This story is part of a series on electoral violence worldwide. Read the full package here.
Americans are living through an extraordinary era of political violence. For years, political violence has been on the rise across the political spectrum—not just according to anecdotal examples but also based on rigorous long-term studies of a representative sample of U.S. citizens. Indeed, support for political violence has now become “normal,” at least when people are asked about the use of violence to achieve political goals that they also endorse.
Violent populism, meaning the violent mass support for a political leader, party, political ideology, or mass movement, on both the right and left pose a grave threat to modern democracy in the United States.
To understand public attitudes, the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has conducted quarterly nationally representative surveys of support for political violence and confidence in democracy since June 2021, fielded by NORC, previously known as the National Opinion Research Center. These surveys show that political violence is supported by determined minorities on both the right and the left and at disturbingly high and stable levels.
They also show that large fractions of Americans see the nation’s politics as broken and are deeply distrustful of the value of elections to solve problems. They see the leading political candidates for the presidency as dangers to democracy and believe political conspiracy theories about the malicious and corrupt behavior of the federal government. In other words, support for political violence is now squarely in the mainstream of Americans’ thinking and a normalized tool to achieve political goals when peaceful means fail.
The most distressing development in the past year has been a spate of assassination attempts and politically motivated mass shootings. In July, a gunman tried to shoot former U.S. President Donald Trump at a campaign rally and ended up killing a civilian and wounding three others, including Trump himself; the gunman was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper. In September, another man was arrested for attempting to assassinate Trump in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The United States has also seen multiple attempts to assassinate or severely harm leaders across the political spectrum. In October 2022, a man broke into U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home with the intention of interrogating and harming her; she was not home, and the home invader later attacked her husband. In June 2023, an individual was arrested while surveilling the Washington, D.C., home of former president Barack Obama with weapons in his van. In June 2022, an individual was arrested for plotting to kill conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
By any count, the number of these events has grown since 2018 and appears to be higher than at any time since the rash of high-level political assassinations and attempts in the 1960s and early 1980s. Indeed, the last nearly fatal attempt to assassinate a sitting U.S. president was against Ronald Reagan in 1981, more than 40 years ago.
And it is not only political leaders and their families being targeted. Over the past six years, the United States has witnessed a number of mass shootings targeted at ethnic groups, such as Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018; Hispanics at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019; and African Americans at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. All three aforementioned attacks were motivated by the right-wing “great replacement theory,” which originated in France but has influenced white supremacists around the world. The theory’s core idea is that elites are conspiring to deliberately replace the white population with nonwhite people—and the attacks were meant to punish and deter this outcome, as all three shooters explained in their manifestos.
The United States has also witnessed multiple instances of violent protests from both the right and the left.
During the summer of 2020, the George Floyd protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, but there were some instances of violence, including looting and attacks on police stations and vehicles, for the purpose of compelling local political leaders to “defund the police,” a goal associated with the left. These instances of political violence occurred in over 100 major cities, including Minneapolis, Portland, New York City, and Chicago.
On Jan. 6, 2021, around 2,000 Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol—breaking through barricades, fighting Capitol and Washington, D.C., police, and ultimately hunting U.S. lawmakers inside the building—all in an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, who was president-elect at the time.
In the wake of the escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Oct. 7, 2023, hundreds of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protests occurred in many U.S. cities and on college campuses in the fall and again in the spring of 2024. And almost immediately, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim incidents of violence and intimidation rose.
There is also the threat of domestic terrorism. According to statistics collected by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, incidents of groups and individuals carrying out attacks of domestic terrorism increased by 357 percent between 2013 and 2021. This includes violence for ideologies across the political spectrum. While anti-government militias, white supremacists, and likeminded extremists conducted about 49 percent of all attacks and plots in 2021, violent incidents by anarchists, anti-fascists, and likeminded extremists rose from 23 percent in 2020 to 40 percent in 2021, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
There has also been a rise in threats prosecuted by the Justice Department to members of Congress—targeting both Republicans and Democrats—for years. To understand more clearly whether the recent rise of political violence incidents is a real phenomenon rather than a product of a human tendency to exaggerate a handful of salient events, CPOST studied every threat prosecuted by the Justice Department to members of Congress from 2001 to 2023. It found that the annual number of threats increased fivefold starting in 2017—the first year of Trump’s presidency—and stayed consistently at that annual high every year through 2023. Targets were roughly half Republicans and half Democrats, as the graphic below shows for the most recent years.
What’s going on in the United States? The first step in understanding major upswings in political violence is knowing what the public thinks. As scholars have long demonstrated, well-functioning democracies and peaceful resolution of political disputes turns on more than the mechanics of electoral politics. They also hinge critically on public support for norms of restraint in the use of force and confidence in the ability of elections to settle disputes fairly. Historically, the more public support for violence, the more common and dangerous actual violence becomes—even in countries considered to be mature democracies.
The news on this front is not comforting. Scholars have long known that public commitment to democratic norms—particularly, confidence in the legitimacy of elections and restraint in the use of violence to settle political disputes beyond the ballot box—are crucial foundations for a constitutional government and to constrain elites who might seek to weaponize institutions for their private concerns. But CPOST’s surveys show that public support of democratic norms is not as high as we would like to imagine and support for the use of force to achieve political goals is at worrying levels—moving well beyond a tiny fringe, with significant minorities supporting violence for causes on both the right and left. Hence, it is no wonder that would-be lone wolves and flash mobs think that their acts of political violence enjoy a mantel of legitimacy.
The good news is that 75 percent of Americans surveyed still abhor political violence. Political leaders at all levels of government, community leaders, scholars, and the media all need to lean into the 75 percent, empowering them to speak up against political violence wherever it comes from. The United States’ political leaders and media figures have an especially powerful role to play. The goal should not be to dampen political enthusiasm, which is so critical for political campaigns. Rather, the goal should be to redirect political anger away from violence and toward voting. Americans should absolutely “fight” for their political future. However, that must mean electoral competition as the venue for nonviolent confrontation and not letting that competition transform into physical violence.
In the United States, the next national election is always only two years away—and all political leaders and media figures have a responsibility to stand up vigorously for these norms that truly safeguard our democracy.