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Early Wednesday morning, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise stood on second base and Rep. Mo Brooks was on deck.
We now know what happened next. The Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in the quaint Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., turned to a scene of chaos and terror.
Wielding a handgun and a long rifle, the attacker fired over 50 rounds, hitting four individuals: Scalise, congressional staffer Zack Barth, Officer David Bailey, Officer Krystal Griner and Tyson lobbyist Matt Mika.
Capitol Police, who were already on scene when the shooting began, returned fire. Then, less than ten minutes after the first sound of gunfire, the gunman was down.
The shooter, who has died of his injuries, was James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill. Although a definitive motive has not yet been confirmed by law enforcement officials, it did not take long after his public name identification to determine that the incident was politically fueled.
On Facebook, Hodgkinson, an avid supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, actively and frequently posted anti-Trump tirades and openly shared his distaste with the outcome of the 2016 election.
A “legal removal” of President Trump petition he shared to his page on March 22 included his own recommendations that “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
Hodgkinson, though a terrorist by any reasonable definition, was not a religious extremist. He did, however, make a habit of criticizing conservative viewpoints and projecting his own militantly liberal ideas across social media. His spiral downward into violence is a blatant depiction of the extreme rage that now permeates both extremes of the American political spectrum.
America has not had a peaceful history. We have endured a Civil War, presidential assassinations, bitterly disputed elections, riots and economic catastrophes.
But in modern times, in which we are by most objective measures relatively powerful and prosperous, we are approaching uncharted waters in terms of the stark ideological polarization in our country. Wednesday morning’s tragedy was a manifestation of the aggressive hatred that is fueling the schism between the left and the right.
You often see pundits lament the ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress and claim the American people are far more moderate than their representatives.
Over the last two decades, the overall percentage of America that has expressed consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has more than doubled, from 10% to 21%. This ideological identification has directly translated to partisan loyalty, which means that common ground between Democrats and Republicans has all but disappeared.
In the past twenty years, Americans have drifted further and further from moderate political positions. A 2016 Gallup poll shows that the percentage of Americans identifying as “moderate” has decreased from 43% to 34%.
Since 1994, which was hardly an ideal year for amicable cross-party relations, negative views of the opposite party have more than doubled. Today, 43% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats view the opposite party in strongly negative terms.
To go one step further, when asked if the opposite party’s policies were “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,” 27% of Democrats believe that the GOP is a threat to our country, and an even higher 36% of Republicans believe the same of Democrats.
It’s even infecting our social lives. As the New York Times put it this week summarizing other recent research, “Americans in 1960 were more likely to allow that members of the other party were intelligent, and they were less likely to describe opposing partisans as selfish.
“In 1960, just 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be unhappy if a son or daughter married someone from the other party. In a YouGov survey from 2008 that posed a similar question, 27% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats said they’d be ‘somewhat’ or ‘very upset’ by that prospect. By 2010, that share had jumped to half of Republicans and a third of Democrats.”
What these people fail to realize is that their own accusation towards the opposing party is, in itself, a threat to the well-being of our nation. The alienation of fellow Americans and their ideology discourages discourse, it discourages understanding, and it discourages unity.
Disagreement is perfectly healthy. The two parties, with different philosophies, are bound to present different plans for health care reform, and to have different tax priorities, and to approach paying for infrastructure differently.
But the idea that these differences are unbridgeable, that the two sets of ideals are so alien to one another that it is simply impossible to negotiate with our fellow Americans, is absurd. We have a common philosophical foundation. We are not Sunnis and Shiites, or Fascists and Communists.
Or are we? As we saw on Wednesday, incessant, dehumanizing intolerance shown towards opposing ideologies