Lots of Blame to Go Around

The editors of the Washington Post have a lot to say today. In the first editorial I wanted to note is this one in which they observe that there’s a lot of blame to go around for the present ambient temperature of our political discourse:

In short, this brush with individual mortality and national calamity is an unsought, but golden, opportunity for Mr. Trump to help cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction. It offers him a chance to show that there is a more constructive path.

This responsibility is not Mr. Trump’s alone. Every participant in our civic life needs to conduct some soul-searching. The motives of the gunman in Butler, Pa., remain unknown as we write. That they were so plausibly political, though, should prompt deeper reconsideration. Speech and conduct once considered unthinkably uncivil have grown routine: We live in a country where protesters harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes, shouting obscenities. Universities have become battlegrounds. And outright physical violence has become a bipartisan hazard — as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and the husband of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can attest. Ordinary citizens get caught in the mayhem — or, in the case of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, who lost his life protecting his family from bullets Saturday, extraordinary ones.

In a statement of her own, former first lady Melania Trump appealed to our common humanity. “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion,” she wrote. Ms. Trump is correct that there’s too much vilification and dehumanization in politics, though it must be acknowledged that her husband is responsible for referring to fellow citizens as “traitors” who “hate America.”

Democrats, too, need to recalibrate their rhetoric. “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s eye,” Mr. Biden said last week in remarks to a group of campaign donors. He struck an appropriate tone on Sunday: “Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is more important than that right now,” he wrote on X.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and in contrast to the many bipartisan calls for calm and unity, threat-exaggeraters on the right included, lamentably, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), reportedly under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, who quickly posted on X that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the assassination attempt. Vivek Ramaswamy, a surrogate for Mr. Trump, said the shooting “wasn’t totally a shock”: “First they sued him. Then they prosecuted him. Then they tried to take him off the ballot.”

Beware of anyone who constructs such sentences around the word “they.”

Gerard Baker strikes a similar note in his Wall Street Journal column:

Avoid the idea that, even if they didn’t actually pull the trigger, Democrats are somehow to blame because of their rhetoric.

It’s true that the language about Mr. Trump and the Republicans is often absurdly overblown: the recent ululations about Project 2025 are a case in point. But it must be within the bounds of acceptable political discourse to claim that Mr. Trump represents a threat to democracy, not least because some of his behavior and rhetoric support the claim. So is it acceptable for Mr. Trump and Republicans to say that President Biden and the Democrats are destroying America without it being interpreted as a signal to anyone with a rifle to take out the Democratic candidate.

If there is room for emotional restraint in the aftermath of this horror, there is also reason to hope for a small movement toward de-escalating the mutual loathing to which so many Americans have fallen prey.

We’ve had a taste of where this leads—the near-assassination of a presidential candidate and the anarchy that might have ensued—as well as the actual murder of a man, a rally attendee who merely wanted to be a political participant.

I completely agree that “both sides do it”. They do it because it works. But the Democrats have a much larger megaphone than the Republicans. The Democratic-leaning media, e.g. ABC, NBC, CBS, the Associated Press, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., have a much greater reach than the more-or-less centrist media, pretty much limited to Reuters, the Wall Street Journal (news),and a handful of others, or the Republican-leaning media, e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal opinion section. Additionally, although the “bully pulpit” is impeded because Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office, it’s not non-existent. Consequently, IMO they have a greater responsibility.

Will they accept it? For a while, I think.