More information is still emerging about the shooting that occurred at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, but while the full picture is yet to emerge, there are ways to think about the political and social climate we live in and how it may have influenced the violence.
The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, is known to have been a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about a 75-minute drive from Butler, where the rally was being held. He was a Republican (but had also donated $15 to progressive groups), carried out the attack with an AR-15-style rifle purchased by his father, and possessed at least two explosives. He killed 50-year-old Corey Comperatore and wounded Trump and two others before being shot dead by a Secret Service agent.
It’s entirely possible that this shooting won’t be considered “political” because not enough is known about the motive. But there’s no doubt that this assassination attempt has further exacerbated the already volatile political climate in the country. Since Trump took office in 2016, the United States has seen a number of incidents, including the Charlottesville protests, the Tree of Life shooting in 2018, the Buffalo shooting in 2022, and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And now, the threat of political violence looms in our future.
To better understand the unsettling and unstable times we live in, Vox spoke with four experts to explain how political polarization, state violence, online radicalization, and feelings of disenfranchisement can lead to political violence.
Based on our conversation, I offer five ways we should think about political violence in this historical moment: why it occurs, and why violent times often get worse before they get better.
Extreme polarization may increase the likelihood of political violence
This kind of violence is unpredictable, which is part of what makes it so frightening. Mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and political violence like Saturday’s shooting are deeply destabilizing, especially in extremely violent times of multiple wars and civil conflicts. But we know that social, political, and interpersonal factors contribute to overt, politically motivated violence.
Liliana Mason, Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University: Political violence is more likely when a society is politically divided along identity lines. When political parties are on opposite sides of racial, ethnic or religious divides (as political parties in the United States are), people are more likely to see their political opponents as enemies.
In the United States, partisans are so geographically divided that they have little contact with ordinary people from the other party. This creates what is known as “moral alienation,” a tendency to vilify and dehumanize our political opponents, allowing us to hurt our fellow citizens without feeling like we’re the bad guys.
Professor Eric Nisbett Policy Analysis and Communications at Northwestern University: We are very tribal, and our political identities have become almost monstrous identities. They supersede any other social or cultural identities we have. For some people, this is combined with a perception and rhetoric that dehumanizes the other side: “The other side is immoral, an existential threat to our group, to our identity…”
And if the other person is immoral, imhuman, a threat, violence is almost morally justified: “I can be violent and still be a good person.” And that’s how a lot of people around January 6, for example, thought of themselves: they’re good people. They’re righting a wrong. And in that case, violence is justified.
Political violence is more American than we’d like to admit.
Violence has always been a part of our politics. Today’s explanation “Joe Biden spoke out about this assassination attempt on his opponent about three times in about 24 hours. The first time he said, ‘This is not us.’ The second time he said, ‘This is not us.’ The third time he said, ‘This is not us.’ But students of history might recall that in some sense this is us,” he said.
Nisbet: Unfortunately, that is us. But there is something different about this historical moment. What’s different from the past decade is that the political violence is no longer just political violence, it’s partisan violence. It’s violence that is focused and centered on our political identities as Democrats and Republicans.
Previously, political violence was fairly symmetric between left and right. It was centered around a more general ideology. It was probably centered around a single issue. Now, political violence has, as has tended in recent years, centered around, “I’m a Democrat, so I support violence against Republicans,” or vice versa. And at least in terms of the number of violent acts tracked by the FBI and the domestic terrorism database, it has leaned more toward the right than the left in recent years.
Today’s extremism did not emerge from nowhere
Politically motivated public violence does not occur in a vacuum. People do not plan assassinations or bombings without a reason. Political radicalization, personal grievances, and mental illness all interact with social forces such as political polarization, as well as the widespread availability of lethal weapons, to increase the likelihood of political violence.
Kurt Braddock, Assistant Professor of Public Communication at American University: We know that extremists are often motivated by how they engage with online content, whether it’s content on social networks or the content they’re absorbing: it doesn’t happen in a black box, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Attackers usually perceive their actions as part of a larger movement that they know about and are motivated by in some way when interacting with people online.
When an assassination attempt occurs, it creates some kind of unrest in society. It often has to do with the perpetrator’s perception of that unrest. They often feel personally victimized, or that their target is a threat to them or their safety. So I think there’s a connection between state repression and actual violence against politicians.
Violence can result from people’s perception that they are losing their rights.
Loss of privilege or rights, whether real or perceived, is another motive for political violence, a pattern that is fairly easy to recognize in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American history.
Violence perpetrated by the state against its citizens also involves acts of violence against the state and its representatives. When a state exerts disproportionate violence against its citizens, whether through repressive laws or police brutality, violence against the state becomes the more logical response.
Braddock: There’s a pretty significant literature showing that one of the factors that increases violence in general — not just terrorism, but rebellions, riots, etc. — is state repression and people having a perception that they’re losing their rights, that people are being victimized in some way. This has been in the literature for quite some time.
Radicalization theory holds that as one “side” becomes increasingly radicalized, the other side will feel the need to defend itself and will become radicalized in response.
Nathan Kalmoe, executive director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Many political scientists define a state as an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. In other words, states can use violence, and other individuals or groups cannot use violence against states or each other with impunity. Thus, the threat of state violence against its citizens is central to our understanding of government, even good government.
State violence and civil political violence are often mutually supportive. For example, violent white supremacist responses to the civil rights movement often combined police violence against activists and ordinary citizens with KKK violence. Sometimes the two worked together and cooperated, but sometimes they were simply working toward the same broad goal of maintaining white supremacy.
Research by University of Michigan professor Christian Davenport and his colleagues shows that people tend to consider the appropriateness of state and citizen violence to be proportional to one another, similar to proportional/disproportionate violence in war: when police use disproportionate violence against protesters, people are more likely to use proportional violence against the police in response.
The U.S. political system is already extremely polarized, and an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate is unlikely to change that. In fact, there is reason to fear that we may see more of this type of violence in the coming months.
Nisbet: One of the drivers of political violence is what’s called metacognition: if Democrats think Republicans are violent, they’re more likely to be violent themselves, and vice versa: “If they pull out their knives, we’ll pull out our guns.” So political violence actually breeds violence, because it makes each group more willing to commit violence as a kind of self-defense mechanism. And it becomes like a self-reinforcing spiral.
Carmoe: I am very concerned about the possibility of political violence afterwards. What we know about the motivations could have a big impact on that. A majority of Americans oppose political violence, but that view changes dramatically when the other side is seen to have used violence first. The most inciting situation would be an ideologically motivated killer from the political left, but it helps that Democratic Party leaders have uniformly condemned the violence.
Braddock: I’m glad to see people on both sides speaking out against political violence, whether politically motivated or not, and I hope this trend will continue — I can’t say I’m certain, but I’m hopeful — but I worry that this will lead to more violence.
Peter Baronon Rosen and Sean Rameswaram contributed to this article..
