American Fury
6 min read
Convulsions of political violence have a way of imprinting on the national memory. They become, in retrospect, the moments from which the rest of history seems to unspool. Yet they are forever intertwined with the possibility that things could have gone exactly the other way.
What if ? becomes a haunting question. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would-be assassin had hit his target in Miami in 1933? What if John F. Kennedy had forgone the convertible ride 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 in 1981 had been an inch closer to his heart? What if Donald Trump had shifted his weight just before a gunman shot at him during a rally in Pennsylvania in July? What if ?
Maybe it is the collision of malice and luck that makes the outcome of an attempted assassination seem simultaneously fated and wholly random. But political violence is rarely random. In fact, those who study the subject most assiduously have been warning Americans for years that threats of violence are escalating.
Our experience of political violence—the shock of an assassination attempt, how the smallest details suddenly burn bright with meaning—can obscure its true nature. Violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideology, hatred, or delusions, is broadly predictable. The social conditions that exacerbate it can simmer for years, complex but unmysterious. Again and again throughout history, and indeed today, periods of political violence coincide with ostentatious wealth disparity, faltering trust in democratic institutions, intensifying partisanship, rapid demographic change, an outpouring of dehumanizing rhetoric about one’s political foes, and soaring conspiracy theorizing. Once political violence becomes endemic in society, as it has in ours, it is terribly difficult to dissolve. Difficult, but not impossible.
As I wrote in “The New Anarchy,” the April 2023 cover story for this magazine, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was a decade ago by nearly every measure. Political conversation borrows the rhetoric of war. People build their identity not around shared values but around a hatred of their foes. A 2023 UC Davis survey found that “a small but concerning segment of the population considers violence, including lethal violence, to be usually or always justified to advance political objectives.” More Americans bring weapons to protests than they did in previous years. A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, which has prompted many capable leaders to drop out of politics entirely.
Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House told me repeatedly that they believed the United States would see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election drew near. Other experts talked about pronounced danger in places where extremist groups had already emerged, where gun culture is thriving, and where hard-core partisans bump up against one another, especially in politically consequential states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Clearly, they were right in their warning. They further predicted that the current wave of violence would take a generation or longer to crest.
Our informational environment threatens to accelerate outbreaks of violence. Social platforms are optimized for rhetorical warfare. Their algorithms reward emotional outbursts, wild speculation, and unchecked hostility, all of which drive engagement with websites that profit off user attention but profess no real commitment to accuracy. Some of the most powerful people on the planet—the billionaire Elon Musk, various members of Congress—stoke contempt for their political adversaries, real and perceived, and encourage legions of followers to distrust the independent sources of information that try to hold them accountable.
Periods of political violence do end. But often not without shocking retrenchments of people’s freedoms or catastrophic events coming first. As I’ve written previously, governments have a record of responding to political violence brutally, and in ways that undermine democratic values and dismantle individual civil liberties. And political leaders are frequently complicit in perpetuating political violence, seeking to harness it for their own ends.
I first became interested in political violence around the time of the Waco, Texas, massacre in 1993 and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In the years that followed, as the millennium drew to a close, the furies of that particular era appeared to cool, which I took as a sign that something had gone right. One scholar of political violence cautioned against such optimism. “The militia movement waned very quickly in the 1990s not because of anything we did, but because of Oklahoma City,” Carolyn Gallaher, who spent two years tracking a right-wing paramilitary group in Kentucky, told me. After the bombing, extremists went underground. But only for a time.
William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, put it in chilling terms when I asked him whether he thought January 6 would be a turning point away from violence in American politics. “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm,” he said. What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate to say this”—but what if the rioters actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I think that would have ended it. I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.”
These are poisonous days in our nation. It is reasonable to worry that the attempt on Trump’s life represents not the end of a cycle of violence, but an escalation in an era that has already seen a congresswoman shot in a supermarket parking lot, a congressman shot while playing baseball, and the U.S. Capitol stormed by insurrectionists. Some degree of cynicism is understandable. But too many Americans are allowing political exhaustion and despair to justify their own abstention from self-governance. Too many believe that screaming into the void, or clicking the “Like” button, amounts to political involvement.
The only way to minimize further bloodshed is to choose leaders at every level of society who reject political violence unconditionally, in word and in deed. This does not mean acquiescing to both‑sidesism—you can still oppose Trump’s authoritarian impulses while condemning the attempt on his life. Making it through this dark time does, however, require articulating American values worth preserving, and building consensus toward reaching them. And it requires understanding the deleterious effects of political violence. Bloodshed begets more bloodshed, and a functioning democracy can only withstand so much of it. There are no random acts of political violence in America, or anywhere else. There will be violence in our nation until Americans come together to say “Enough.”
This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “American Fury.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
