The Rising Tide of Political Violence

It is commonplace for Americans to assume that their country’s problems are sui generis. Since the July 13 assassination attempt against former U.S. President Donald Trump, many commentators have portrayed the event and the tensions around it as unprecedented. Others have reached for comparisons, but they have almost always been domestic—focusing, for instance, on the astounding number of assault weapons in private hands in the United States compared with the number in every other country on earth.

It is certainly true that the shooting was a uniquely horrifying American moment, albeit one that was part of a rising tide of threats. There has been a drumbeat of major violent events (or near-events) in recent years: the mob attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential vote; the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball game in 2017; the kidnapping plot against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. Under the radar, this dangerous environment had intensified for all other kinds of public servants, as well. Between 2016 and 2021, threats against members of Congress rose tenfold, dropping only somewhat following Trump’s presidency. Threats to federal judges have doubled since 2021. And in recent quarterly polls, a fifth of local elected officials—such as school board members and county commissioners—report that they have received violent threats.

But Americans should realize that such problems are not theirs alone: political violence is growing in many democracies. Trump’s near-death experience at the hands of a young man with no clear partisan agenda has echoes in the attempted assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last year. The year before, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was killed—the first assassination of a Japanese leader since the 1930s. In August 2023, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate was assassinated after leaving a campaign rally. And in May, a shooter attempted to murder Slovakia’s prime minister.

Current and former heads of state are not the only victims. From 2022 to 2023, France saw a 12-fold increase in violence against elected officials, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. A total of 51 candidates were physically attacked in the three weeks leading to July’s elections. Germany has had over 10,000 attacks on politicians in the last five years, and thousands more on party buildings. Mexico’s 2024 election was the deadliest yet, with 37 candidates murdered and over 800 injured. In Colombia, India, and Nigeria, violence against officials is also on the upswing.

Although each country’s violence has differing local causes, there are clear patterns that echo across countries. American political violence has much in common with that taking place in Germany and India, as well as in France’s most recent election. In all these states, a significant portion of the attacks are largely the product of radicalized partisans, often egged on by parties. Containing it requires containing these parties’ politicians.

But doing so is much easier said than done, especially in the United States. There, voters have only two real parties to choose between—and one of them is captured by a radical wing. Trump may be the most recent victim of American political violence, and attacks can come from both sides of the divide. But the reality is that his followers include the country’s biggest perpetrators, and they will be hard to cordon.

DANGER ZONE

Not every country experiences political violence for the same reasons. France’s violence, for example, involved a mix of riots related to police brutality and pension reform in 2022 and 2023 before morphing into partisan attacks on parliamentary candidates in the lead-up to the July 2024 election. Colombian candidates are often targeted by armed groups to frighten political actors into serving criminal interests. In Nigeria, many local officials are kidnapped by bandits simply to fetch a healthy ransom.

But often there are similarities among states. Mexican candidates, as with Colombian ones, are frequently killed by criminal organizations. In France and Germany, political violence is spurred by radicalized political groups who have created an atmosphere in which violence is more acceptable as political behavior—though it often boomerangs back against them. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, for example, traces a significant portion of the political violence in Germany to supporters of the radical Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose extreme anti-immigrant positions have involved planning meetings on forced deportations with neo-Nazi groups. AfD’s violent youth supporters, for instance, have attacked centrist and Green politicians. But having created such a fraught atmosphere, AfD politicians themselves now face the greatest number of attacks. In the Indian state of West Bengal, parties have militant wings that intimidate both opposition politicians and wayward co-partisans, using riots, bombings, and murder to keep people in line.

This all may sound quite different from what happens in the streets of the United States. But a survey of the past eight years reveals many similarities. In addition to the riot of January 6, would-be terrorists threatened state legislatures in the fall of 2020. Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and CNN employees. In 2022, a man in Ohio shot and killed his neighbor because he believed that the neighbor was a Democrat.

The Republican Party has been overtaken by an extremist fringe willing to normalize violence.

Violent actors also target people from similar ideological camps. The January 6 mob, for example, brought a noose and chanted “Hang Mike Pence”—targeting Trump’s own vice president—because he refused to help steal the election. The co-partisan attacks mean that although the vast majority of political violence emanates from the right, the victims are almost equally distributed across the left-right divide.

January 6 was the first time rioters attempted to overturn an American presidential contest. But partisan attacks are not new to U.S. history. In the 1830s, the Know-Nothing Party organized around an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform, leading to mob violence from supporters during its campaigns. In 1860, the country’s South—led by pro-slavery politicians—seceded, sparking the Civil War. And after that war was done, former Confederates regained seats in Congress by waging bloody battles in which Southern Democrats openly murdered Republicans, many of whom were Black, to scare them away from voting. And Dixiecrats used violence during the mid-twentieth century to try to crush the civil rights movement.

Today, there are Americans on both the left and right who support political violence. Left-leaning violence tripled from 2015 to 2020 according to the Global Terrorism Database (the last year for which there are statistics broken down by ideology). But violent incidents from left-leaning perpetrators started from a very small number, and they remain infrequent. Violent incidents from the right, meanwhile, started from a higher baseline and then grew significantly; in 2020, the right was responsible for almost four times as many planned violent incidents as the left. That is because the Republican Party has been overtaken by an extremist fringe willing to normalize violence. Former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, for instance, ran a campaign ad showing him breaking into a house with a gun and encouraging supporters to “Get a RINO [Republican in Name Only] hunting permit.” Former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani declared, “Let’s have trial by combat,” before sending the right-wing mob toward the Capitol on January 6. Representatives Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Steve King have spoken at the white nationalist America First Political Action Committee Conference in recent years. It is no surprise, then, that a 2020 study by the political scientist Pippa Norris found that—when measured by ideology and tactics—Republicans had much more in common with Turkey’s autocratic Justice and Development Party than with the mainstream center-right parties of Europe.

COALITION OF THE SANE

So how can the United States curtail attacks? There is no easy answer. But some of the other countries struggling with partisan violence have done a better job than others, and they provide a possible template.

Consider, again, France and Germany. In both states, mainstream parties have limited the reach of extremists by forming a cordon sanitaire, or buffer, around their most dangerous actors. In Germany, the primary center-right party has ruled out governing with, and therefore legitimizing, the AfD. The French center-right party has been eclipsed in size by the far-right National Rally; the RN is already the country’s dominant conservative entity. But in France’s recent parliamentary elections, the center-right teamed up with straight centrists, the center-left, and even the regular left to block the far right from gaining a plurality. Doing so was a massive logistical challenge: candidates from across these factions had to drop out of races between the first round (where the National Rally won) and the runoffs so as not to split the vote. But it was a clear success. Thanks to their work, the “Republican front” deprived the far right of a megaphone with which to spread the illiberal and dehumanizing ideas that prompt social violence.

Adapting these lessons to the United States’ two-party system is hard, but not impossible. It would first require admitting that what is most important is keeping purveyors of violent discourse out of top political office. Doing so necessitates setting aside disagreements and forming a big tent with the greatest possibility of winning. For Democrats, that would require openly acting on the reality that a change of presidential candidate is needed. For non-Trump Republicans, it would mean taking on a clearly nonviolent and classically liberal identity around which they could rally, as the French Republicans have done, and as groups such as Principles First and Republicans for the Rule of Law are attempting. Although such changes seem daunting, a short timeline can be empowering in forcing the urgency of the moment.

Leftist support for political violence has also been increasing.

To bring this program to fruition without forcing its purveyors to undermine (or destroy) their electoral chances, reformers may have to change the structure of the American electoral system. Many Republican voters are Trump true believers, but a solid plurality (many of whom voted for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in primary contests, even after she had ended her campaign) are not. They may not be willing to change political stripes to vote for a Democrat, but they have already shown their preference to vote for a different type of Republican. Alaska and Maine, for example, use ranked-choice voting that allows multiple Democrats and Republicans to run in the general election without splitting their base, and in these contests, many Republican voters cast ballots for nonextreme GOP candidates. Ranked-choice voting also incentivizes politicians to moderate, because less partisan candidates are more likely to end up ranked second on ballots. It is no coincidence that Alaska and Maine have produced Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins—the two Republican senators most willing to speak out against violence and antidemocratic action (aside from Utah’s Mitt Romney, who is retiring from office).

Allowing different flavors of a party to emerge is important now for the right. But it could become equally useful for the left. The Democratic Party remains mostly intolerant of violent actors, but leftist support for political violence has also been increasing. Some supporters of independent Senator Bernie Sanders threatened Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, for example. In 2017, a leftist traveled to Washington, D.C., with a plan to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And although only a small number of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 devolved into violence, that violence was serious in cities such as Seattle.

This uptick shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a polarized society, violence rarely sticks to one side for long. The last bout of political violence in the United States started with the right, as segregationists in the South lynched Black Americans and murdered civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s. But these killings galvanized backlash from those who felt that the time for the pacifism that Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused had passed. Violence spread to the left throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with riots, militant groups, and murders by extremists such as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

On Saturday, the United States avoided the assassination of its leading presidential candidate. But it was through sheer luck: the 20-year-old shooter missed Trump’s skull by less than an inch. The country may not be as lucky the next time around, and the results could be catastrophic. When a 19-year-old in Sarajevo killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a deeply divided world descended into war. The tinder is laid in the United States, and it is bone dry. Americans need to take lessons from other countries to stop it from igniting.