Just over a week ago, on 13 July 2024, US presidential candidate Donald Trump escaped death by a matter of inches. A 20-year-old registered Republican had managed to take up position on a roof roughly 150m away from where Trump was delivering a speech, from where he fired a series of shots at the former president.
In the aftermath of this assassination attempt political figures from across the world rushed to express their (qualified) support for Trump and their condemnation of political violence. US President Joe Biden declared: “Our politics must never be a literal battlefield” and called for a cooling of temperature and hostilities. From No 10, newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a statement, saying: “Political violence in any form has no place in our societies”. Such responses are to be expected in the aftermath of such an attack. However, they help to reveal the hypocritical attitudes towards political violence held by those at the top.
The hypocrisy of political violence
Within politics we can identify a hierarchy. At the very top sit the ruling politicians, just below them the large corporations, billionaires, and media moguls (those with an outsized influence on legislation thanks to their wealth), and right at the bottom reside the everyday, working voters – ‘the lumpen electorate’.
Whenever political violence is perpetrated up this hierarchy (upwards political violence), from the electorate against politicians or corporations, it is aggressively condemned and demonised as behaviour unbefitting of a ‘civilised’ democracy. The IRA bombing of the 1984 Conservative party conference, numerous US assassinations of American politicians, the murders of British MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, the 6 January attack on the US Capital; all have been rightfully condemned as atrocious actions that should be inconceivable within our societies.
In contrast, when the political violence is perpetrated down the hierarchy (downwards political violence), most commonly by politicians and governments against their electorate or the citizens of other countries, this condemnation does not take place and the violence is deemed acceptable. On the rare occasions where such condemnation does take place, it comes in a distinctly different form than when against upwards political violence. It may be criticised as a bad and wrong action or policy, but it is still regarded as a legitimate policy ‘choice’ that is within the rights of politicians and governments to make.
Downwards political violence
For the most part, downwards political violence comes in the form of death by degrees. Politicians implement policies and pass laws that harm the lives of ordinary people but, because blood isn’t spilled instantaneously, such laws escape the label of violence they deserve. However, these actions perpetrate violence all the same.
Austerity – the economic policy of David Cameron and George Osborne by which public services and government departments were chronically underfunded – has been found by a University of Glasgow study to have contributed to up to 330,000 premature deaths. The imposition in 2017 of the two-child cap on Universal Credit claimants has kept at least 250,000 children in poverty, and provides another example of slow death via Tory governance. Such political violence is not just restricted to the Conservatives – Labour’s recent refusal to commit to removing the cap, when a wealth tax on the super-rich could easily enable them to afford to do so, demonstrates that downwards political violence is a bipartisan affair.
Across the Atlantic the situation is similar. The removal of women’s medical rights and bodily autonomy through the banning of abortion in several states can be seen as nothing other than a violent, misogynistic attack. Similarly, the policy of separating child migrants from their parents at the southern border and then placing them in cages is another act of violence committed by the Trump administration.
From this we can conclude that downwards political violence takes place on a regular basis from politicians of all political persuasions. However, because the violence does not immediately cause death or serious injury it is not characterised as violence in the same way that a member of the public attacking a president would be. Politicians don’t pull physical triggers – just metaphorical ones.
Explicit downwards violence
Except politicians also cause physical triggers to be pulled. According to the Guardian, drone strikes under Barack Obama caused a civilian death toll as high as 800. The Iraq war, initiated by George W Bush and Tony Blair, killed “About half a million people … as a result of war-related causes between the US-led invasion in 2003 and mid-2011”. Historically, leading politicians have overseen the deaths of numerous innocent civilians – direct results of their policy decisions.
Since the 7 October terror attack against Israel, the US government and legislature have sent Israel over $12.5bn in military aid (as of 31 May 2024). Given that Israel has come under heavy criticism and condemnation for its conduct in its war on Gaza – with arrest warrants being logged for PM Benjamin Netanyahu by the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor and Israel as a state currently being tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice – such aid can only be seen as helping Israel to kill more Palestinian civilians.
With the death toll potentially as high as 186,000 according to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, Biden and senior politicians within the US legislature hold a notable degree of responsibility for these murders.
Political violence is endemic
In this article I have endeavoured to show that downwards political violence is perpetrated to an excessive extent by those in positions of power. This is rarely called out or condemned in the manner that upwards political violence is – you will not see Starmer tweeting that ‘political violence is never acceptable’ in reference to US drone strikes or the military funding of war crimes. You won’t see a US president deliver a speech calling for a ‘political realm without murder and death’ in relation to policies that keep hundreds of thousands of people in poverty and drastically cut short their life expectancy. This is because the forms of downwards political violence are largely seen as legitimate, if immoral, policy decisions.
It may be argued that, as most politicians in the western world are democratically elected, they have a mandate to inflict downwards political violence. This, I disagree with. In a world in which figures of authority are allowed to perpetrate violence on their citizens and on foreigners with no mass condemnation, we have merely added a step of bureaucracy to violent mob rule and labelled it as ‘just, fair, and democratic’.
The point of this article isn’t to say that those who commit upwards political violence are somehow vindicated or justified due to the atrocities of downwards political violence. We should strive for a world in which no forms of political violence take place. But for that to happen we need to begin to adopt the same attitudes – and expect our political leaders to do the same – towards downwards political violence as we do towards its upwards variant.
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