In the days since Robert Bowers murdered 11 congregants inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Americans have contemplated and debated the most urgent questions in our common life. There has been mercifully little discussion of gun laws. Observers on both sides have grasped that these murders—and the hatred that generated them—require more than a stale dispute about background checks and AR-15s. No; the questions before us are far more serious. Is homegrown anti-Semitism on the rise? Do people or groups other than Bowers share culpability? Was this in any sense a manifestation of political hatreds that appear less and less governable?
Whether the Squirrel Hill shooting indicates the revivification of domestic anti-Semitism is difficult to say. We are hopefully skeptical. A much-touted Anti-Defamation League report claiming a dramatic increase of anti-Semitic attacks since the election of Donald Trump has major methodological flaws (some of the increase, for example, happened on college campuses and so presumably had little or nothing to do with the far right). And, of course, violent attacks against Jews, though far rarer than in Europe, were common enough in America long before Trump rose to prominence: We recall, just in the last couple of decades, the shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles in 1999, the shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation in 2006, and the shootings at two Jewish community centers in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2014. Indeed, anti-Semitism has existed through the whole course of American history and reached a high point in the years just before the Second World War.
The habit of blaming large cultural or political forces for crimes committed by individuals is, moreover, both morally vexed and dangerous. Margaret Thatcher was ridiculed when she said, in 1987, that “there is no such thing as society,” but her point was sound. Individuals are responsible for themselves; there is no entity, “society,” that forces them to do wrong when they would otherwise do right. Bowers was not compelled to carry out his murderous fantasies because guns were too readily available or because dark powers on the web encouraged his hostility or because our public discourse has degenerated into name-calling or because Donald Trump said irresponsible things about his critics. The same is true of Cesar Sayoc, arrested for sending pipe bombs to Trump’s detractors, and of James Hodgkinson, who attempted to kill GOP congressmen and nearly succeeded in the case of Steve Scalise. Each of these men, and no one else, bears the guilt of his crimes.
That is not to say, however, that our increasingly uncivil discourse cannot generate violence. Of course it can. When our political leaders slander their adversaries, when they maliciously distort the meanings of reasonable statements they happen to disagree with, when they encourage incivility and brutality—they create an atmosphere in which twisted minds are emboldened to act on their worst impulses. What our leaders breathe out we all breathe in.
American political culture was already dirty and uncivil when Trump arrived on the scene. His candidacy and victory were as much response to the incivility as generators of it—reactionary in a literal sense. In the aftermath of Pittsburgh, though, the president had an opportunity to express principles that bind Americans together—to forgo petty criticisms and remind Americans, even the Americans who loathe him, that we are, together, better than our hatreds. In moments of shock and grief, other presidents of both parties—George W. Bush after 9/11, say, or Barack Obama after the Tucson shooting—have spoken to the nation with compassion, generosity, and chastened idealism. “For the truth is, none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,” Obama said in Arizona after a shooting that left six dead, including a 9-year old girl. “None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. . . . But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.” No president can remain always in the sphere of unifying rhetoric, and Obama in particular would quickly drop his charitable words for vinegary criticisms of anybody who objected to his proposals. But he understood that in times of pain and tragedy, the president has a duty to speak to and for all Americans.
Trump doesn’t understand this. After news of the Pittsburgh murders, he went ahead with a campaign rally in Murphysboro, Illinois. The president seemed aware of the need for cohesive words at the outset of his talk. “This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us,” he said, quite properly. “It’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from our world. . . . We must stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters to defeat anti-Semitism and vanquish the forces of hate. . . . And those seeking their destruction, we will seek their destruction.”
These are fine words, but they were dropped into a lengthy campaign address in which he ridiculed Maxine Waters and railed about “the caravan” and called the media “foolish and very stupid people.” No one remembers what he said about Pittsburgh because he said it in a rambling talk full of wisecracks and insults and boasts.
Trump has no inclination to speak to all Americans. His is a zero-sum worldview; he attacks those who attack him and praises those who praise him. When the time comes to remind Americans of our finest ideals and our bonds with each other, he is absent. A very few have forgotten those ideals and bonds altogether, and as we read their infamous names in the news, we sense the void at the top.
