In a bygone age, historians and philosophers asserted that even successful assassinations were utterly inconsequential. The deaths of ancient rulers such as Philip of Macedon and Julius Caesar may have been dramatic, but the Hegelian and Marxist view of time saw history shaped by structural forces: class, economic growth, military development, geography. By comparison, a small knife, or a gust of wind that bends the trajectory of a bullet, was a trifle. After the death of Abraham Lincoln, the British politician Benjamin Disraeli put it bluntly: “Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
This assumption flipped in the 20th century. Almost every chronicle of World War I treats the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as its precipitating event. More recently, the killing of President Juvénal Habyarimana seems to have unleashed the Rwandan genocide, and historians including David Halberstam have argued that the assassination of John F. Kennedy prolonged the Vietnam War.
Successful assassinations are rare. In the 2009 paper “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” Jones and his fellow economist Benjamin Olken amassed a data set of 298 assassination attempts on world leaders from 1875 to 2004; only 59 resulted in a leader’s death.
“When an authoritarian leader is killed, we see substantial moves toward democratization,” Jones told me. “But when that would-be assassin fails, the evidence is a mild move in the other direction, which is toward authoritarianism, even if the effect size is smaller.” When I asked how their research applied to the failed attempt to assassinate Trump, Olken stressed that failed assassinations led to a “tightening of the screws” only in authoritarian countries. “In democracies, we do not see that at all,” Olken said. “In our historical data, the United States is very much a democracy.”
The question before us today is whether and for how long that will remain true. Trump, a man who not long ago attempted to overturn the results of an election that he had decisively lost, is on the precipice of another four years as president of the United States, buoyed by a Supreme Court decision that expands the legal immunity of that office. “We’re in a time in the United States where there is more talk around authoritarianism and an increase in presidential power, along with explicit concerns around Trump’s plans in terms of being contained by checks and balances,” Jones said. “If you think of the U.S. as a democracy, you’d think this assassination attempt would have little effect on our institutions and politics. But if you think we’re edging toward authoritarianism, you might have this concern.” A successful assassination is a tragedy. A failed one is a test.