Most assassins and failed assassins are mad more than anything else, and their grievances are totally incoherent. Cole Allen, the man who allegedly tried to shoot President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was different.
Allen’s apparent manifesto was eerily lucid, and to the extent he was divorced from reality, it was exactly as divorced as the standard NPR-listening No Kings protester is divorced from reality: calling Trump a racist, a pedophile, and a traitor, and accusing the administration of starving children.
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For decent people who detest political violence, this creates a very uncomfortable situation. A democracy needs and deserves robust political debate, but when the center-leftism of Bluesky and Reddit becomes a gateway to murder plots, it’s hard to hold onto the “let it rip” free-speech absolutism that makes America exceptional.
“Civility” is a standard request in these times, and a reasonable one: We don’t want to curb political opinions, we just want to curb how they are expressed. This is good and true. We should disagree with respect and keep debates substantive rather than personal.
But this argument doesn’t apply you believe the guy on the other side rapes little girls. You shouldn’t be civil to a rapist or a pedophile. Likewise, Allen’s preferred columnists and social media commentators will also tell you Trump is a fascist who will cancel all future elections. Facing fascism and the literal end of democracy, it’s hard to uphold liberal pluralistic pieties such as free and respectful debate.
So “civility” is an unconvincing argument given the nature of the Left’s charges.
The problem isn’t that the liberals are uncivil. It’s that liberals are too convinced that they are correct. This is a problem that predates the Trump era: There is not enough epistemic humility on the left half of American political discourse. I’m not saying the Right has adequate humility either, but hubris (and, subsequently, political violence) seems concentrated on the progressive side.
The Obama years were full of this sort of certainty: Debates are for the past, back before we were all so enlightened and smart. We now can solve the problems.
During the Biden years, health experts were perfectly happy to spread noble lies and lean on Big Tech to shut down debates because they knew what was right. Ironically, “we believe in science” became a shorthand for “we should stop questioning things.”
This certainty was obviously misplaced. Many of Obama’s policies were awful trainwrecks. During COVID-19, the experts were wrong about the nature of the spread, the efficacy of masks, and the ability of the vaccine to prevent infection. Shutting down debate made it harder for us to get closer to the truth.
One argument for free speech and against using violence to achieve our aims is that we may be wrong. If you silence dissent, then it’s harder to learn your errors. If you kill a guy you thought was Hitler, but he was really just Captain Queeg, then you cannot reverse the horrible course of events you have initiated.
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This applies to other illiberal behavior, such as lying. If you lie because you know you are right, you make it harder for others to know if maybe you are wrong.
We need a lot of things right now. One of them is a lot more intellectual humility.
