Tell Possum

 Last night's news flash—about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—is surely the moral nadir of what has already been an immensely depressing campaign season. It may also be the one moment—more than any other in the Trump era—that truly dooms American democracy. Not only did the would-be assassin's bullets take the life of an innocent bystander and severely injure another; they also came within an inch of ending the life of one of the two major party contenders by violence. Nothing could be more destabilizing of our democratic system. 

The whole purpose of a democratic election is to resolve our political differences by peaceful means. As Elias Canetti described it, we substitute the invisible "army" of a voting majority for the real-life army of a civil war faction. We agree to settle our disagreements by resort to the ballot rather than the bullet. As soon as we abandon this norm, the entire system collapses. If one side believes that the other will not respect the results, and is seeking to predetermine the outcome through violence, then each will feel entitled to resort to arms. 

Indeed, if Trump and his cronies were looking for an excuse for a right-wing putsch, the would-be assassin just handed them one on a silver platter. Trump is already a man who has declared, in this campaign season, "I am your retribution." He already has paranoid tendencies and a persecution complex. His fans already incline to worship him as a semi-divine figure, a cult leader and avatar who will channel their own power-fantasies and sense of grievance. Making him into a martyr can only exacerbate these trends. 

Indeed, right-wing pundits have already been laying the groundwork for this. If they can portray themselves as the victims, it makes it all the easier to justify an unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties. There could be purges, investigations, hunts for "internal enemies." Trump has already been saying all along that he plans to prosecute his political foes and critics (including former members of his own administration). Can you imagine how far he might go with the narrative of a foiled assassination plot at his disposal? 

Suppose—as seems most likely—it is ultimately shown that this gunman acted alone. Do you think that will stop the right-wing conspiracy mill? Tucker Carlson has already been saying all year that Democrats are going to try to kill Trump. The Heritage Foundation guy already issued his chilling statement that "our revolution will be bloodless—if the Left will allow it." An event like this—no matter how thoroughly it is proven to be the work of one misguided soul—provides the perfect excuse to say "See? The Left struck the first blow! They fired the first shot!"

This moment, then—far more than Biden's terrible debate performance, bleak as that was—is the absolute low point of the campaign. Indeed, it's the worst moment of the last eight years. This feels like the true nail in the coffin of American democracy. It's all over now. This is the end. And it came, as Ezra Pound put it, pace Eliot, not with a whimper but a bang. 

Pound made this observation in the Pisan Cantos—responding to the news of Mussolini's assassination at the hands of partisans. It's impossible to sympathize with Pound's ludicrous and vile fascist politics of that era. It's also hard to shed any tears for Mussolini. But there is still a raw emotional power, to which one responds in reading the Pisan Cantos. One is seeing someone record their thoughts as their political world collapses around them. 

The brutality with which Mussolini was dispatched ("Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano [...] by the heels at Milano") and the fall of his ignoble regime puts Pound in mind of T.S. Eliot's most famous and over-quoted line—the one about the world ending "not with a bang but a whimper." Pound—using the nickname "Possum" for Eliot—insists that his fellow poet had gotten it backwards. The world does not end with a whimper, he writes, but with a bang. 

Seeing the attempted assassination of America's own would-be Mussolini—an attempt that claimed the life of an innocent person and may have doomed American democracy in one go.... Seeing the attempted assassination that went off with three "bangs"—or, rather, "pops"—as the witnesses on the scene described it—three bangs that may have ended the American democratic experiment—Pound's words came back to mind:

yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper

    with a bang not with a whimper

That is how the world ends.