Lower the Volume

Election Day will mark nearly 20 years since my friend Dan Malcom was killed on a rooftop in Fallujah. Dan died trying to help my platoon. Friendly artillery had us pinned down on a roof. Hot shards of jagged shrapnel slapped against the side of our building. Dan had climbed into an exposed position to shift that artillery when a sniper’s bullet found him. He was 25 years old. When I finally came home from Iraq, I was 24, but I had as many dead friends as an 80-year-old. I also had lots of questions—probably more than I knew at the time. Today, if you ask someone about Fallujah, they’re likely to remember the battle but to have forgotten that it was about an election.

It was easy to be cynical about Iraq then, just as it’s easy to be cynical about America today. And when I came home, I felt cynical. A senior officer, a man I respected, sensed I was struggling. He took me aside. He told me not to forget what guys like Dan had sacrificed for, and then he showed me a photo of an Iraqi woman, smiling, her ink-stained finger raised in the air. Not long after that battle, millions of Iraqis had voted for the first time in their life, proudly displaying their fingers stained with ink to indicate that they had cast ballots. They made strides toward creating a political system where their country’s future would be decided at a ballot box instead of the barrel of a gun.

Yesterday, our country moved tragically in the opposite direction. We have an opportunity now to lower the volume of this race. President Joe Biden took an important step by immediately condemning the shooting in a televised address to the nation. Former President Donald Trump should do his part by saying that violence is never acceptable in our politics and that the results of the election will be respected. The true leader, the one worth voting for, will figure out how to bring the country together in this crisis, even amid an ongoing election campaign.

Next week marks the beginning of the Republican National Convention. The assassination attempt against Trump will be a much-discussed topic; already, some of his supporters are seeking to blame their political opponents. But Trump could take a different path. The Secret Service agent turned conservative commentator Dan Bongino likes to say that the right believes the left contains people with bad ideas, whereas the left believes the right is bad people with ideas. Trump could call on his political opponents and his political allies to embrace the former mantra, distinguishing people from their ideas. Trump has called his enemies “bad people” in the past, but now he’s suffered a near-death experience. Sometimes, that changes people.

Democrats have plenty of work to do themselves. Republican leaders have, correctly, asked them to tamp down the “end of democracy” rhetoric. Trump’s actions have threatened our democracy in the past and may well do so in the future. But if democracy survives only if Democrats win, then democracy is already dead, because democracy requires choice. Framing specific electoral outcomes as necessary to the survival of the country amounts to the tacit endorsement of extreme actions. Democrats should stop framing their political opposition in such stark terms.

Wars start for political reasons, but they continue because of loss. When you don’t simply disagree with someone but you actively hurt them, the political becomes personal. A father who’s lost a child to war may fight to avenge a personal loss. Our country cannot afford for politics to become so lethally personal.

Our own democracy has already seen too great an upsurge of political violence: Charlottesville, Virginia; the riots in Minneapolis; January 6. Such violence is a betrayal of those who sacrificed so much, like my friend Dan. The two most unpopular presidential candidates in modern American history can seize this moment to prove their ability to lead, assuring the American people that the future of our country will always be determined at the ballot box and never again at the barrel of a gun.