Not a normal election

This afternoon, Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and someone took a shot at him. The shot apparently nicked his ear, which means it narrowly avoided doing much worse damage. Trump stood up again to gesture to the crowd before the Secret Service dragged him to safety.

People are saying, "That's it—he's won the election." Maybe, but the election is nearly four months from now. That's a long time in politics.

Other people—mostly Trump's political opponents—are saying loudly that "Political violence has no place in America." Clearly these are people who don't understand America very well. I've discussed this point before: for example, here and here, and to a lesser extent here and even here. Sorry, but in some ways we are all about political violence, even as we repeat the motto that "Ballots are better than bullets."

I don't know what to say about this, though, nor about the election in general. What are we going to be facing, in the next few months? Will this be an election like 1968, scarred by violence and uncertainty but ultimately settling into a recognizable victory for one side? Or will it be more like 1860? For example, will Joe Biden's continuing (and ever more visible) deterioration trigger a split in the Democratic Party, so that we end up with the vote split four ways (Biden, Trump, Kennedy, and … oh, let's say Newsom)? Will we have a contingent election that has to be resolved by the House of Representatives? The last one of those (so far) was in 1837, so that would be interesting if it happened!

At some level, I agree with a number of pundits who have argued that this attempt is the logical result of the anti-Trump propaganda we have been hearing steadily ever since 2015. After all, if you really believed that Trump were the next Hitler, wouldn't you feel morally obligated to take him out of the race by any means necessary, even if that included violence? 

It's like the argument about whether the Democrats cheated in the 2020 vote. To be clear, I have no way of knowing whether they did, and we have so many voting precincts (using so many different systems to tally results) that a systematic audit is probably impossible. On the other hand, if you really believed that Trump were the next Hitler, wouldn't you feel morally obligated to prevent him from winning by any means necessary, even if that included electoral fraud? Surely if fraud didn't happen, its absence would be as much an indictment of the weakness of the Democratic Party as a testimony to the strength of our democratic institutions. 

Even more basically, though, I cannot tell what this election is really about. What are the issues? Normally if people are willing to kill each other over a political controversy, I assume that the controversy is an existential one, a matter of life and death. In 1860, slavery was an existential issue: for abolitionists in the North, slavery was a moral evil on which compromise was impossible; for planters in the South, the abolition of slavery would have meant their utter destitution. So yes, it was a life-or-death issue.

But today? What are the big issues today? Are they really life-or-death?

I just googled that question and got this article from ABC which lists seven main issues:

• Abortion: Yes, the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization back in 2022 was profoundly consequential. But it was one-and-done. Any attempt to implement national legislation about abortion today—which means, in the wake of Dobbs, to take it out of the hands of 50 individual states—will have to pass Congress. And if Congress has been incapable of passing national legislation about abortion in the last fifty years, don't expect them to turn on a dime and do something now—in either direction. This issue is going nowhere.
• Immigration: Both parties want to improve how the border is managed. The differences are only a degree. It's hard to see how this is an existential issue.
• Health care and prescription drugs: Both parties want health care to be magically cheaper. I'm not aware that either party has a clear idea how to make this happen. This is a great source of ammunition for arguing that The Other Guys are awful, but I don't expect either party to improve anything much. 
• Taxes: Again, each party has talking points to prove that The Other Guys are evil incarnate. Will either side's tax policies solve the nation's looming financial crisis? (See here and here.) I wish!
• Judges and the Supreme Court: How is the Supreme Court an issue? President Trump appointed three justices, but again that action is one-and-done. The two oldest justices at this point are conservatives (Thomas and Alito). In the first place, they seem to be healthy; in the second place, if they die while Trump is back in office he will simply replace them with other conservatives. This will mean no net change. So how is it an existential issue?
• Trade: OK, this one is a meaningful difference. Trump wants to slap a stiff tariff on certain imported goods; Biden points out—correctly—that this will make those good more expensive for everyone. But of course the point is to encourage American companies to start manufacturing these goods again, by raising the price. In other words, the point is to bring back American manufacturing jobs. Is that worth it? Economists have debated this point since the days of David Ricardo, so there are arguments on both sides. I don't know who is right. But America has survived through years of high tariffs before, and I assume we can do it again.
• Foreign policy: Now this is an existential issue! President Biden supports further aid to Ukraine, while President Trump does not. Further aid to Ukraine means (sooner or later) war between the United States and Russia—for convenience, we can abbreviate this as "World War III," and we can assume that it will involve nuclear weapons. A nuclear WWIII means the end of the United States as a functioning polity, and poses a nontrivial risk to the continuation of human life on earth. (I discuss this point at some length here, here, and here.) Therefore, anyone who values human life and wants to see the United States survive intact should long for the rapid departure of Mr. Biden and all his administration from the halls of power. (I do not necessarily endorse Mr. Trump as his replacement; but of the three major candidates today, Biden is without question the most dangerous on this topic.)  There is no other way to parse the situation. But that can't explain today's shooting, because Biden wasn't the target.   

Really? That's it? Those seven are the best we've got?

In other words, there are no issues as profound as slavery. If the two parties have gotten to the point of wanting each other dead, it's not for substantive reasons but just because we as a people have gone crazy.

Just bloody wonderful.

Stay safe out there.