For months, the political scene of the country has been stable: Two old men, both with the unbending allegiance of their parties, were cruising toward their national nominating conventions.
The rivalry of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, now four years old, seemed destined to continue, month after month, with little movement one way or another, the result being to cement them in their positions and to render the November choice fixed.
That was that.
But that was then.
Then came June 27. Then came July 13.
On June 27, the wheels came off the Biden train. He stammered, he hesitated, he lost his train of thought. His rhetoric followed the path of a dirt road in the country.
On July 13, former president Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. The chaos on the dais at the Butler Farm Show became both a fixed image in the American mind and a metaphor for what is unfolding now: panic, uncertainty, anger, disappointment.
All those emotions are a product of the American political system that, along with providing public choice in elections, rewards the visibility and accessibility of leaders -- two of the signature features of our culture.
"America started as a democracy where everyone's equal, where there wasn't a monarchy with the idea that the rulers are quasi-divine and are behind castle walls," said Thomas Klassen, an expert in North American politics at Toronto's York University. "In the United States, anyone can become president, and then that person must be out there, in public among the people. With the election coming up, that became more important for Trump and will be important for Biden."
Even so, not since 1968, when in early winter the election seemed as if it would pit President Lyndon B. Johnson against former Vice President Richard Nixon, has such upheaval rocked an American election. Johnson, deep in the quagmire of the Vietnam War, was challenged first by Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and then by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York. The president withdrew.
In April, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and then, so too was Kennedy. Amid rioting in the streets of Chicago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination and seemed to close the gap with Nixon, but he was defeated.
The year 2024 is giving 1968 a run for its money.
Now an election that seemed to be moving inexorably into a contest the nation dreaded but accepted has been transformed into something else entirely. The nation has the same two men running for president, but they're not the same candidates they were.
For Trump, the question is whether the Republican presidential nominee uses his appearances at the Milwaukee convention for conciliation or confrontation. His interview with Salena Zito suggests that the former is possible. That would require -- that would affirm -- a substantial transformation of his practice and his style.
Anything is possible. A bullet grazing the ear but not gaining purchase in the face or heart could have enormous power. An entire nation awaits the answer.
For top Republicans in Milwaukee, as for the rest of the American political class, the question is whether their pleas for calm are heeded. Already there are disturbing signs that they might be ignored.
"There is a narrative that is dominant within far right-wing circles," said Arie Perliger, a professor in security studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. "For them a successful assassination would have solidified their view that the Democratic Party and its related organizations, and the left in general and several federal state agencies, are willing to go very far to prevent Trump from winning. They would have been pushed against the wall, and I would expect substantial violence."
On Sunday night, some 26 hours after the shooting, Biden asked Americans to realize that, as he put it, "We are not enemies. We're neighbors. We're friends."
But Americans are not always friends, as Saturday's shooting in Butler proved.
"Every industrialized nation has crime, some of it violent. What makes the U.S. different is that our violent crime is far more likely to be lethal, because our country is awash in an unending supply of guns," said David A. Harris, a University of Pittsburgh Law School professor and expert on law enforcement and crime. "As a result, we must all live in fear that we or our loved ones will die as part of this randomly cruel and senseless plague that never seems to stop."
President Biden called this a "time of testing." The phrase has analogs throughout the Bible and American history. One came with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, another with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression followed by the Second World War. Another came with Johnson, protesting college students and a resurgent conservatism in the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
One is with us now: a time of testing that the country must pass. Because everything's changed.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
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