Political violence upheaval They have the power to imprint themselves in the national memory – in retrospect, they become the moments around which the rest of history unravels – but they are forever intertwined with the possibility that things could have gone exactly the other way.
If ? Questions like these haunt me: What if the would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt had hit his target in Miami in 1933? What if John F. Kennedy had given up on a convertible in Dallas in 1963? What if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t walked onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968? What if the bullet that pierced Ronald Reagan’s lung was an inch closer to his heart in 1981? What if Donald Trump had shifted his weight just before he was shot during a rally in Pennsylvania in July? If ?
Perhaps it was a collision of malice and luck that made the assassination attempt’s outcome seem both fated and completely fortuitous. But political violence rarely happens by chance. Indeed, those who study the issue most intently have been warning Americans for years that the threat of violence is escalating.
Our experience of political violence can mask its true nature: the shock of an assassination attempt, the way small things suddenly take on meaning and flares up vividly. Violence used to achieve political ends is largely predictable, whether driven by ideology, hatred, or delusion. The social conditions that exacerbate it can simmer for years, complex yet mysterious. Throughout history, and indeed today, periods of political violence have coincided with ostentatious wealth disparities, declining trust in democratic institutions, intensifying partisanship, rapid demographic change, a deluge of dehumanizing rhetoric against political opponents, and a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Once political violence has taken hold in a society, as it has in ours, it is very difficult to dispel it. Difficult, but not impossible.
As I wrote in this magazine’s April 2023 cover story, “The New Anarchy,” political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was a decade ago by almost every standard. Political conversations borrow from the rhetoric of war. People build their identities around hatred of enemies, not shared values. A 2023 University of California, Davis survey found that “a small but concerning portion of the population believes that violence, including lethal violence, is usually or always justified to advance political ends.” More Americans are bringing weapons to protests than ever before. More elected officials are facing harassment and death threats, and many effective leaders are withdrawing from politics altogether.
Top military and White House officials repeatedly told me that violent attacks would increase in the United States as the 2024 presidential election approached. Other experts told me there was a pronounced risk in places where extremist groups have already emerged, gun culture thrives, and hard-core partisans clash with one another, especially in politically important states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Clearly, their warning was correct. They went on to predict that it could take a generation or more for the current wave of violence to peak.
Our information environment threatens to accelerate the outbreak of violence. Social platforms are optimized for rhetorical warfare. Their algorithms reward emotional outbursts, wild speculation, and unbridled hostility. All of this drives engagement with websites that profit from user attention but profess no real commitment to accuracy. The most influential people on the planet, from billionaire Elon Musk to various members of Congress, foment contempt for real or supposed political opponents and encourage their legions of followers to distrust independent sources that seek to hold them accountable.
Periods of political violence always come to an end, but often not before shocking restrictions on people’s freedoms and tragic events. As I’ve written before, governments have a track record of responding brutally to political violence, in ways that undermine democratic values and curtail individual civil liberties. And political leaders are often complicit in perpetuating political violence and seeking to use it for their own ends.
I first became interested in political violence around the time of the 1993 massacre in Waco, Texas, and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Then, as the millennium drew to a close, the anger over that particular era seemed to subside, and I took that as a sign that something was going right. One researcher of political violence warned against such optimism. “The militia movement went into rapid decline in the 1990s because of Oklahoma City, not because of anything we did,” Carolyn Gallagher, who spent two years tracking right-wing paramilitary groups in Kentucky, told me. After the bombings, extremists went underground. But only for a time.
William Bernstein is The delusion of the crowdWhen I asked him if he thought January 6th would be a turning point away from violence in American politics, he responded in chilling terms: “The answer, and I know it’s never a comfortable answer, is that if the violence escalates to a point where it’s contained, then it will end.” He then asked, “I hesitate to even say this,” what would have happened if the rioters had actually hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6th. “I think that would have been the end. I don’t think it will end without some kind of cathartic catastrophe. Without that, I think the violence will just continue for a generation or two.”
These are toxic days for our country. It is fair to worry that the assassination attempt on Trump represents not the end of a cycle of violence, but an escalation in an era that has already seen congresswomen shot in supermarket parking lots, congressmen shot while playing baseball, and insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol. A certain amount of cynicism is understandable. But too many Americans are abandoning their self-governance out of political exhaustion and despair. Too many believe that yelling into the void or clicking the like button amounts to political engagement.
The only way to minimize further bloodshed is to elect leaders at all levels of society who unconditionally reject political violence in word and deed. This does not mean subscribing to bipartisanship: one can oppose Trump’s authoritarian impulses while condemning the attempt on his life. But to get through these dark times, we need to be clear about the American values we must uphold and build consensus to live up to them. And we need to understand the harmful effects of political violence. Bloodshed begets more bloodshed, and a functioning democracy cannot tolerate so much bloodshed. Political violence does not occur indiscriminately, in America or anywhere else. Violence will continue in this country until Americans come together and say, “enough is enough.”
This article will appear in the September 2024 print edition under the headline “American Outrage.” If you buy a book through a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for your support. Atlantic.
