We still have enough checks and balances in place in our country that are working quite well without having to consider assassination.
A lot of if’s, but you asked for hypotheticals. In our country the right to bear arms helps protect to a certain degree against tyranny. If that was taken away, along with quenching the free press and it going to state run news, voices across the spectrum are no longer expressed, major voter fraud was rampant and the president actually started having his rivals dissappear time and time again under mysterious circumstances, then, I’d have to say it’s not too early to shoot the bastard, and yes, it would be a just and moral choice.
ISTM that the guys from the VFW would have taken care of the matter during the Republican clown car stage of the festivities. Certainly before Super Tuesday.
When the president is holed up in the White House with private security preventing legal means from removing him from office. Not that that would be assassination, It would be a police action.
While it may seem to be a just and moral choice to remove a very, very, very bad president by any means possible, IMHO, it would cause even greater problems because of the people that support him and put him there in the first place. The old adage, “Be careful what you wish for” comes to mind.
The problem with this is a subtle implication that disenfranchisement or oppression of a small underclass is “okay” unless it meets some threshold of people.
It’s easy to stick to “violence is never okay” arguments when all government is is minor policy changes that may make your life marginally easier or harder, but political violence is still violence. I think violence against public officials, those acting on their behalf, and those putting them in power or lobbying for their policies is morally justifiable and understandable if it’s actively enabling harm towards you. I don’t like pretending that just because something is done by congress or EO or reinforced by the way we’ve organized something instead of with a sword or gun it’s not “violence”. They’re both violence, and one can be a moral and just response to the other.
I don’t know where that line is, but I think it’s well before “they’re sending us to camps”. This is why I can’t get worked up about antifa, more radical splinters of BLM etc, etc. Yeah, some people who identify with those movements go off half cocked towards people who didn’t do anything and don’t intend to, and that’s absolutely wrong! But in principle, fighting people who want to harm you, even if the avenue of harm and violence is on its face “peaceful”, is understandable and I’d argue can be seen as just.
Now, we can have consequentialist arguments about whether it’s effective to fight legal or systemic violence with physical violence, and we can have arguments about exactly what degree of legal or systemic violence warrants what kinds of physical violence (at what point disenfranchisement warrants beating vs murder vs whatever), but I think it takes a privileged position to dismiss all violence as inherently immoral unless someone tries to North Korea mode the country.
There was some moderator push-back against this question, but I think I can answer it within the valid confines of the discussion, because the answer is “no.”
If a bad President has started breaking the law and amassing power, there is still time to address this by legitimate means.
(Besides, one might argue that every U.S. President has “begun that process!” Washington used troops against rebellious citizens; FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court; Reagan ignored treaties; Obama tried to exempt some people from deportation. All Presidents have pushed at the boundaries of the law.)
Those figures are based on John Adams’ estimate of the French Revolution, not, as is commonly supposed, the American Revolution. I think historians estimate Loyalists comprised about 20% of the population when the war began. Most Americans were undecided. In any case, had the Patriots not won the support of the majority of the colonists, the military victory–had there been one under those circumstances–would have been a hollow one that could not stand. While I’m firmly opposed to the assassination of a U.S. President under any circumstances, one-third of the population would be an insufficient basis for any decision on an issue of national importance.
But their numbers are dwindling, they get out voted.
On a practical rather than a moral level, killing Zombie Hitler probably won’t accomplish much. Whatever vision of America someone thinks they are promoting by shooting the POTUS, that vision has certainly already failed by the time Zombie Hitler is calling the shots from the White House.
Say you succeed in taking him out. What then? After all, he ran on a platform of, " I may be Zombie Hitler, but my opponent is a LIBERAL!" You still have a country full of Zombie Hitler voters, and Zombie Goering is next in line to run the Hitler administration. Zombie Hitler is just a figurehead representing something in the population at large. A bullet won’t fix that; it will only accelerate the rate at which suspected liberals are processed through the camps.
It’d be completely pointless, if the political structure is such that legal removal is impossible. The people politically supporting and protecting the president aren’t going to die when he does (unless the scope of this assassination broadens significantly, becoming a full-blown purge) so they’ll end up influencing his replacement and reacting (probably negatively) at the assassination, making the country’s situation worse.
At a guess, it might become morally acceptable if the president is holding onto power through raw force, i.e. he’s using the FBI and the military to threaten and intimidate opponents and has declared future elections postponed indefinitely with national guard units activated to quell protests.
It does seem unreasonable, but even with your 20% number, it still seems likely that just such a decision was made - and we now celebrate yearly - on the basis of the decision of a group that was probably less than half of the population by a fair amount.
Either we have to say that the Revolution was an unsupportable venture, reasonably speaking, and shouldn’t be accepted as moral, or that this is in fact sufficient - if that team ends up winning in the end.
It seems likely that you’re probably never going to get more than 1/3rd or 3/5ths or however many people to logically run through the question of whether the government is operating in a philosophically justifiable fashion. Realistically, probably less than 5 in 100 of all people could be expected to actually understand the question and form a reasoned opinion on the matter. But so if that group - the 5% - are against a revolution or an assassination, but the other 95% are all for it, because they think that there’s this great guy named Caesar who would be a much better Emperor than the lawfully elected President, and Caesar is telling them to kill the President, that fact that 95% of everyone is backing Caesar still sort of doesn’t mean that you’ve got a sufficient majority.
In a sense (despite my statement that you need a third of the country), the only real determinant is that your side wins and that they have a justification their actions that is accepted by succeeding generations.
Regrettably, that’s not much of a standard. The real Caesar had that much. Whether the Soviet revolution did or not, I’m not certain (I feel like the succeeding generations probably figured out pretty quickly that they’d done the dumb) but it’s hard to argue that they weren’t nearly as justified in their beliefs that Socialism was the only justifiable form of government as the early Americans were about Humanism.
But in terms of what you want to tell a loan wolf nut that wants to kill the President, I think that saying that you need 1/3rd of the country to back you is, at least, a wiser argument to make than “you need to expect that you’ll go down in history as a hero”.
(I was going to write how if you are a gun owner it is pretty much your obligation to overthrow tyrannical governments, but I have no desire to be on some crazy watchlist).
Here, let’s rephrase the question: When is assassinating anybody the just and moral choice? And let’s take one historical incident as an example.
In 1969, Joan Robinson Hill died under mysterious circumstances in Houston, TX (Read Tommy Thompson’s bookBlood and Money for the full story). Her husband, Dr. John Hill, was indicted for her death. His first trial ended in a mistrial. While he was awaiting retrial, he was shot to death.
Joan’s stepfather, Ash Robinson, paid for the hit on John Hill because he wasn’t happy about the mistrial. Was he right to do so?
Only because they remain rare events, because the vast majority of Americans reject the idea of assassinating our leaders, even when we think those leaders are godawful.
To give a less extreme example:
You might argue, “What’s the harm in refusing to pay my taxes? The amount I would pay is an utterly trivial fraction of the government’s total revenue.” But imagine what would happen if everyone felt that way. And then explain what makes you so special that you should be the one who doesn’t have to follow the rule.
You’re probably right, but they’re old. And slow. Takes 'em a while to get some momentum going.