Why Are There So Few Assassinations?

Understanding the memetic nature of political violence

The era from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century was a kind of golden age of political assassinations. Over a twenty-year period, the political leaders or reigning monarchs of the US (twice), France, Russia, Italy, and Spain were all murdered.

Tsar Alexander II was killed by a bomb blast in 1881, a few months before President Garfield was assassinated. In June 1894, the president of France was stabbed to death. This was followed by the assassination of the Spanish prime minister three years later. In September 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed and killed while walking to catch a steamship in Geneva. King Umberto I of Italy was shot dead in July 1900, and then a year later President McKinley was killed. The king of Portugal and his son were also gunned down in 1908, and the king of Greece five years later.

And these were just the ones that succeeded. Attempts were made on the lives of Tsar Alexander III (1887), King Leopold II of Belgium (1902), Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1905), and King Alfonso XIII of Spain (1906). Yet another Spanish prime minister was assassinated in 1912. The fateful killing of Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin (1911) may have been what ultimately opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution. Of course, the First World War itself was set off by the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, which served as a kind of bookend to the era.

And then things just stopped. Other eras would see isolated political assassinations, but the period from 1881 to 1914 was like nothing that happened before or since. It might seem natural to ask what went wrong during this one period in history. But given what we know about the world, I think the better question is why there have been so few political assassinations in other eras.

Consider that there are a lot of crazy people out there who get agitated about politics. There is also an endless number of nihilists with nothing to live for, but who would probably like to see their names in the history books. Powerful firearms are widely available in many advanced nations, particularly the United States. In this country, it is common for malls or schools to get shot up by disturbed young men who expect to get nothing out of the act except that they might end up being part of a news story for a few days. Why don’t more of these types go after major politicians?

People today still know the names James Earl Ray and John Wilkes Booth. Thomas Matthew Crooks probably won’t be as well remembered in 50 years, but that is simply a matter of inches. And even among those who aren’t crazy and instead have clear-minded political goals they want to accomplish, it’s not difficult to see how an individual could convince himself that he might change the course of history for the better by killing a government leader.

The answer must have something to do with the memetic nature of man triumphing over rationality. There’s a tendency to think of mentally disturbed individuals as less subject to social cues than normal people. If anything, the opposite might be true. I highly recommend Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us for insight into how socially constructed even extreme forms of mental illness can be. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, it was common for crazy people to think they were Napoleon. As historical memory of the French emperor faded over the years, schizophrenics moved on to other delusions.

Whether consciously or not, mentally disturbed people look around for cues about how others in their situation commonly behave. If you’re an American today, the cultural stereotype is that a sufficiently disturbed individual becomes a school shooter, not that he takes a shot at the president of the United States. This might be because killing an important politician is relatively harder, and so hitting soft targets has become the norm, especially given that would-be assassins might not be patient and competent enough to get around basic security measures. The particular ways in which misfits and losers boiling over with rage express their nihilistic despair are subject to being influenced by social norms no less than anything else. Social contagion is real, and it can be seen in everything from anorexia to rising rates of transgenderism to political assassinations.

Depiction of the assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria on September 10, 1898

In the period from 1881-1914, the vast majority of political assassinations and attempts were carried out by men who expressed support for anarchist ideas. Opposed to all forms of government and industrial capitalism but, unlike socialists, hostile to organized action even among themselves, anarchists preached the idea of bringing change by a spontaneous uprising of the masses. Assassinations were to be carried out for the sake of the “propaganda of the deed,” in order to serve as catalysts for revolutionary events. As Barbara Tuchman explains in her chapter on anarchism in The Proud Tower, this philosophy was developed by mainly French and Russian thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

“The Idea is on the march,” Brousse wrote, “and we must seek to inaugurate the propaganda of the deed. Through a royal breast is the way to open the road to revolution!” The next year at an Anarchist Congress in the Swiss Jura, Kropotkin specifically advocated propaganda of the Deed, if somewhat less explicit as to method. Though never recommending assassination in so many words, he continued during the eighties to urge a propaganda by “speech and written word, by dagger, gun and dynamite.” He sounded an inspiring summons in the pages of La Révolte to “men of courage willing not only to speak but to act, pure characters who prefer prison, exile and death to a life that contradicts their principles, bold natures who know that in order to win one must dare.” Men such as these must form an advance guard of revolution long before the masses were ready, and in the midst of “talking, complaining, discussing,” must do the “deed of mutiny.”

Crazy people of the time therefore had a meme-complex to latch onto that would encourage them to channel their energies towards a political cause. A good contemporary analogy might be radical Islam, the only ideology that seems able to motivate spectacular acts of violence by a large number of individual actors across the world. Like anarchism before it, radical Islam is a global movement that spreads as others hear about its successes, whether in the form of seizing territory or simply being able to engage in widespread mayhem.

The era of assassinations ended with the advent of the First World War, which created new political ideas and realities, and also with the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia, which showed that leftists could actually organize their way to power instead of simply calling for random killings and hoping that the masses would rise up in response.

All of this is why it makes sense to have an entire law enforcement body dedicated to protecting the president of the United States and those running for the job, along with their families. People are blaming the Secret Service for letting the assassin get that close to the president, and mistakes may certainly have been made. But if we’re being honest, there’s probably little we can do to ensure a perfect success rate if we are going to live in a society where it’s seen as normal to try and take out leaders. The best protection against political violence becoming a widespread phenomenon is coming down hard and fast against any threats against government officials and candidates for office. Successful attempts, or even ones that get close, have a tendency to lead to even more violence.

During times like this, people are at their most desperate for partisan rants. They want to be told that norms are breaking down and society is losing its way because of their political opponents. Why yes, my side might do bad things too, but the things we do aren’t nearly as bad, and they’re only responses to the things that the other guys did first.

Instead of diving into these tedious debates, I’ll just point out that, contrary to the claims made by some of his supporters, there is nothing inconsistent in believing both that Trump is a threat to democracy, and that one shouldn’t try to assassinate him. This is because when people start killing their political opponents, one always has to think about what might happen in response, including how the event is understood by others who might decide that they want to take their own shot at making history. I’m not saying that a political assassination can never be justified in an individual case, like the proverbial thought experiment involving Baby Hitler. Rather, it’s only that without any good methodology to identify Baby Hitlers, or even Adult Hitlers before they become Hitler, the norm against killing political leaders in all but the most extreme circumstances is one that must be upheld.