By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Assassination, terrifying and unthinkable, is in the air again in the Great Republic. In this campaign, there have been two attempted shootings, and numerous death threats.

Like the gruesome cranial mist captured fleetingly in the Zapruder film on November 22, 1963, the risk of history-turning violence hangs over the world's most consequential electoral contest.

Had America not done what America too often does, then 60 years ago this day, the charismatic US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have been campaigning for a second term in 1964.

But events took their bloody turn and would do so again. And again.

The deadly violence of January 6, 2021, headlined the current electoral cycle just as its blithe acceptance by spineless Republicans has licensed Donald Trump's unlikely return.

Not even a vile defecating mob chanting "hang Mike Pence" and "where's Nancy?" disgusted them enough to render this toxic narcissist, persona non grata. Nor his criminal conviction and quotidian conceits.

Trump narrowly dodged an assassin's bullet just over two months ago, and last week, there was a second shooter lying in wait at a Florida golf course, armed with yet another high- powered assault rifle.

An atmosphere of intense fear and racial intolerance is common to these two periods.

The vulgar tycoon feeds this fear. Amid (unconfirmed) reports that Taylor Swift had received death threats for endorsing Harris, his instinct was not to urge restraint and civility, it was to use ex-Twitter to write simply, "I hate Taylor Swift". Message received.

The internet and social media may act as accelerants, force multipliers for conspiracy theorists and anger merchants, but America was as polarised in the 1960s as it is now.

Racial hatred sat at its heart and violence, as always, became its vehicle.

Widely admired, Kennedy enjoyed the highest average approval ratings of any modern president - his lowest was still safely above 50 per cent. But the haters - concentrated particularly in the segregationist southern states - hated him deeply. Then as now, they were armed.

Kennedy knew the dangers of visiting Dallas, a city well-known for its gun-lust and an irascible incivility towards "Yankee" liberals.

Adlai Stevenson - a democrat grandee and Kennedy's UN ambassador - had been jostled and abused in Dallas only a month earlier and even Kennedy's vanquished 1960 opponent, Richard Nixon, had called on Texans to receive the president courteously.

The atmosphere around the trip was tense.

On his last day, Kennedy reportedly said to aides and wife, Jackie "you know, we're heading into nut country today."

The virulent Dallas Morning News had run hostile editorials and carried a full-page ad calling him dangerous and a communist.

Flyers around Dallas depicted his likeness as "wanted, dead or alive" and a radio shock-jock warned listeners that the Stars and Stripes could be replaced by the Hammer and Sickle under communism.

Lies, exaggeration, fearmongering, and hate. Little has changed as Trump calls asylum seekers "not human" and "animals" who are "poisoning the blood of our country".

Ahead of the motorcade, Kennedy stared down from his hotel room and observed darkly, "all you'd have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight."

Sixty years later, the would-be assassin at Trump's campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, did just that. Right under the noses of the Secret Service, Thomas Crooks ascended a local building.

"It's important that we hold ourselves to account for the failures of July 13," said acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe yesterday, acknowledging there had been "line of sight" failures by his service.

A Trump supporter died that day. Two others were rushed to hospital with critical injuries. The plan now, apparently, is to afford presidential candidate(s), the same alienating levels of protection provided to presidents.

But how many more billions will it take to protect politicians from those they serve? It is probably an undefendable project anyway, with so much public exposure, so many angles and so much to be gained by manufacturing outrage.

What do these extraordinary measures say about America's democratic norms and the hackneyed tropes of "shared values" that are trotted out so often by unimaginative Australian leaders?

Heinous as it was, JFK's brutal murder was as culturally and symptomatically mainstream as is Trump's unfathomable appeal today.

Face it. Endemic gun violence is more defiantly American than liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For all its high ideals and florid prose, this is a country where right to life remains subordinate to the superior right to own lethal weaponry.

A society so culturally violent that people seriously contend that arming teachers with sidearms is the best answer to mass shootings.

Where is the self-reflection? There are plenty of totalitarian states where the rulers despise and oppress their citizens - think Afghanistan, where women and girls are now shrouded, anonymised and enslaved. But is there a developed country on the planet where the citizens hate each other so much they carry arms for protection from one another? In shops, hotels, and at sportsgrounds?

Where schools and kindergartens drill children on "active shooter protocols" to protect them from adults with military assault weapons?

It is not "freedom" that defines America, but something inimical to that: an immovable commitment to guns and violence.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.