America’s ugly election

LABOR DAY marks the beginning of the home straight in a presidential election. This one threatens to be ugly. The president’s supporters are clashing with Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. Donald Trump flew to Kenosha, Wisconsin, for a photo-op in front of burned-out buildings, a week after police shot and paralysed an unarmed African-American man and one of the president’s supporters shot and killed two demonstrators, possibly in self-defence. Having adopted a strategy built around profiting from fears about unrest, the president has an interest in stoking it. Many Americans worry that November could herald not a smooth exercise of democracy but violent discord and a constitutional crisis.

Is this all hyperbole? America has had violent, contested elections in the past. In 1968 one of the candidates, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated. In 1912 Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest while making a speech in Wisconsin. (He finished the speech before heading to hospital, and survived.) Historians are still arguing about who really won the election of 1876. Yet the country has always managed to gain the consent of the losers in its presidential elections—even in the midst of the civil war. That long unbroken streak suggests that doomsayers need to keep things in proportion. However, there is a real risk that things could go wrong in November.