Contra Destiny on Political Assassinations

Political assassinations are bad

Edit 7/19: There has been much discussion on whether Destiny condones the shooting or if he merely “lacks sympathy” for Donald Trump. This post was written hours after Destiny began commenting on it when his rhetoric was at its most violent, and he has since taken a more toned down line on the assassination. Regardless, his interview with Piers Morgan is more than enough to substantiate the view that he does not condone the shooting - which works well enough for this piece to remain relevant.

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Destiny, in broad strokes, has shared what I would call a 'Post-liberal' view of political assassinations. Typically, liberals are against political assassinations because they view voting as how power is determined as opposed to taking power by killing political opponents. He extends this view to all conservatives and I assume anyone to the right of him who supports Trump, in the sense that if politics is all about preventing threats then anyone who aids and abets the threat in any way is an acceptable target (or that he won't have sympathy for attacks, or that he hopes the shooter’s aim improves etc). Whatever his position is - I am against it for the following reasons:

The main arguments are the following:

1. The modern rarity of political assassinations implies that the mentally ill are prone to being copycats.

2. Mentally ill people lack proper judgment and are unlikely to be successful.

3. Conservatives do not want to "destroy the country" in any meaningful sense, Destiny's view that they do ignores all faults with the Democratic party's program and marketing as well as the historically unpopular candidate Joe Biden. There are good reasons to vote for the republican party as well as Trump that he’s ignoring.

I. The Rarity of Political Assassinations.

Richard Hanania writes that political assassinations used to be more common. I asked Claude.ai to list 19th and 20th century assassinations but stopped at 30.

1. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914) - Heir to Austro-Hungarian throne

2. Abraham Lincoln (1865) - U.S. President

3. John F. Kennedy (1963) - U.S. President

4. Mahatma Gandhi (1948) - Indian independence leader

5. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) - Civil rights leader

6. Alexander II of Russia (1881)

7. Yitzhak Rabin (1995) - Israeli Prime Minister

8. Anwar Sadat (1981) - Egyptian President

9. Leon Trotsky (1940) - Russian revolutionary

10. Indira Gandhi (1984) - Indian Prime Minister

11. William McKinley (1901) - U.S. President

12. Benazir Bhutto (2007) - Former Pakistani Prime Minister

13. Patrice Lumumba (1961) - First Prime Minister of Congo

14. Malcolm X (1965) - Civil rights leader

15. Robert F. Kennedy (1968) - U.S. Senator

16. Reinhard Heydrich (1942) - Nazi official

17. Ngo Dinh Diem (1963) - President of South Vietnam

18. Olof Palme (1986) - Swedish Prime Minister

19. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (1975)

20. James A. Garfield (1881) - U.S. President

21. Park Chung-hee (1979) - President of South Korea

22. Rafael Trujillo (1961) - Dominican dictator

23. Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898)

24. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia (1934)

25. Huey Long (1935) - U.S. Senator

26. Luis Carrero Blanco (1973) - Spanish Prime Minister

27. Ziaur Rahman (1981) - President of Bangladesh

28. George Moscone (1978) - Mayor of San Francisco

29. Harvey Milk (1978) - San Francisco City Supervisor

30. Inejiro Asanuma (1960) - Japanese Socialist Party leader

These are just in the 19th and 20th century. Given supposed 'political polarization' over time, you would expect there to be way more political assassinations today considering that firearms are much better, more prevalent and declining mental health. In short, there are more crazy people today (per capita and absolute) and also way more and better firearms. This indicates that crazy people express their craziness in socially understandable ways. It may be that the rate of political assassinations can be heavily socially influenced, because school shootings were less common in history and political shootings more common, but that has reversed today likely for social contagion reasons. In sociology this is called the Mass Shooting Contagion theory. Talking about and valorizing how great political violence is in any way, even if tacit justification and not outright calls, could increase the rate of political assassinations. For this reason I think it's understandable why so many people are condemning it - and I believe that Destiny has entirely ignored this possibility in favor of even worse arguments in support of the idea.

II. Mentally Ill People Lack Proper Judgement.

No matter how strong arguments in favor of political assassinations could be, the reality is that people who actually want to do them are going to be more ill on average, causing their judgement to be poor. Destiny seems to view it as okay if Trump died, but I'm not positive that it would be any better than him surviving (not including the other arguments, in which push me to the side that it is better that he lived.) In reality, no one can know what would have happened, but if the shooter was successful I would expect more copy cats. You could say that there are more mentally ill left people than right people, and in the ensuing war you would expect the left to win out in terms of number of assassins, but mentally ill attackers don't always have clearly defined political views in terms of left-right. A lot of times their political positions are as crazy as they are.

It's also reasonable to assume that crazy people have worse aim and lack of proper follow-through and planning. The sniper in this situation did manage to get into a decent position before getting some shots off, but a more trained and clear-headed actor such as an actual military sniper would have almost certainly succeeded if they had the same objective. This is because they would have had more training, not be actively insane, and planned for days if not weeks of the exact location, type of gun to bring and so on. Mental illness impairs the level of conscientiousness you would need to consistently do a ton of damage, and it's only in wild situations where crazy people rack up high body counts, such as an actual concert full of thousands with a hotel overlook and nearly endless ammunition. The success of the vegas shooter doesn’t prove that mentally ill people are good shots, only that they ‘succeed’ when given unlimited ammunition and targets.

Any justification, tacit calls, or any view that this act was good or could be good or whatever clarification you want to make - has to keep in mind that your reserve stock of fighters are insane and not capable of consistently executing their plans.

III. Conservatives Do Not Want to "Destroy The Country" in any meaningful sense, and there are good reasons to support Trump that do not involve destroying the country.

I view this as the most important section, and unfortunately I'm not going to spend much time on it because actually going into policy would take thousands of words, so I'll keep it short. The basic view is that Destiny has a warped view of conservatives for some reason or another that I won't speculate on, and is not taking seriously the points in favor of voting for Trump/Republicans. This is leading him to think that the only possible reason someone would vote for Trump is because they want to Destroy Democracy. Also, he thinks that Trump will Destroy Democracy, which I will try to touch on but won't be able to fully cover. The argument in this section is that since they don’t want to destroy democracy, the idea that they do should not be used as justification for violence. I will shortly break down the candidates and where they agree/disagree.

Policy points that Biden and Trump agree on (That I think are the most important):

1. United States economic policy should be more populist in general. We should impose tariffs on trade and make things in America and so on. We should deficit spend our way to increase domestic production because free trade has only damaged the working class.

2. Various trade deals and globalization have weakened America and empowered our enemies abroad. We should limit this and return to how it was, with good jobs and not rely so much on Chinese goods.

3. Social Security and Medicare, as well as most entitlement spending, should not be cut in any way. Taxes should not be raised on anyone (Trump) making more than 400k (Biden) to pay for this.

Policy points that they disagree on (most important):

1. Abortion.

2. What should be done in Israel (Biden would be tougher on Netanyahu) and Ukraine (Trump is skeptical of Zelensky and Ukraine aid)

3. Trump may or may not want to aid Taiwan if they are invaded.

4. Trump wants to cut taxes for the rich and fund this with a tariff. Biden wants to levy more tariffs but would spend it on deficit reduction or more domestic spending and not cut taxes.

5. Obviously they would appoint conservative/progressive people to the judiciary and civil service. This is basically what project 2025 is.

6. Cultural reasons. Trump is more culturally conservative than Biden and may sign bills that are positioned conservatively in nature.

Now, you may disagree with Trump and agree with Biden on all of those things. You may even think that cutting taxes, pulling aid from Ukraine to some degree, appointing conservatives, and signing conservative bills are absolutely terrible. But this is not Destroying Democracy in any meaningful sense. The pillars of a second Trump campaign, at least policy wise, are run-of-the-mill Trump populism. If Destiny thinks that would amount to the end of the country then I have no idea what he's talking about.

The last major point in this section is about Biden and the democratic party. As a candidate, Biden does not have mass appeal. He is literally an out of touch old person. His popularity is at low levels rarely seen, and according to both Nate Silver's model as well as the economist, is at less than 30 percent odds to win the electoral college. Both models predict that as of today, he will lose the popular vote. He's not particularly likeable and under his administration there has been a record high of illegal immigration which is causing backlash to immigration in general. Inflation is high and wage growth is poor relative to recent history, and despite Biden's claims that corporations are behind it, "greed" has not caused the increase in inflation, spending has.

What you have is an unpopular candidate due to factors including his age, inflation, and immigration. You may disagree that Trump would change these things or be an answer to them. But it's not Destroying Democracy to vote against Biden on these issues, even if you think that on net Biden is the better candidate. There are legitimate points of grievance about his administration and as a candidate in specific, and these broad ideas of immigration and inflation contribute majorly to his slipping approval numbers. The opinion that you should vote for him in spite of that may be reasonable and in fact I mostly agree, is still not a justification for political violence of any kind. Since the majority of people disapprove of him anyway, that implies there is a lot of violence to be doing since there's a low chance he wins in a fair election - which I've already argued against in the points above.

IV. Final Thoughts

A sub point that I won't cover in depth here because I'm not going to take up any more time is the idea that Trump, regardless of his voters, will want to destroy democracy or be able to. In short, I agree that Jan 6th was terrible and that Trump is a threat to democracy yadda yadda, but him legitimately winning an election (which he is likely to do) will prevent him from trying to contest his loss (which is unlikely to happen). Unfortunately/fortunately, Trump winning may very well lower his desire to contest the election. I predict that he will not destroy democracy in any meaningful sense if he wins. You may think that Jan 6th should disqualify him from winning regardless (I agree with this) but that is beside the point. Voters can decide for themselves whether they want 4 more years of a Biden administration that they mostly don’t like, or 4 years of Trump with some chance of democracy ending. It’s not clear to me that they should automatically vote for Biden because this is contingent on a cost-benefit analysis of the value of democracy and the percentage chance that Trump ‘ends it’ and the expected value of the Biden administration, which I personally think is reasonable but could be convinced otherwise.

As an aside, there is something strange to the idea that Biden is unpopular and will likely lose, and conservatives should be killed because they are threatening Democracy. There is a sub point related to Biden’s administration and how various decisions like him not stepping down, choosing Kamala as his VP, and (the much memory-holed) positioning of his first term as a temporary transition, but alas I am out of time here.

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure what Destiny thinks about the whole Trump Will End The Union Theory, because in this tweet he frames the outcome as basically tax cuts, which I think is more realistic than the end of the American experiment. There is an outside chance that the assassination attempt emboldens Trump to be more extreme, but that would just be another argument for why it was bad, not that it was good.

There are other arguments such as the expected value of assassinating an unpopular person to begin with, their possible replacement with a more popular candidate, emboldening the party to be more extreme, revenge killings, breakdown of social order, lessening of democratic legitimacy of the winner if their opponent was assassinated, the moral implications of murder, and so on and so forth. I did not include these not because they are bad but because you have to stop somewhere.