense self-reflection and revulsion.
Institutional trust may be approaching rock bottom, but Americans don’t need to be coached into reverence for America’s civic conventions. They certainly don’t need their hand held by politicians to arrive at the conclusion that the attempted murder of a presidential candidate represents a grotesque violation of the national covenant. The speed with which both campaigns rushed to introduce unity as a campaign theme tells us something about the receptivity of American audiences to it.
One or both campaigns could still squander the promise of this sobering moment. Doanld Trump’s suddenly subdued and conciliatory demeanor could disappear as quickly as it appeared. Joe Biden and his faction could forget the pledges they are making to themselves and reengage in the effort to brand the former president a unique threat to the stability of the republic whose presence on the American political stage demands extraordinary remedy. Resolve could fall away in favor of recriminations as copycats attempt to follow the shooter’s lead.
So far, however, the most visible figures in American politics and media (with some notable exceptions) have behaved admirably. Rather than leading the American people into a place of civic decency, they’ve followed the American people there.