Protesters demonstrate in front of U.S. Marines guarding a federal building on Saturday in Los Angeles.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
This weekend, the United States was once again enveloped in a spectacle of contrasts. A military parade in the nation’s capital was meant to flaunt state power while city streets across the country thrummed with anti-Trump protestors and their fragmented demands. And both occurred in the wake of the horrific, cold-blooded assassination of a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota.
The events are not unrelated, though none directly caused the others. In a fundamental way, the ritual, the resistance, and the tragedy are united by the spectre of political violence: the threat of it, the rejection of it, and the frightening reality of it.
Saturday began with news of a political assassination. Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state representative, and her husband Mark were killed, and state Senator John A. Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife Yvette were believed to have been wounded by the same suspected gunman, Vance Boelter, who was apprehended late on Sunday evening.
Governor Tim Walz said the shootings appeared to be “politically motivated,” and a notebook belonging to Mr. Boelter included the names and locations of about 70 potential targets, including doctors, community and business leaders, and Planned Parenthood centres.
Analysis: The great theatre of Donald Trump’s U.S. military parade
In Washington, President Donald Trump sought to have a parade to celebrate the United States Army’s 250th anniversary and his own 79th birthday through an expression of military might.
The parade, which Mr. Trump had wanted since his first term in the Oval Office, featured dozens of tanks and artillery vehicles alongside more than 6,000 uniformed troops.
In his closing remarks, Mr. Trump declared, “Every other country celebrates their victories. It’s about time America did too. That’s what we’re doing tonight.”
At the same time, the “No Kings” rallies drew an estimated five million protesters in over 2,000 events across the country.
The demonstrations, organized by a coalition of progressive organizations, were construed as “a nationwide day of defiance … to reject authoritarianism.” The protests were largely non-violent, though one bystander was killed by security forces after they confronted a would-be shooter with an AR-15-style rifle in Salt Lake City, and police fired tear gas into crowds in Los Angeles after a 4 p.m. dispersal order.
It was a weekend in which these varying forms of, and challenges to, political violence each overshadowed and complicated the others.
The abstract, valourized violence of the military – organized, unified, non-partisan – was challenged by the counter-narrative of ordinary citizens with fragmented interests contesting authoritarian drift. And both were eclipsed by politically motivated assassinations, a direct form of anti-democratic violence that is both a symptom and accelerant of political radicalization.
The events of this past weekend tied together the uneasy presence of violence inside a democratic polity. Mr. Trump’s military parade was never going to be a simple celebration of American history.
It is, as with many other of Mr. Trump’s directives, an attempt to reweigh the underlying values of American democracy. This performance of state power at a moment of domestic unrest, on the President’s birthday, is a reminder to both supporters and critics about who serves as the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military force. Power, in Mr. Trump’s view, is personal.
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Peaceful protests, by contrast, are an integral element of democracy, an aspiration to resolve political conflict by demonstrating solidarity with others and without resorting to violence.
Yet, the No Kings protests arose against the backdrop of normalized, legal state repression, as immigration raids escalated. When protesters responded, Mr. Trump ordered the National Guard to deploy.
Protesters across the country mobilized in defiance of the President’s approach to immigration, the lack of transparency, the gutting of the federal public service and more, but were ultimately hampered by the fact that the democratic right to assemble and protest a democratically elected president is a tight knot of contradiction.
And then there is the assassination of elected officials, political violence in its clearest, most irreducible, most dangerous form.
What was once rare now seems to be getting more common: within the last year alone, there have been assassination attempts against Mr. Trump before the election, an arson attack that targeted the home of Josh Shapiro, the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, and the murders of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington.
Conflict is inevitable in democracies, but its expression as unabridged violence is a failure of democratic institutions and norms to mediate, channel and contain it.
This task is made more difficult in a country that has always, to some degree, venerated violence and war as part of its national identity. The American Revolution is mythologized as an act of righteous rebellion and the right to bear arms is, after all, written into the constitution.
The events of this weekend underscore the precarity of the situation. Whether American democracy under Mr. Trump can once again reclaim its ability to contain violence by keeping it without the bounds of ritualized displays like the parade and peaceful civil demonstrations remains an open question. But the stakes are indeed high: a democracy that cannot prevent political violence is likely to succumb to it.