It comes just three days after a gunman assassinated former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and wounding two others. But surprisingly, the chattering class quickly moved on to other things.
As of Tuesday morning, the assassination attempt was just one of many reports, even in conservative media outlets. It was quickly replaced by Trump’s vice presidential pick, the opening of the Republican National Convention, another poor interview performance by Joe Biden, and good morning joe The MSNBC drama is over.
Even in this attention-starved media ecosystem, one would think that a near-assassination incident of a former president and current presidential candidate that killed another would be more than a three- or four-day story.
A major factor keeping everyone moving forward is the lack of any apparent motive by gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks to assassinate Trump. The 20-year-old is a registered Republican who has donated small amounts of money to progressive candidates. We have yet to discover a manifesto or series of social media posts that might provide some clues as to why he committed the crime.
That makes it difficult for conservative media outlets to sustain criticism that Democrats are partially (or fully) responsible for Crooks’ crimes, as they call Trump a threat to democracy, the next Adolf Hitler, and more.
(It doesn’t help that some on the right blame Democratic rhetoric for the shootings, and they have made equally inflammatory remarks about Biden.)
The facts of the shooting also don’t provide much fodder for improbable conspiracy theories that it was a false flag attempt or a bona fide deep state conspiracy.
Instead, we get the unsatisfactory explanation that Crooks is another loner motivated to commit violent acts by nihilism rather than some form of overt political fanaticism. There’s only so much we can say about seemingly random acts of violence.
However, we quickly moved beyond the randomness of Trump’s near-catastrophic assassination, and we faced danger. Randomness is increasingly a defining feature of American politics.
The inevitable takeaway from the last eight years of the Trump era is that clear narratives about the decline of the political system, structural economic changes, ideological realignment of voters, etc., explain less and less about the political outcomes we actually see.
Big, concise stories leave fewer and fewer traces of how people vote, which politicians are elected, and what policies they enact.
Our politics is too weird, too confusing, too mediated, too haphazard. What fills the void is the void itself.
Ross Douthat argued New York Times Today, wherever Trump goes, a maelstrom of randomness and serendipity follows him, nearly knocking him out and narrowly saving his life, which explains his current dominance of the political scene.
“This is a man who has endured self-humiliation and numerous political near-death experiences, who is ready for the greatest comeback in American political history, who has just turned an assassination attempt into a bloody Renaissance painting of resistance… You Either consider him a defining figure in American political history.
Similar randomness occurs in the Democratic camp.
Democrats have been trying, without success, to figure out what a durable, winning liberal coalition would look like in an era when coherent political coalitions stubbornly refuse to gel.
Without a “chaos candidate” of their own, they settled on eventual lead candidate Joe Biden, who was experienced enough to reliably provide some stability while still being malleable enough to latch on to anything. Popular trends that may win their share of wins.
They are betting all their chips on the performance of the 81-year-old, who is already unpopular and is experiencing clear, severe cognitive decline at the most perfect moment, lowering the party’s chances of retaining the White House. Chance.
It seems increasingly likely, then, that this election will depend as much on a slight shift in Trump and some malfunctioning neurons in Biden as on his governing record or second-term plans.
Not that nothing matters about the outcome of the chaotic 2024 election. Instead, the results should be less important.
If the next president is not the one who wins arguments, forges stubborn coalitions, or forges a new governing consensus, it stands to reason that the next president should have far less control over government and individuals.
If, as Douthat muses, “there is no obvious next political stage in the development of civilization,” then perhaps the next president should give up trying to impose any next stage of civilization.
To be sure, chaotic, random politics does not equal liberalism, or even growing support for liberal ideas. The opposite seems to be true.
But it does mean that people are quick to reject and resent the next government’s efforts to govern the country and control their lives, whether that attempt at control comes from the red team or the blue team.
