Penna Dexter

Normal Americans are repulsed by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. This was a bridge too far even for people who buy in to careless “threat to democracy” rhetoric from Trump’s opposition. Their recoil reminds us that we must take care to preserve our constitutional republic.

Our system of government is meant to help our nation avoid political violence. Under constitutionalism, we have systems that allow differences of opinion on government policy to be handled by negotiation and at the voting booth.

A prominent constitutional scholar says the escalation of political violence in the last 15 years has tested the bounds of constitutionalism “pretty aggressively.”

Yuval Levin (Yoo-vuhl Leh-vn) is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and  Editor at National Affairs and The New Atlantis. In an essay for The Free Press, Dr. Levin says the nearly-successful attempt to take out “a once and perhaps future president“ is far from a natural next step from the violence and threats of violence against public officials we’ve been seeing in recent years. He says “this moment feels like a sharp break” that “gave us a terrible glimpse of what it would be like to live beyond the bounds of our constitutional republic.”

Within a constitutional republic our differences may be stark, but there are institutions in which those disputes can be settled “through competition and negotiation.” Dr. Levin points out that, in a constitutional republic, there’s a prevailing assumption that our political victories and defeats are temporary and that the people on the other side of our political disputes “aren’t going away.”

Step outside of constitutionalism and you have “a realm of violence and pain” where “there is no expectation that the people we disagree with today will be here tomorrow and have to be accommodated somehow.”

As Dr. Levin points out, Our constitutional system exists to help us “disagree well.” We must put a stop to its degradation.