America has gone from gunshots to the ‘Kamala effect’ in just four weeks
Call it the ‘Kamala effect’ but exactly one month after gunshots were heard in America, some discern a new energy and positivity in its politics. Back in mid-July, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump made the political landscape appear dark and forbidding. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on the politics of violence. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Gunshots fired at Donald Trump merely grazed the 2024 presidential candidate’s ear ahead of his Republican Party’s national convention. But they may have achieved something more fatal, finally shattering the world’s view of America as a nation engaged in vibrant and peaceful democratic deliberation in the run-up to Election Day, November 5.
Experts say the alarming rise in political violence in the US in recent years is the deadly blowback of years of hate speech by politicians. America is not alone in this troubling surge of extreme behaviour:
In June, Denmark’s prime minister was physically assaulted on a Copenhagen street.
Slovakia’s populist prime minister was shot four times in May, but survived to promise vengeance and retribution…
This Week, Those Books:
Why the rich world is not immune from political violence.
An award-winning writer on the trauma of living in a country constantly faced with death.
The Backstory:
Four serving presidents and one candidate for president have been assassinated since the founding of the United States in 1776. However, incidents of political violence, routinely described in news reports as “unprecedented”, have been occurring in the US for at least 15 years…
Polarised societies are particularly susceptible to political violence when politicians use hate speech, according to…
This Week’s Books:
The Landscape of Political Violence (chapter)
By: Stathis N. Kalyvas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2019
My rating: Penetrating insights
This first chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism is very useful in categorising and explaining a phenomenon as chaotic, destabilising and “ill-defined” as political violence. Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas starts by acknowledging that political violence can be stretched “almost infinitely” because of the popular quip “the personal is political” and because the definition of violence has kept expanding. (Poverty and inequality, for example, can be said to be the result of structural violence.)
The professor, who also co-edited the Handbook…is able to bring some order to types of political violence as in the table (below) provided in the chapter:
Table showing different kinds of political violence in chapter by Stathis N. Kalyvas in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism
The big takeaway from this chapter, especially in the context of today’s United States, is as follows: “Some types of political violence ‘thrive’ under war, authoritarianism, and poverty, especially in ethnically divided societies. But even if we were able to suddenly get rid of war, autocracy, poverty, and ethnic divisions, we would not be able to guarantee peace, because political violence can be observed in prosperous and peaceful democracies as well…”
The Sound of Things Falling
By: Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated into English by Anne McLean)
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2013
My rating: Gripping
In this novel by one of Colombia’s finest authors, the violence of the country’s past weighs heavily on the present. Award-winning writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has constructed a story based on Colombia’s tragic history of the drugs trade, the regularity of political violence and the resulting trauma induced in a whole generation.
At the outset, the narrator, young Bogota university law professor Antonio Yammara, notes the habitual violence “that transcends the small resentments and small revenges of little people, the violence whose actors are collectives and written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front”. He mentions presidential candidates killed…sometimes, live on TV…
Choice quote:
“Nobody asked why he’d been killed, or by whom, because such questions no longer had any meaning in my city, or they were asked in a mechanical fashion…”
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
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