You would think that the attempted assassination of a president would be a moment in which Americans could briefly set aside their differences and denounce political violence with one voice. But there was no such comity to be had after a gunman nearly ended the life of Donald Trump and killed one of his supporters, a husband and father of two, during a rally in Pennsylvania.   

Social media was instead alight with laments that the shooter’s bullet strayed from its intended mark. In one characteristic post, a Home Depot employee named Darcy Waldron Pinckney exclaimed on Facebook: “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” Unfortunately for Darcy, she attracted the attention of the 3.2 million-follower-strong Libs of TikTok Twitter account, which highlighted that remark in the hopes of getting her fired. It worked. The company confirmed Darcy’s termination two days later.  

A debate over free speech erupted online after Darcy’s firing. Many wondered whether it is ever appropriate for the right, as it vociferously defends free speech, to use “cancel culture,” as it did in the case of Darcy Waldron. Waldron, it should be remembered, was simply saying aloud what most Democrats think.

Indeed, a third of Democratic voters surveyed by one pollster said they agreed with the statement: “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.” Thus, to ask the question of whether turnabout is fair play is to miss the forest for the trees. The reality is that the left created the conditions that made this sort of enmity an eventuality. The pendulum they created is now careening back toward them.  

The question is not so much whether this should be happening as it is, “What did people think would happen?”

Recall that in the last several years, many on the right were canceled for much lighter offenses than publicly expressing disappointment that a former and perhaps future president’s head did not explode on live television. To take just a few examples:

In 2020, a 55-year-old Virginia man was fired from his job at a shipyard for refusing to remove a “Trump 2020” hat. Actress Gina Carano was cut loose from the set of The Mandalorian in 2021 after she shared a post that implied that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust—a cringeworthy remark, granted, but it shouldn’t have resulted in her termination. Later that year, a police officer was let go for donating $25 to a defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse. 

These are just a handful of examples, separate from but related to the exceedingly cruel rhetoric that not infrequently approaches the genocidal and has also been normalized by the left. Remember that in 2018 the late actor Peter Fonda proposed ripping then-11-year-old Barron Trump “from his mother’s arms” so he could be “put … in a cage with pedophiles.” The following year, reacting to a standoff initiated by a professional agitator against young Trump supporters, film producer Jack Morrissey tweeted that “MAGA kids” should “go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper.” Morrisey’s post included a grisly visual aid in the form of a picture of a shredded body shooting out of a grinder.  

One might argue that these fantasies of violence and oppression do not correspond to real views held by ordinary, sober people. However, for a nontrivial segment of the left, they might or do in fact. The poll that found most Democrats wish Trump’s shooter hadn’t missed isn’t the only clue. 

The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports once published a survey of what Democratic voters think ought to be done with those who declined the COVID-19 vaccine. Fifty-nine percent supported forcibly confining the unvaccinated to their homes at all times, except for emergencies. Forty-five percent favored a government program “requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.”   

The pandemic provided these people with the opportunity to sublimate their violent desires against their political opponents into a more acceptable form of cruelty by couching it in safetyism. Indeed, three days before Rasmussen published those results, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times argued that “mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.” The author highlighted and defended websites that have featured “snippets and photographs of anti-vaccine advocates, often taken at their deathbeds.” Ghoulishly mocking these dead, he concluded, was good and necessary. 

That brings us back to the question of enmity, about which German political theorist Carl Schmitt had much to say in Theory of the Partisan, a book based on two lectures he delivered in 1962 amid the rise of violence that arose as a consequence of political instability.   

For Schmitt, there are distinct forms of political enmity: conventional, real, and absolute. Conventional enmity manifests in the classical model of warfare, in which belligerents do combat within an agreed-upon set of rules and parameters. The objective is to defeat the opponent and come to terms.

Real enmity is characterized by intense political commitment, often in defense of a way of being against a clearly defined adversary, i.e., the Peninsular War between Catholic Spanish peasants and Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Conventional rules of war collapse in the face of this kind of enmity as partisans do not abide by regular codes of conduct or rules of engagement.

And finally, there is absolute enmity, which is a type of war that is uncontained not only by conventional limits on enmity but by space and time. It is a revolutionary kind of enmity, resulting in the enemy being reduced to an abstraction. In plain terms, it means that the goal is not a truce but the utter annihilation of an opponent that has been dehumanized and therefore should expect neither justice nor mercy. Partisan wars are existential wars, contests over who will control and define the public sphere.  

None of this is to say that a kinetic civil war is inevitably on America’s horizon, nor should its citizens hope for one. But I do think that our politics are now characterized by an enmity that Schmitt might assess as somewhere between real and absolute.