The attempted assassination of a contender for the highest political office in the United States has shaken the world, with swift condemnation coming from leaders across the globe, as might be expected—but what is far more worrying is the response of too many people on the other side of the political divide in the US, essentially suggesting ‘if at first you don’t succeed.’
Strangely, the attempt on presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, came from a young registered Republican who was coming up to his first opportunity to vote in a national election. He chose instead to attempt to change the channel on his party’s choice of leader by using a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle. Et tu Brute?
The American predilection of choosing movie stars, business moguls, and lately a reality television star and convicted fraudster for elevation to their highest political office is bemusing to the rest of the world but speaks volumes for the state of American politics. Politics for many American voters has become more of a gameshow than a serious decision that can shake the world to its very foundations.
For far too much of the world, Mr. Trump is the quintessential embodiment of the Ugly American.
In narrowly missing personal extinction, Mr. Trump must have learned first-hand how the real world can go wildly off script.
There are those who would suggest that the Donald is the author of his own misfortune, if not his fortune, through his over-the-top rhetoric and the stoking of the divisions within the body politic of the world’s most powerful nation. This is a point of view we cannot and must not accept. Words matter, but at the end of the day, they remain only words. In a democracy it is words and their concrete expression through ballots, not bullets, that should decide the day.
We must not, and dare not, encourage that avenue of political expression lest it flourish and blossom into complete anarchy. A swift glance around the world will provide all of the evidence a sane person would deem necessary to support that position. Political assassination is the first hallmark of a failed state.
We have come to believe in the “too big to fail” concept despite the ready evidence of the collapse of empires such as the former Soviet Union and the end of the British hegemony over all of the world’s “pink bits.” At this moment, the political turmoil in the United States has that empire teetering on the brink of tearing itself apart. For the sake of us all, Americans need to pull back from the abyss and dial things down.
At the crux of the current challenges facing the future of American politics lie the media—or more accurately the media’s ongoing complicity in the loss of its own credibility. Americans, and to too great an extent, our own citizens, have lost faith in the media to bring them something reasonably approximating the truth, choosing instead to play to the lowest common denominator on each side of the divide, stoking the furnace of political discourse with misinformation in search of the almighty online clicks and the advertising dollars they bring with them. In the so-called information age, partisan pandering pays.
Together, we as the electorate, must stand against these trends aimed at tearing and dividing us apart to demand more and better from our politicians, our media and ourselves. The media plays an important role in this paradigm—unfortunately, so far we have failed to make the grade. In this we must not give up. That, not violence, is where we must endeavour to try again, and again, and again, because, for all our sakes, we must succeed.
