Opinion: What it will take to calm America

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the forthcoming book, “Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

On Sunday evening, President Joe Biden spoke from the Oval Office, calling on Americans to temper their passions. In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, Biden reiterated his message that there is no room for violence in our politics and that everyone needs to take a breath and calm down. The nation needs to “lower the temperature,” he said. “No matter how strong our convictions,” Biden added, we must “never descend into violence.”

Will the message work? Coming at a pivotal moment in his own reelection campaign against Trump, Biden’s address is something of a stress test for what presidents can accomplish when political tensions spin out of control. Biden’s appeal is not coming in a vacuum; many political leaders across the spectrum have denounced the attack on Trump and called for calm. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNN Sunday,

“The rhetoric has consequences. When you have a heated environment and you have political division in this country, like we have in the age of social media, everything is amplified, and everyone can go on and turn the dial. So we need to work on bringing that down so that we can have thoughtful debate and we can have policy discussions.”

By virtue of his office, Biden is singularly positioned to attempt to soothe America. But sadly, even if Biden was not in such a fragile political position, the odds would be stacked against the president, as history suggests.

Americans lived through a horrendous moment on November 22, 1963 when a gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy. The event, which was of greater magnitude given the fatal outcome, traumatized the nation. A president who embodied the promise of a new generation had been slain. All sorts of theories swirled about what happened in Dallas, most of which were connected to the divisive issues of the era — civil rights, anti-communism, right-wing extremism and more.

As soon as Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency, he too appealed to the nation to restore its better angels. Let us continue, he said, urging Americans to move forward with Kennedy’s agenda as the best memorial to the fallen leader. He said: “Our American unity does not depend upon unanimity. We have differences; but now, as in the past, we can derive from those differences strength, not weakness; wisdom, not despair. Both as a people and a government we can unite upon a program, a program which is wise, and just, enlightened and constructive.”

But Johnson soon learned that presidential appeals to moderation often fall flat. The huge fault lines created by divisive issues that predated Kennedy’s assassination only widened. The civil rights movement intensified its effort to achieve racial justice through legislation while the White backlash grew worse and more violent.

The pressure from America’s youth to abandon traditional social and cultural values involving matters such as sexuality and style only grew stronger, as was on display at the Woodstock concert in 1969. At the same time, the growing culture wars between college students and the people whom President Richard Nixon would call the “silent majority” intensified.

And Johnson made things worse himself, as he accelerated a war in Vietnam that turned into one of the most divisive issues the nation ever faced. Americans fought bitterly over the military conflict, driving many further and further apart by the time Johnson stunned the political world when he announced that he would not run for reelection on March 31, 1968.

Throughout the 1960s, political violence flared. President Kennedy’s tragic death did not become a basis for reconciliation. Instead, Americans endured more assassinations that created shock and dismay. Malcolm X was slain in February 1965. In 1968, the horrors intensified with the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April and the killing in June of Senator Robert F. Kennedy after he won the California Democratic primary.

The bloody police crackdown on protesters in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention in 1968 symbolized how deep the anger had become in the body politic. In his 1968 campaign, Nixon stoked the divisions with his appeal to “law and order” and blasts against the protesters who had taken to the streets.

Of course, the decades that followed the 1960s have been characterized by intense division, polarization and political warfare. Americans moved further and further apart after 1963, not closer together.

The history of the 1960s should remind us today that after Saturday’s shocking attempt on the life of Donald Trump, Biden has an uphill battle to calm the nation.  The issues that divide the parties remain deep, the political processes will continue to foster discord, and many political leaders are likely to return to the toxic rhetoric that has been normalized in recent years.

Fighting against political violence will require much more than a speech. It will depend on a new generation of leaders willing to establish guardrails on what is permissible, it will require policies to address guns and psychological problems, it will require institutional reforms to create more room in the political system for pulling back from the extremes.

Unless the country is willing to take bold steps, presidential speeches won’t do much to bring us back from the precipice we stand on in 2024.