Trump is an authoritarian who must not win. Saying that is not inciting violence | Jan-Werner Mueller

No one should accept the idea that that opposing Trump's authoritarian aspirations is equal to incitement to violence

The horrific attempt to assassinate Donald Trump - and reactions to it - created a kind of X-ray of our body politic. It demonstrates how, contrary to the conventional wisdom about polarization" - which suggests some kind of symmetry between the parties moving towards extreme poles - US politics is fundamentally asymmetrical. Democrats, from Biden to AOC, have been statesmanlike and stateswomanlike, condemning political violence in unison. Republicans, by contrast, have immediately blamed the attack on Biden. Worse, they have used the attack for a novel form of blackmail: stop warning about Trump's authoritarianism or be accused of inciting violence. Of course, Trump must be protected on the campaign trail and beyond; at the same time, US democracy must be protected from Trump.

Democrats were right to repeat the civics textbook wisdom that democracy is about processing conflicts - including deep moral disagreements - in a peaceful manner. Meanwhile, commentators, out of naivety or noble idealism, did not always choose to remain faithful to the historical record: political violence might, in theory, be un-American;" in practice it is, alas, as American as apple pie. If anything, the recent period - both in the US and European democracies - has been somewhat exceptional in not featuring many high-profile attempts on politician's lives (which is not to deny the continuity of racist domestic terrorism in the US).

Jan-Werner Muller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist