Photo by Jay Rembert
While much remains unknown about the motives of the would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, one thing is certain. The man who attempted to kill Donald Trump believed his bullet would change the course of history for the better.
Such thinking is common and is promoted in most school books that exhort young people to be better citizens by featuring the stories of national heroes who have changed the world. The killer’s belief that murdering a political leader could improve the nation was the logical converse of this mistaken principle.
The ‘Great Man’ Theory of history is as old as the writing of history itself. All the old epics, legends, sagas, and testaments revolve around heroes whose actions mark great shifts in human affairs, the rise and fall of nations, empires, and epochs. Such stories consoled our ancestors by drawing a dangerous and unknowable natural world into the compass of our own language. Even when our science and technology unlocked many of the world’s secrets, we still needed to compose these truths into stories to make sense of them. No less than our ancient ancestors, we apprehend our reality through the stories we tell ourselves and all of these continue to depend on the shining image of the hero.
Our greatest mistake in trying to understand how the world works and our place in it is to confuse these fables for reality, for in doing so we are led to believe, as the Butler assassin did, that one bullet can fix a broken country. A common prompt for a beginning ethics class is, “if you had the opportunity to smother Hitler in his cradle, would you have done so?” Most answers attempt to balance one revolting murder against the millions of Hitler’s victims. But such calculations shift when Hitler is not viewed as a person but as the symbol of a deeper social and cultural disease. How many thousands of vicious, embittered, amoral, Great War veterans had to be suffocated to prevent the rise of mid-twentieth century German expansionism?
Political assassins have always believed that the figure they were slaying stood in the portal between one bleak future and a brighter one. Roman Senators thought this way as they jockeyed for space on Caesar’s back. Booth shouted “sic sempre tyrannus” after shooting Lincoln. Leon Czolgosz’s last words were that he killed President McKinley “because he was the enemy of the good people—the working people.” Caesar’s murder did not ensure the future of the Roman Republic, Lincoln’s death did not derail emancipation, and McKinley’s assassination did nothing for working people.
Our stubborn veneration of heroes as the makers of history is sustained not only because it is the easiest story to tell, not only because it justifies a social system built on a few individuals owning and commanding an ever increasing proportion of society’s wealth, but because it flattens a chaotic world into a seemingly understandable and predictable reality. The songs of ancient heroes told around fires at night offered reassurance that the world had a beginning, a character, and a destiny and was not just a tangle of chaos. This function has passed into the hands of historians who are responsible for making the past seem orderly and pundits who do the same for the future.
How would one write a history without imposing a presumption of order, a human-made conception of order, upon what is ultimately a chaotic succession of human interactions? Do we have enough verbs to capture all the nuances of people’s behaviors? Do we have enough adjectives to describe their states of mind as they act?
Trump is not a hero or an anti-hero. He is not even there as much as he is a convenient story we tell ourselves to make sense of a wildly changing world. Even had Trump not descended his golden escalator to the presidency, there would still be a MAGA movement because that upwelling of disaffected white anger was generations old by that time. Its roots stretch back into the nineteenth century, with the mass rejection of equality by so-called Populists, the white anomie of civil rights, and the intensification of economic competition both domestically and internationally. By the twenty-first century the acceleration of the rate of social change burst all bounds and great numbers of people sought the assurance of heroic stories, the knowable.
Trump is not a threat to democracy as much as he is a symbol of its deepening absence. American democracy has been a system that relied on masses of citizens accepting without reflection their own disempowerment. Patriotism, media monopolization, and real economic benefits fogged and anesthetized understanding of the creeping authoritarianism building up beneath the busy-body Progressive reformers, the New Deal technocrats, and the Cold War spooks. Neoliberal policies combined with the collapse of monopolistic control of communications in the twenty-first century has disrupted the mechanisms of knowledge and reassurance. Out of its rubble has arisen both MAGA and the never-Trumpers, the one pretending that the answer to authoritarianism is more authoritarianism, and the other pretending that there is something called democracy to defend. Trump now serves to perpetuate the myth of democracy by establishing its existence in threatening it.
MAGA is a cultural movement as much as a political movement. Like every cultural movement, it builds by offering the anxious, the disaffected, and the alienated a place where they can find community, validation, and belonging. Like all successful formations of identity it promises a coherent understanding of oneself, a framework within which to make sense of one’s place in a chaotic world. (The same can equally be said of those fighting MAGA who are increasingly forging a common identity around the shining ideal of “democracy”, an idea just vague enough to rally without commitment to any fundamental change.) These are not things that a bullet can destroy.
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