The Seeds of Hatred

A quick timeout and then they start in on each other all over again. The fight between the left and the right in the United States can’t be stopped even by the shootings in Arizona. The country finds itself in a sort of permanent civil war. It just drags on. The “United” States — that’s what it used to be.

America paused. The six people slain in Tucson were remembered with one minute of silence on Monday. The flags in Washington, the scene of political battles, flew at half-mast. At least for a moment, it looked as though the nation had been brought to its senses by the Arizona bloodbath.

But that impression was deceptive. The moment of reflection was hardly long enough for people to catch their breath before the right and the left started cheerfully in on one another again. That’s the way it is in this society that cynically calls itself the “United” States. This society, fractured from within, is seemingly incapable of anything else. Even in the face of murder and manslaughter, the political factions attack one another.

The echoes of the shots fired by a disturbed young man intent on sending a Democratic representative to hell and almost killing 20 others had hardly stopped resounding when the political trench warfare began, with everyone trying to explain the meaning of this tragedy.

The well-meaning warnings, the careful words of the president, all seem to have been forgotten and suppressed within minutes, along with the statement by the new speaker of the House, John Boehner, that an attack on one of them was an attack on all.

The way the world’s oldest democracy fights its battles has always been more uninhibited, perhaps more ruthless, than here in Europe. Even America’s political jargon has always been brutal: “Showdowns” loom everywhere, they wage war on terror as well as on poverty, drugs and even the snowstorm in New York. That sort of language becomes routine. That sort of language dulls our senses.

But in the past 10 to 15 years, partisan politics has escalated to a sort of permanent civil war. Broadcasters and bloggers that hew to the strict party line agitate to the point that Democrats and Republicans approach every encounter with the idea that the nation will rise or fall because of it. Democrats opposed George W. Bush tooth and nail, and since 2009 America’s conservatives wage holy war against a suspected leviathan named Barack Obama.

And above all, the tea party movement tries to justify its shrill, often hate-filled rhetoric with Thomas Jefferson’s bombastic pronouncement that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

It wasn’t only Sarah Palin, heroine of the right wing, who prodded her followers with militant slogans (“Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”). Democrats adopted the wrong tone as well: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama declared during the 2008 presidential campaign. The crowd went wild.

Even now that blood has been shed, both political camps are keeping to themselves. Liberals wallow in the smug feeling of being innocent victims and blame the right for their complicity. Meanwhile, Republicans make efforts to downplay the Tucson incident as an act by a single disturbed individual with no connection to politics, much less to Sarah Palin, who a year ago put out campaign material showing Giffords’ congressional district in the crosshairs of a gun sight. America’s right wing is quick to absolve Tucson of blame for something that could happen anytime and anywhere.

Now it has happened in Arizona, exactly in the former Wild West, where the political culture is just a little rougher and harder than it is in Washington. Liberals and conservatives coexist here in strictly different worlds, in separate neighborhoods and in separate suburbs. People in Arizona stick with their kind and don’t have much to do with anyone unlike them. Here is where your opponent more quickly becomes your enemy.

In addition, Arizona crafts its weapons laws in the tradition of Billy the Kid. Jared Loughner couldn’t have had easier access to his semiautomatic pistol and oversize magazines than he had here. The weapon remains part of Arizona’s identity, and stricter federal laws from faraway Washington don’t offer any protection.

Obama once promised that as president he would reintroduce the lapsed 2004 law banning ownership of the Glock 19, the weapon used in the Tucson shootings. But he had long since abandoned that idea. That, too, was a concession to the leaden culture of Washington; no one dares go up against the all-powerful gun lobby.

No, there’s no panacea to be used against assassins. There is no harmonic consensus democracy, no gun law strong enough to stop a lunatic from running amok. Germans who claim otherwise need only think of the crimes in Erfurt and Winnenden. Yet, the United States makes it far too easy for their murderers. As soon as the moment of silence for the Tucson victims was up, the culture of combat took over once again. It is a culture that makes its supporters negligent accessories to murder.