The Long Simmer of Political Violence in America

For the past several years, American politics have heated to a rolling boil. Members of Congress have been shot, an intruder attacked the House speaker’s husband in their home with a hammer, and a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Political violence is not new. Yet this weekend, when former President Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—an apparent assassination attempt that left one person dead and two others injured—it felt as if the kettle had boiled over.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some officials across the political spectrum called for de-escalation. American politics have grown too pitched, they argued, and it is time to turn down the temperature.

The incident has turned a mirror on America. How did we get here? How true are the claims, as President Joe Biden put it in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, that “this is not who we are”? What does history tell us about the necessary steps to reclaim a peaceful democracy and retreat from what seems to be the point of no return?

On this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic, I spoke with staff writer Anne Applebaum and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, who have both written about political violence in America and abroad, to examine these questions.

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Adam Harris: This Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, injuring candidate and former President Donald Trump, killing one person, and critically injuring two others.

We’re still learning details about the gunman himself and how people react to this horrible event.

What we do know now is that it was a tragic and terrifying inflection point in an already tense presidential campaign. I’m Adam Harris, and this is Radio Atlantic. Our regular host Hanna Rosin is working on a special project.

And with me to talk about this distressing moment in American politics and history are two Atlantic voices.

One is staff writer and historian Anne Applebaum. Hello, Anne.

Anne Applebaum: Greetings.

Harris: And Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Hey, Adrienne.

Adrienne LaFrance: Hey Adam.

Harris: Thank you both for joining me on this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. So Anne, on Saturday, Americans saw something that they aren’t used to seeing in this modern era. As you’ve processed this with everyone else, what have you been thinking about over the last few days?

Applebaum: I’ve thought quite a lot about the normalization of violence.

There was an attempt to kidnap Nancy Pelosi.

The attacker used a hammer to attack her husband, but had meant to reach her.

During the January 6th events, there were calls for the murder of Mike Pence.

Somebody had a noose there ready for him. It’s hard to know how serious that was, but it was certainly—the language of assassination was present. And then there was also an attempt—however serious, still hard to tell—to kidnap and assassinate the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.

So we’re actually in a moment when the normalization of violence, to use that phrase again, is part of the culture. And I should say it’s not only famous people, it’s election officials. It’s ordinary, low-level, local politicians. The idea that violence is an okay way to express your political opinion is much more widespread now than it was even just a few years ago.

Harris: And Adrienne, you know, responding to that, thinking about these previous events that we’ve seen even in this election cycle. In a cover story about extremism last year, you cited a 2022 UC Davis poll that found one in five Americans believed that political violence would be at least sometimes justified.

So what does this most recent instance say about the undercurrent of political violence in America?

LaFrance: I think Anne is exactly right that the signs of a society becoming more comfortable with political violence have been all around us for a while now, concerningly. It’s terrible. You mentioned the UC Davis study. They found a small but substantial percentage of Americans believe that lethal violence is justified to get to their preferred political ends.

You see more Americans bringing weapons to political protests in recent years, political aggression often expressed in the rhetoric of war, the building of political identities around hatred for the other or hatred of one’s political foes rather than articulation of whatever value someone might have.

So this has been in the air—in addition to the concrete examples that Anne provided of actual violence—anyone who tracks this has been warning for years that we’re in it and that it’s getting worse.

Harris: And you mentioned something that—thinking about weapons and how guns factor into all of this—what is the sort of ramping up of access to firearms meant for the forms that political violence can take in American society?

LaFrance: One expert who I talked to in recent years—you know, I had been asking about where we should anticipate there to be violence—because the nature of political discourse is so dispersed. Often you hear people invoke the possibility of another civil war. And for Americans, I think you think of the civil war of the 19th century, understandably. But the kind of fight we’re having politically is different today. It’s just the way society is organized is different. And this person that I asked—I had asked where should we look for the threats of violence?—and I remember more than one expert telling me that it’s likely to be in places where there’s already militia groups emerging, where people who do disagree strongly with one another bump up against one another, where there’s heightened partisanship, and in particular swing states.

So the states that came up again and again in those conversations were Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona. And so you know, I think guns are broadly available in America, generally, but with an incident like this, you have to ask about access to the weapon that was used.

Harris: And so as Adrienne mentioned, we often bring up this idea of a civil war, kind of around when we’re thinking about political violence, because that’s our sort of touchstone example. But is that the right way to be thinking about political violence in America?

Applebaum: It’s funny, I saw the movie Civil War, the one that came out recently, and although it was better than I thought it was going to be, it struck me as wrong. Because for those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s sort of two sides fighting and they have big weapons, they have tanks and helicopters, and there’s a literal war inside the United States with teams of people shooting other teams of people. And that doesn’t feel to me like what could happen here.

I think the better idea of what could happen here is something that looks more like civic breakdown and a really good example might be Northern Ireland. So Northern Ireland was a very, very bitterly divided community in which people literally had different identities. Some people felt themselves to be Irish.

Some felt themselves to be British. And that wasn’t reconcilable. You couldn’t find a halfway point in between where you were half and half. And what you had in Northern Ireland was a low-level, constant violence. So bombs, murders, assassinations, explosions. So the province was roughly ungovernable. And over the years there were different phases—I don’t want to overgeneralize it. There was a British police force that tried to bring calm to the situation. There were many years of negotiations. But that seems to me the kind of world that we could wind up living in, or maybe parts of the country could wind up living in. As you say, maybe Pennsylvania, Arizona seems like a good possibility given how many death threats have been made to Arizona election officials and other non-conformist Republicans in Arizona, some of whom I’ve talked to.

And that’s a model of a society that feels ungovernable, and people are frightened to go out of their house at night—not because of crime, but because they might be assassinated by the other side, or even assassinated by their own side if they’ve been insufficiently partisan. Northern Ireland also felt a little bit like a gang war.

People who tried to reach out to the other side or who tried to become peacemakers could also become victims of violence. Anybody who was in the center, or anybody who wasn’t a participant, became a target. And that’s actually where I see the United States going and in some senses, we’re already there.

If you hear stories, as I say, from elected officials and others in states where they haven’t conformed to whatever the partisan rules are, you hear them afraid of violence. I was actually in Tennessee a few months ago, and I met Republicans there who didn’t go along with the MAGA version of Republicanism that’s prevalent in Tennessee, and some of them were afraid.

I mean, you can’t say it in public. You have to be careful how you talk in front of your neighbors. It’s even worse of course if you’re a Democrat. And people are afraid to participate in politics. They’re afraid to work for political campaigns. It’s very hard to get Democrats even to be candidates for the state Senate and legislature in parts of Tennessee because it’s so dangerous to be a Democrat.

And I think we’re already there in a lot of parts of the country.

Harris: What would that sort of chilling effect on people’s ability or willingness to want to go into politics, what does that mean for our broader democracy?

Applebaum: It means that, you know, politics become, instead of a forum for civic participation and a place where we can iron out our difficulties and our differences through dialogue, it becomes something that’s fraught with danger.

People want to stay away from it. Maybe people become cynical and nihilistic. This is what happens in authoritarian countries—people don’t want to participate in politics because it just feels like everybody is corrupt, everybody is violent. The extreme language puts a lot of people off—not just from, from being a candidate, but from participating in any way, even from voting or even listening to the political news.

And by the way, I’ve heard that a lot in the last few days, from people who are not journalists, or not in politics. You know, I just don’t want to hear what’s going on. I don’t want to listen to the news.

Harris: It’s almost like I just want to tune it out.

Applebaum:I just want to turn it off.

Harris: Adrienne, you’ve reported recently on the sort of rise of political violence in America.

One thing that you said you learned in your reporting was how other cultures managed to endure sustained political violence and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact. And I think that’s the thing that’s kind of on all of our minds, like, how do we keep this democracy intact? So what are the necessary next steps to ensure that democracy sort of lives on?

LaFrance: I think Anne hit on it exactly. I mean you need people who are willing to participate in the project of self governance and that requires capable people to lead at all levels of society.

It requires, in my view, voters who are willing to say, enough, we are not going to tolerate violence, and we are going to elect people who unconditionally reject violence as a way of governing or as a way of life. I mean, the tricky part is, the history is not tremendously hopeful and there isn’t one blueprint. You know when I set out to report the story you referenced, Anne and I actually talked about this a lot in the early stages of my reporting in part because I wanted to hear from her about sort of what are the other countries that got it right and what can we learn from conflict resolution in Ireland or elsewhere?

And the truth is, once you’re in endemic political violence, it can take generations to get out of it. I mean, I certainly hope that’s not the case for us here, but it’s the sort of messy, almost boring, day-to-day work of democracy that needs to be done, and that’s exactly what’s declining.

Harris: Yeah, you mentioned that there isn’t necessarily a road map. When the U.S. has reached these sort of pitched moments in the past, how did we work our way back?

LaFrance: Right, so one example that I thought might be— which I hoped was a hopeful example going in, but then was sort of disabused of that optimism—was I had thought about the paramilitary movements of the 1990s and sort of the post Waco climate of political violence, and how in the late ’90s, after the Oklahoma City bombing, it seemed like tensions had cooled.

This was my sort of like remembering that moment. It was like, Oh, things were tense, but then they domestically cooled. I talked to some scholars who study closely that era and, and those movements. And what they had told me was actually, it wasn’t that we did something right, or there’s something positive we can replicate. But in fact, the Oklahoma City bombing, which was you know, a terrible attack that killed, I think, 168 people, that that was a cataclysmic act of violence that then, of course, led to accountability by law enforcement, which sort of cooled the movements for a while, but didn’t totally dismantle them. And so obviously, you don’t want to think that worse violence is the only path out.

But that is something I heard from lots of scholars. Sometimes it takes people being startled into recognition of how bad things are, in order to move past periods of violence.

Harris: And this is one for both of you. Just thinking about this moment and how it situates in the sort of broader historical timeline of American politics. Thinking about the fact that this is a nation that began with a revolution, it kind of began with violence and in a sort of different way. How does this moment fit for you into the timeline of American history?

Applebaum: It’s funny, I recently read a book that was published decades ago, which is Bernard Bailyn’s book, which is called The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. And one of the revelations in it for me was, first of all, the amount of violence that preceded the revolution.

So, burning down the houses of colonial governors. Also the widespread conspiracy theories, that, you know, the British had a secret plot to do this or that and we need to defend ourselves against it.

In addition, of course, the colonists had real grievances and there were also many brave and valiant and amazing people among them and the process by which we eventually wrote a constitution is pretty extraordinary.

But the resemblance of that moment of violence and that moment of anger to other moments that came later. I mean, the most obvious one is the lead up to the Civil War when you had cycle after cycle of violence—whether it was in Kansas, whether it was in the southern states. There was a series of violent events that preceded the Civil War, and then, of course, there were a series of violent events that followed the Civil War as the North tried to reestablish the Union and tried to reestablish a Constitutional state. There was a rebellion against it, in effect, that ended with Jim Crow and the segregated South, which kind of kept the lid on things for a while. And then we had the Civil Rights Movement, which was another era of extraordinary violence.

I was recently in Birmingham, and I went to the Civil Rights Institute, and there’s a long wall there where they have a timeline.

And if you start in the 40s and go into the 50s, I mean, every week, every few days, every month, there are incidents of violence, whether they’re bombings or protests or somebody being beaten up. So some of what’s happening now feels very much to me like it’s a continuity. We’ve reached these moments of bitter conflict in the past and they’ve sometimes had very violent resolutions.

What you just said, Adrienne, I think is incredibly important, which is that sometimes there has to be a cataclysm before people understand how bad things are and they move back. The second World War had that function in Europe, you know, after the Second World War, people said, never again, let’s rewrite the rules. After the American Revolution, same thing, never again. Let’s write our constitution to make it possible to have a democracy and not to have constant strife. I don’t know that we’ve reached that moment yet in American politics where something happens and it makes everybody draw back and say never again. I mean, even in the wake of this attempted assassination of Donald Trump, one of the first reactions from one of the most prominent Republicans, J.D. Vance, was to essentially say, this is Biden’s fault. There was an immediate partisan ugly reaction on the part of a lot of people.

LaFrance: And that’s so interesting to me too, because we absolutely need to assess who is responsible for stoking political violence in America. I think calls for unity are important, but not without the need for scrutiny. At the same time, if you look at the way political violence operates, it really does operate similarly regardless of the ideology behind it.

And so that’s not to say we should both-sides it, obviously we shouldn’t. But I have found it instructive to look at past periods of political violence across the ideological spectrum because you see the same things happening over and over again.

Harris: With that actually in mind, you mentioned a little bit earlier that the way out of this is for people to have the confidence to run for office, or people to become politically engaged, all of that good rosy stuff that would actually be good for the fabric of American society. But you’ve also written about how officials have been warning about potentially increased attacks and political violence as we move towards this November election date, which is only a couple of months away. What are we doing to ensure that we are steering away from more violence in the next couple of months? How do politicians ensure that we’re not moving towards more violence?

Applebaum: The best way to do this–and this is also, there’s a lesson from Northern Ireland here—the best way to do this is to make as much of the conversation as possible about real life. In other words, as opposed to your political identity. So, about the economy, about building roads, about schools, about education, about health care. Because those are issues that we can disagree about, and maybe even strongly disagree about, but we’re probably not going to kill each other over them.

Whereas when the argument is about your identity versus somebody else’s identity, then you might kill them. The Northern Ireland lesson, actually, the peace process was not about making Catholics and Protestants like each other. That was pointless. I mean, they’re not going to like each other. But, just to bring them into common conversation. So, okay, you don’t like each other, but you can talk about, should the bridge be on the, this part of the river or should it be further down the river? And should the road go through this neighborhood or should it go through another neighborhood?

And this was very granular work, and there’s some people who argue that even that didn’t work and people still don’t like each other and there still could be another cycle of violence there too. But the more we talk about concrete things in the real world, and the less we are having battles of dueling identity, the better.

The catch is that battles of dueling identity are more emotional and attract more attention, and make people care more than the conversation about how healthcare should be financed. And actually the politics of the United States, certainly since the Second World War, have mostly been conducted on that level.

These were policy arguments. What made Barack Obama and George W. Bush different wasn’t some big identity clash. It was about, they had different views of how the economy should work, for example. And the more we can get back to that, the better.

LaFrance: Well, and one thing I would just add to that is, we also have to recognize that relative to earlier periods of political violence, the informational environment we’re in is different. And that’s not a good thing. I mean, talk about stoking emotional reactions. The architecture of the social web is designed to reward anger and a lack of restraint and outbursts that we of course are seeing now.

And that’s a whole nother factor to contend with as we’re trying to navigate this as a country.

Harris: This is my last question, for both of you, and it’s about the reactions that people have had to Saturday’s shooting. Democratic representative Jared Golden of Maine has cautioned against what he called sort of hyperbolic threats about the stakes of this election and said, “It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism, or a battle against fascists or socialists bent on destroying America. These are dangerous lies.” Now you both have written about the high stakes of this election and the danger of another Trump presidency. What’s your reaction to his comments and the other calls to tamp down criticism of the former president?

LaFrance: I think you’re seeing this a lot, not just from him, but you’re seeing this a lot on the right. And you know, my belief is that Americans are sophisticated enough to be warned against authoritarianism when that threat is credible, which it is. And also to not take that concern and turn it into violence. And so, you know, I think we need to be more sophisticated than say, you know, never criticize anyone truthfully, lest someone take that as a call for violence. And the stakes of this election are high.

So, you know, our colleague David Frum wrote a powerful essay about the need for nuance. It’s an extraordinarily complex moment, but the idea that you can’t criticize a very powerful person credibly is not the way to run our country either.

Applebaum: And this, the one very difficult point, and I think I alluded to this already, is that one of the main sources of the normalization of violence in our political culture is Donald Trump, who laughed at the attack on Nancy Pelosi, who’s talked about using violence against political demonstrators, and on and on and on and on.

And I think if we’re somehow not supposed to talk about that, then we’re doing everybody a disservice, because that is a very important source of the fraught nature of the current moment.

Harris: We’ll of course obviously be learning more over the coming days, but thank you both for talking with me.

Applebaum: Thank you.

LaFrance: Thanks for having us

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Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Adam Harris and thank you for listening to this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We’ll be back with a new episode as usual on Thursday.