This election and violence

By Bernard Rowan

“The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23).

I’m worried about this election season in America. A problem with America is we’ve embraced the technologies of death and violence at the expense of love, love of thy neighbor and one’s fellow citizen. In one of the richest and most advanced nations, there is violence galore. Americans specialize in gun violence, and many consider guns the holy grail of freedom. With guns, Americans kill one another at higher rates than perhaps any other country on earth or in history. The number of mass shootings has grown, a shameful statistic. The transoms of newspapers and social media depict endless incidents of violence against women. To an extraterrestrial being, America might appear as a land of bullying, misogyny and murder, among other sins. We lack respect for the young and the old, with high rates of infant mortality and elder abuse. Many to most movies depict violence as normal. Yes, that’s it. We’ve come to expect violence as the norm in the United States of America. The life of a democracy guarantees little, and America has much to do.

So many of us look at what “our leaders” tell and say to us. We imitate them, honor them and revere their styles. That isn’t what democracy means, but it happens. Popularity and populism more often truck with demagoguery. That includes the violence of rhetoric and the rhetoric of violence.

Scholars of the American polity should do better by looking at the role of violence in the rhetoric of the nation as well, including in recent presidential election cycles. The 2016 presidential election saw Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, in my opinion, begin a cycle of rhetorical violence. The degradation of each other, ad hominem remarks and statements, marked that election. Trump’s style, honed in apparent imitation of his father and Roy Cohen, among others, is to dehumanize his opponents. It’s an arrow in the quiver of demagogues, populists and charlatans across the ages. But Clinton also erred in referring to Trump and his supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” The phrase has its own Wiki page. Trump called on his supporters to use violence against a heckler on more than one occasion. Honestly, it’s beneath a country whose founders knew about the use of violence in speech and sought to insulate a new republic from its pernicious effects.

Of course, in the 2020 election’s aftermath, Trump and his lieutenants orchestrated and permitted an insurrection involving much violence. While the participants in this fiasco and illegality are responsible for their actions, Trump and other national leaders violated their oaths of office and incited citizens. Fortunately, their behavior failed to upend the election, but Trump to this day refuses to admit his unconstitutional actions. This, from a person who was the president, continues to impress too many that it’s OK not to support the Constitution, the highest laws of our land, and the idea of the rule of law. And for him to tote a Bible in front of St. John’s Church during the foment and protests following the murder of George Floyd was a sacrilege and farcical act. Trump rarely speaks with the conviction of faith in any form, certainly not as a God-fearing believer in God’s commandments, the first of which are about love. Of course, he doesn’t have to believe in God under the U.S. Constitution either.

The nations of the world would do well to learn from America’s recent and continuing errors of irrationality and violence. To portray violence through normal processes, to glorify it and to accept it are signs of failure. These depredations tend to repeat and continue in cycles of hate and enmity. Real leadership is called upon to address and ease the causes and consequences of violence in America. Let’s hope our new president will see to it that we accomplish needed change in this regard.

America has grown too comfortable with the idea of reason as a contest of strength. Having a position on an issue is not about “defeating others." It’s certainly not about dehumanizing one’s opponents. Any would-be leader who spends more time “going negative” is sowing the seeds of her or his failure. The American people need and deserve to participate in the development of creative solutions to the ills of violence and to continue charting the technologies and processes of freedom that have seen the ascendancy of the country under the Constitution. I don’t think America is in jeopardy of its mortality, but there are growing signs of a need for fundamental introspection and a revival of the ethics of reason based on love and love of country, which begins with the love of one’s fellow citizens. Only time will tell if America in this election makes the diminution of violence a priority and sticks to it.

Bernard Rowan is associate provost for contract administration and academic services and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and a past visiting professor of the School of Local Autonomy, Hanyang University.