History Warns About the Dangers of Hyperpolarization and Paranoia

The shocking attempt on Donald Trump’s life this weekend has prompted comparisons to similar attacks on past U.S. presidents. Trump’s defiant, bloodstained fist pump is perhaps closest in visual form to the moment in 1912 that Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet in the chest yet still finished his stump speech. Others have pointed to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; indeed, it seems likely that the instantly iconic photo of Trump will live alongside the famous picture of Jackie Kennedy on the back of the presidential limousine in our collective cultural memory.

Yet as a historian of 20th century American politics, I think that the nearest historical corollary to our current moment actually happened seven months prior to JFK’s death in Dealey Plaza. In April 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald—yes, that Oswald—aimed his mail-order rifle through the kitchen window of another presidential candidate, only to have the bullet ricochet off the window frame and slightly wound the intended victim. That both Trump and Oswald’s victim were slightly wounded by missed rifle shots is only the first, and most superficial, parallel.

It is the political environment that served as a backdrop to that shooting in the spring of 1963 which bears a surprisingly close resemblance to today. Although these two shootings are separated by six decades, the hyperpolarization and paranoid rhetoric that propelled them both will only increase the risk of ongoing, targeted political violence in the near future.

Oswald’s target on that April night was former Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a conservative independent candidate considering a run for president. Just two years earlier, Walker—a decorated Korean War ranger—had been cashiered for promoting right-wing training materials that alleged communists had infiltrated the government and journalism. Walker blamed President Kennedy and decided a political career would be the best revenge; he sought to build a coalition out of Southern segregationists and Christian right activists like the Rev. Billy James Hargis, an Oklahoma preacher with millions of radio listeners.

Walker’s entry into politics fed into a wave of paranoia that was sweeping left-wing discourse. While it is little remembered today, there were widespread fears that a right-wing military coup might overthrow American democracy. Walker was the second in a trio of U.S. generals—Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay were the others—who clashed with three consecutive Democratic presidents and then attempted to run for the White House themselves.

Democratic politicians and liberal pundits were not generally afraid that these generals might actually win a presidential election, but they were worried that the generals’ disaffection might be shared by active officers and could lead to an attempt to overthrow the federal government by military coup. After all, this had happened in France in 1958 with Charles DeGaulle ending the Fourth Republic; might the First Republic of the United States of America be the next to fall?

Fears of an anti-communist coup were so commonplace that they became a recurrent theme in blockbuster movies, including Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and Seven Days in May. Indeed, the Kennedy administration gave director John Frankheimer special permission to film Seven Days in May—whose villain was modeled after Edwin Walker—in the White House because, as a movie reviewer later put it, the movie was “simply dramatizing the plausibility of a military takeover in this country.”

In a speech at the Hollywood Palladium in November 1961, Kennedy himself had insinuated that Walker was a “man on horseback,” a classical reference to the public desire for an authoritarian ruler to instill law and order. Kennedy went even further, accusing these far-right figures of engaging in a paranoid hunt for “treason in our churches, in our highest court, [and] in our treatment of water.” (The last was a reference to anti-fluoridation activism, which was then a right-wing coded site of conspiracism.)

A year and a half later, Lee Harvey Oswald took those warnings seriously and shot at Walker. When Oswald’s wife questioned his right to kill the general, he responded, “Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time?” And while he failed with Walker in April 1963, in November he successfully killed President Kennedy in retaliation for his attempted overthrow of Communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. To a radicalized young communist like Oswald, the political differences between Walker and Kennedy were too slight to matter.

The heightened rhetoric and paranoid politics of the early 1960s had created a toxic stew that broke down belief in basic political institutions and the power of democratic dissent. A wave of assassinations followed, starting with the attempt on Walker and running through the deaths of two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and the assassination attempt on George Wallace.

Today, we face a surprisingly similar situation. Trump is not a military man like Edwin Walker, but he is backed by many who are, including ex-Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and other officers cashiered for their accusations of communist infiltration of government and the media. And while Walker allied with the radio preacher Billy James Hargis for a series of rallies in America’s heartland, Trump has the backing of a wide variety of Christian nationalists and faith-based organizations like Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA Faith. The rhetoric of white backlash and vehement anger over public health measures is a through line as well.

But it is Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results that have most fueled widespread fears that he represents an existential threat to American democracy. Trump’s administrative incompetence and institutional safeguards caused the last attempt to fail, but, as the warning goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. In the future, Trump or an imitator might successfully spark a constitutional crisis over seating state delegates or by invoking the Insurrection Act to repress political opponents.

That, at least, is the fear of many Democrats, including the 1 in 5 likely voters who believe “political extremism or threats to democracy” are the most important issue facing the country this election. Both Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have leaned into the heightened rhetoric, grounding the president’s faltering reelection campaign in the proposition that Trump represents an “existential threat to democracy.” The belief is so firmly rooted that even Democrats who believe that Donald Trump would merely be a bad president—rather than an existential risk—have been blasted on social media by progressives calling them “actual, legitimate villains” who should “rot in hell.”

Likewise, it has become commonplace for anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats to compare Trump to Adolf Hitler and other dictators. “Trump Hitler” was even the top trending term on Twitter by Sunday afternoon with more than 300,000 posts. Such rhetoric may be meant to be taken seriously, not literally, and we don’t yet know the shooter’s motivation or much about his political leanings; but would it be surprising if an unstable young person took it both seriously and literally, asking themselves, “What would they say if somebody got rid of Hitler / Trump at the right time?”

This is not a defense of Donald Trump. I myself believe he is one of the worst presidents in U.S. history and that his attempt to overturn the 2020 election is permanently disqualifying. And his own rhetoric, and that of his supporters, is routinely horrid, tuned to incite peak anxiety in his political opponents; I sometimes wonder if it is still possible for a Republican to win office without running an ad featuring them blasting away with a large gun. Regardless of party, partisanship in a hyperpolarized political environment incentivizes extreme rhetoric and paranoid reasoning. People vote more frequently out of fear than out of love, and we are an especially fearful people.

We do not know the particular motivations of Trump’s shooter at this moment, but it can be a red herring to hunt for a clear and definitive ideological motive. Consider the example of Oswald, whose shootings of a conservative (Walker) and a liberal (Kennedy) were more grounded in a narcissistic determination to show his self-importance than in pragmatically advancing his radical politics.

Oswald was 23 when he shot Walker; Trump’s shooter was 20. Periods of heightened rhetoric and political paranoia can give such alienated young people a focal point for expressing their generalized anger and ennui. While only a few will resort to acts of political violence, it takes only one with the slightest bit more luck than was on display Saturday to further rupture public faith in the stability of American democracy.

I am afraid there is one further cautionary note to add. The failed assassination attempt on Edwin Walker was a beginning, not an end. It was not regarded as such at the time since nobody knew it was Oswald until after he shot Kennedy. Nor did the problem end with JFK’s death. It is for good reason that historian Philip Jenkins titled his history of the long 1970s the Decade of Nightmares, a period of widespread political instability and targeted violence, from dozens of Puerto Rican nationalist bombings to hundreds of airplane hijackings.

We ought to be worried that the attack on Donald Trump could be a beginning, not an end. The danger of a copycat attack on Trump or a retaliatory attack on Joe Biden cannot be ignored. Bear in mind Trump’s first words after the attempt on his life, pumped fist in the air: “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Is it so hard to imagine a young, unstable person taking those words not just seriously but literally, perhaps taking a shot at Joe Biden?

This kind of rhetoric raises the odds of future political violence. Actually fixing the toxic miasma of American politics would require major structural reforms, but until we are ready to have that conversation, our best hope of avoiding another decade of nightmares is to lower the national temperature. That does not mean soft-pedaling critiques of our political classes, but it does mean thinking carefully about whether our words contribute to substantive debate or merely amplify public outrage and paranoia.

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