Somewhere between a political rally and a courthouse, between a social-media threat and an actual weapon raised, the American republic is being asked a question it has answered before and must answer again: whether its citizens possess sufficient moral seriousness to prefer argument to violence, and law to vengeance. The asking is not polite. The stakes, as they have always been in this country’s life, are permanent.
What we are watching is not a crisis of policy. It is a crisis of political culture, which is a graver thing entirely. When candidates are threatened and public servants require armed protection to conduct ordinary business, and when a portion of the citizenry treats this as the natural weather of democratic life rather than a moral emergency, the republic is not merely stressed. It is being slowly untaught. A people who grow accustomed to the presence of political violence will eventually grow accustomed to its logic, and the logic of violence is that the argument with the better fist wins.
This republic was assembled by men who understood, with unusual precision, the distance between a government of laws and a government of passions. They had watched republics collapse. They knew that civic order is not a permanent achievement but a continuous discipline, requiring of every generation a willingness to subordinate immediate rage to durable principle. The constitutional architecture they built was not designed for saints. It was designed for ordinary, ambitious, quarrelsome people, precisely because such people are the only kind available. The design assumes conflict. It channels conflict into courts, into legislatures, into the long slow negotiation of democratic elections. What it cannot survive is the decision by any substantial fraction of citizens that the channel itself is the enemy.
We are not there yet. But we are close enough that the distance deserves honest measurement. Since 2016, the FBI has tracked a steady increase in threats against federal officials and members of Congress. The year 2022 brought an attack on the Speaker of the House’s family in her own home. The year 2024 brought two separate attempts on the life of a presidential candidate. These are not isolated episodes of individual madness. They are data points in a pattern that political scientists who study democratic backsliding recognize as diagnostic: the normalization of coercive intimidation as a tool of political competition. When the losing side threatens judges, and the winning side celebrates the threats, both sides have made the same terrible bet against the republic’s future.
The named enemy here is not a party. Assigning this pathology exclusively to one party or the other is the comfort of the partisan and the evasion of the citizen. The enemy is the habit of mind that holds any political goal worth achieving through fear, and any opponent sufficiently wrong to deserve not defeat but destruction. That habit of mind is not new to America. It tore the country apart once before in a conflict so ruinous that the wounds are still legible in law and landscape. What is new is the speed at which inflammatory language travels and the deliberateness with which certain political figures have chosen to feed it rather than quiet it. A politician who calls opponents enemies of the people, or who greets with silence the threats made against a judge or an election worker, is not merely being careless with language. He is withdrawing the civic credit that keeps institutional trust solvent.
The prescriptions are not complicated, though they are demanding. First, elected officials across the spectrum must speak against political violence every time it appears, without the cowardly qualification that the other side does it too. The republic is not a ledger in which wrongs cancel. It is a covenant that requires renewal, and the renewal has to start somewhere, even if the credit is asymmetric. Second, the Department of Justice must prosecute threats against public officials and election workers with the same energy it brings to other federal crimes, because selective enforcement teaches citizens that certain forms of intimidation carry no cost. Third, the press, which has every right to cover political conflict aggressively, must exercise the editorial judgment to distinguish between political argument, however fierce, and explicit incitement, rather than treating both as equivalent expressions of a vibrant democracy. The first is protected speech. The second is accelerant.
Fourth, and most demanding: ordinary citizens must recover the capacity to hold two thoughts at once. A voter can believe her party is right on every contested question of the day and still condemn, without reservation, the threat made against the opposing candidate’s life. These are not in tension. The willingness to make this distinction, quietly and without applause, is precisely what civic virtue looks like when it is not performing for an audience.
There is a passage in the oldest tradition of American constitutional thought that returns to me when the country is in this condition. It does not promise that the republic will survive. It promises only that the republic deserves survival, and that the work of deserving it belongs to the living. The work is patient, inglorious, and repetitive. It consists mostly of refusing, again and again, to trade the slow dignity of democratic argument for the quick satisfaction of making your opponent afraid.
A republic that cannot be argued out of its errors will eventually have to be frightened out of them, and a republic governed by fear has already surrendered the thing worth fighting for.
Prairie Counsel is a recurring columnist for The Republic Standard.