Low Decoupling And The Trump Shooting

When presidents get shot, thinking gets poor

Trump was recently shot at during a campaign rally. Not much is known about the shooter other than the fact that he, you know, tried to kill the former president. The online commentary is predictably stupid in myriad ways.

First of all, lots of people, including former president Bush, are calling the shooter cowardly. No, he’s not cowardly, he’s bad. Those are different things! The 9/11 hijackers were not cowardly, though they were quite bad—they were in fact very brave, willing to give their lives for something they believe in. Anyone who gives their life for what they believe in is extremely brave, even if they believe in something bad.

Everything is, of course, breaking down on tediously partisan lines. Republicans are claiming Democrats who criticized Trump are complicit in the shooting.

(I generally think you should get evidence for your claims before accusing someone of complicity in attempted homicide, but what do I know—I’m just a lowly blogger).

These same Republicans, of course, would never admit complicity if the shooting had been directed towards Biden, despite making similar wildly hyperbolic claims. In fact, Trump himself mocked Paul Pelosi after a savage hammer attack. Does this mean it’s okay for Democrats to hyperbolically claim that Trump is Hitler? No! But it does mean that people from both parties come away from this looking pretty bad.

Many on the right are accusing Democrats of hypocrisy, claiming, in one breath, that Trump is like Hitler, and in the other wishing him a speedy recovery. But it’s not the same people saying both of those things! Seriously, find one prominent person who compared Trump seriously to Hitler and then wished him a speedy recovery! This is like accusing Republicans of hypocrisy because some support arming Ukraine and others don’t. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s just members of a group disagreeing.

Many people are low-decouplers. This means they confuse different standards of normative evaluation. They object to statements that are literally true but sound bad—things that are correct but shouldn’t be asserted. Bush’s statement about the attack being cowardly is the best example of this: something can be unfortunate but not cowardly. Yet there’s a more common strain of low decoupling and confusion on this subject.