The Danger of Treating Politics Like War

“We’re going to defeat Crooked Joe Biden,” Donald Trump promised his rally crowd in Butler, Pa., “and we’re going to take back our country. We’re going to take it back. Our country, our country has been stolen from us. One of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over the last four years!” Then as Trump railed against immigration, a shooter perched on a nearby rooftop sprayed bullets at the rally crowd, wounding Trump’s ear, killing one crowd member, and sending two more people to the hospital in critical condition.

Astoundingly, as Trump left the stage surrounded by Secret Service, he pumped his fist and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” The crowd then chanted “U-S-A!”

America is often a violent nation. Our history is filled with lynchings, assassinations, and mass shootings—we are violent in both public and private spaces. But our current political moment is characterized by violence masquerading as politics. Since the 1990s the dominant frame for understanding American politics is “politics is war and the enemy cheats.” Our political news is dominated by appeals of outrage, accusations of corruption and hypocrisy, and charges of conspiracy. All of that violent rhetoric threatens the fragile trust upon which democracy and political stability thrive.

Read More: How the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Fits Into America's Violent History

Politics is for solving problems through consensus, cooperation, and compromise, but our public sphere is broken. Violence is always anti-democratic because it’s the use of force instead of persuasion.

To call politics war cheapens the sacrifices made by actual soldiers and turns our political opponents from good people (who have good reasons for wanting different policies) to enemies (who have no redeeming qualities and must be destroyed).

Unfortunately invoking violence has a great deal of rhetorical power, which is why so much of our political discourse is saturated with the language of brutality. Throughout American history, and especially over the past 10 years, political leaders have found that ad hominem attacks are useful for delegitimizing and creating hate-objects out of others, that threats of force and intimidation are useful for silencing opponents, that violent metaphors attract attention, and that fear motivates voters.

But it’s not just figures such as Trump who have turned our public sphere into a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” Research in media studies, psychology, sociology, and other fields has established that media (print, radio, television, cable, podcasts, etc.) overrepresent crime news and other kinds of crime content. Our social media apps are designed to optimize for engagement, which means that highly emotive “moralized content” and “fake news” circulate more frequently than good old boring truth. Consuming all of that crime content leads to people cultivating what researchers call a “mean world syndrome,” in which they overestimate how likely they are to be victims of crime.

Read More: A Stark Look at the Recent History of Political Violence in America

While we have a long history of violence, the United States is actually a pretty safe place to be. According to FBI statistics, violent crime in the U.S. had been steadily declining since its peak in 1991 and it’s still near record lows. And yet “mean world syndrome” may help explain why, according to Gallup, a record 95% of Republicans “think there is more national crime” today. Everybody—but especially conservative news consumers—think they live in a mean world full of enemies. People are scared by the media and politics information they consume, and they’ve bought lots of guns.

Trump has built his political persona with a hero narrative that claims that he has risked everything to save the nation. As I explained in my book Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, Trump ran in 2016 by telling the nation a story of sin and redemption—he claimed that because he was once “the ultimate insider,” he knew how the system was rigged and he was the only one qualified to fix it. His 2024 campaign has been built around the themes of persecution and revenge—he claims in a frequently used meme that “they’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way” and has vowed to seek “retribution” against his political enemies.

It may make good political sense to campaign on those kinds of violent themes, but it doesn’t help the cause of democracy in America. It certainly doesn’t help us to solve political problems to think of our opponents as enemies who are out to get us. Instead it helps to cultivate outrage, erode trust and fellow feeling, and increase the potential for actual violence. 

“We are not enemies, but friends,” Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Though politicians and the media may tell us differently, politics is not war, war is war.