Divided state: on the U.S., a fractured polity

The shooting of Charlie Kirk, a controversial, outspoken conservative commentator and political ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, has revealed, once again, the depth of polarisation of opinion in the country and its disturbing proclivity towards using lethal violence to settle debates. Ironically, Mr. Kirk was a vocal advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, even as he espoused a range of right-wing values at liberal university campuses, and in curbing abortion rights, and limiting the rights of transgender and LGBTQ persons — all the while recruiting young voters to the Republican cause. The man arrested on suspicion of shooting him, Tyler Robinson, is said to have diverged from his own conservative family roots although few specifics or possible motives are established so far. This much is clear: years of political vitriol backed by policies built on the values of nativism, revisionism, exclusion, religiosity, and a hateful intolerance of social and ideological diversity have brought the shutters down on any channels for open-minded dialogue and bipartisanship that might have existed earlier.

The U.S. is at a crossroads in terms of its standing as a moral and economic force espousing, respectively, for the merits of democracy and capitalism. Given the crackdown on and deportations of students, academics and residents protesting atrocities in Gaza, and the cruel family separations resulting from immigration raids, there are many who would doubt the claim that the U.S. remains the bedrock of substantive democracy. Economically, the rules-based international order that emerged through the years of the Washington Consensus stands in a shambles in some regards, with Mr. Trump’s tariff policy that fuelled a worldwide trade war bringing global supply chains to their knees. Nowhere is the impact of these tectonic shifts in the U.S.’s ideological and policy posture more keenly felt than on its own soil, with Democrats on the retreat after two Trump terms, and Republicans embracing their President’s political agenda, which is only an amorphous version of the classic conservatism that many of them adhere to. When conversations across the aisle fall silent, fear looms large, especially for minorities pushed to the fringes of the political discourse, and the desperate on all sides fall back on toxic gun culture to give vent to their frustrations with the status quo. Given that numerous past Presidents have tried and failed to start conversations on common sense gun control reform, including no fewer than 17 attempts by Barack Obama to introduce such legislation in Congress, it is only the emergence of a new, enlightened leadership in both parties that could hold out hope for a less fractured and hateful polity in the post-Trump years.