How to Prevent a Spiral of Political Violence in America

On July 13, a gunman scaled a rooftop outside a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and shot at former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. The gunman lightly wounded Trump, killed one rally goer, and critically injured two others. He was, in turn, quickly killed by a Secret Service sniper.

As news of the attack broke, many assumed that the shooter was a Democrat or someone who held left-wing views. Such an affiliation would, after all, seem natural, given Democrats’ antipathy toward Trump and growing alarm about the prospect of a second Trump term. For years, many American pundits and politicians have worried that increased partisan polarization would directly drive a rise in political violence. And there has been no shortage of Republican-aligned political violence in the United States—violence that could prompt some Democrats to respond in kind.

Yet as it turned out, the 20-year-old shooter was a registered Republican. Nothing in his record suggests that he was driven by a hatred for Trump or for conservatives. In fact, his motive remains unclear. The only thing that is certain is that he came of age in a country in which prominent right-wing leaders increasingly call for violence. He inhabited a national culture that is becoming more accepting of political attacks. The party in which he was registered has become especially open to violent acts and threats.

And our research shows that it is these three forces—rhetoric, culture, and an aggressive Republican coalition—that encourage violence or public support for it. These forces are pushing the United States closer to the edge. Extraordinarily few Americans would shoot a presidential candidate. Yet the opinions Americans hold about the use of violence matter. Even if most of them would not engage in violent acts, they shape the opinions of their family members and friends and may encourage volatile individuals to commit acts of violence.

Since 2017, we have studied the American public’s views about political violence using national surveys. This research suggests that the percentage of Americans who believe that violent retaliation is justified if their political opponents commit violent acts is rising dramatically. A slight majority of Americans who identify with a political party now believe that. Whenever someone carries out political terrorism, it can prompt reprisals. Around the world and throughout American history, attacks by social and political groups frequently provoke counterviolence.

Our studies also suggest that the most important factor that diminishes Americans’ support for political violence is responsible leadership from party leaders: a decrease in their violent rhetoric and a rise in anti-violence messaging. American political leaders need to consistently, explicitly, and without caveat denounce political violence when it occurs. This is especially true, however, of Republicans. The data is undeniable: although public support for political violence is increasing across the partisan spectrum, people on the right are far likelier to translate this sentiment into real-world, violent action. Given the trajectory of Americans’ growing tolerance for violent acts in politics, without a substantial rhetorical shift among Republican Party leaders, the kind of disturbing act that occurred in July in Pennsylvania may well reoccur.

TERRITORIAL AGGRESSION

The United States has been awash in political violence since its founding. The country was born from a revolutionary war, and internal conflicts between racial and religious supremacists and opposing liberation movements date back to the late 1700s. These include brutal wars between Native Americans and the U.S. government, uprisings by enslaved Black Americans, devastation during the Civil War, violence during Reconstruction, attacks during the civil rights era, Black urban uprisings, and ongoing anti-Black violence by police. Christian nationalism has also motivated political violence, such as the nineteenth-century killings of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and vicious efforts to disenfranchise Catholics and Jews. Plutocracy-inspired antiunion violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw bosses employing private militias and calling on the military to suppress labor action. The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of heightened political violence and general social unrest, with historic levels of protests and attempted and successful assassinations. Notably, this upheaval occurred as movements to expand rights challenged traditional social hierarchies.

Over the past few decades, pollsters have occasionally asked Americans about their views on political violence. In 1970, a Gallup survey asked U.S. adults if violence is sometimes justified to bring about change in American society. Eighty-one percent of respondents said no. In 1985, when the monthly magazine Business Week (now Bloomberg Businessweek) surveyed Americans about attacks on abortion clinics, 81 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “It is not the American way to resort to violence when you disagree with a national policy.” In 1992, Gallup asked whether the violent protests that followed the acquittal of three police officers who had assaulted Rodney King were justified. Eighty percent said they were not justified.

Between November 2017 and June 2024, in partnership with the polling firm YouGov, we conducted over a dozen surveys—each with a national sample of between 1,000 and 3,000 adults—to more deeply investigate Americans’ views on political violence. When we asked the most basic questions, our studies did not show a large increase in support for political violence. One question we asked repeatedly was, “How much do you feel it is justified for [your political party] to use violence in advancing their political goals these days?” In October 2022, for instance, fewer than 20 percent of respondents said that violence could be justified, in line with earlier studies. 

But we teased out meaningful changes when we asked questions that considered different contexts around, rationales for, and degrees of violence. We found that partisans were twice as likely to endorse political violence if it was framed as retaliation against prior violence committed by people affiliated with the opposing political party. And this support for retaliatory violence has grown sharply. In early November 2020, 39 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans agreed that political violence might be justified if the opposing party was violent first. In a June 2024 survey, however, 58 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans agreed that violence could be justified if the other party went first—a stark increase.

VIOLENT DELIGHTS

Faced with this data, many analysts have connected rising support for political violence in the United States with growing partisan conflict. Behind that abstraction, however, the reasons Americans approve of political violence are complex. One driving force is the views on violence espoused by top political leaders, which can help normalize violence among supporters. In surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, for example, we found that more loyal partisans were more approving of political violence.

But leaders can also help make violence less appealing. When these same partisans first listened to an anti-violence message from a leader they admired, they became less supportive of violence than less partisan respondents. In 2019 and 2020 surveys, we read respondents quotes from Trump or then Vice President Joe Biden condemning political violence. When these respondents were subsequently asked for their views on political violence, more than 30 percent fewer respondents expressed support for it. The effect of this priming was the most pronounced among the respondents most committed to a political party. Intriguingly, hearing anti-violence messages from a leading politician had a similar effect on respondents affiliated with the politician’s own party as it did on those affiliated with the opposing party, possibly because, in the case of opposing partisans, they perceived a lower threat of violence by the other party.

The impact of anti-violence messages is visible outside of polling data. On January 6, 2021, Trump’s belated call for rioters supporting him to vacate the U.S. Capitol convinced some of them to leave. Video footage released from that day vividly demonstrates the effect of a political leader’s call to halt violent acts. In one clip, a leading protester dubbed the “QAnon Shaman” announced that he was leaving the Capitol because “Donald Trump asked everybody to go home.”

Conversely, recent research by the Dangerous Speech Project, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization, has found that hateful or violent speech by influential messengers can directly inspire real-world violence. Just weeks after Trump announced his candidacy for president in the summer of 2015, he began touting violence and repression as a solution to political problems, mocking U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, for allowing protesters to grab a microphone at a public event. “That will never happen with me,” Trump bragged. “I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will.” Later in his campaign, he infamously vowed to get “a little more violent” with protesters and led his fans in “Lock her up!” chants against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump routinely dehumanizes groups—a common precursor to mass violence—calling his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants are “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America. So do his fellow partisans: in early July, the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor, Mark Robinson, raged that “some folks” in the United States “need killing.”

Political rhetoric can create an environment in which violence is tolerated or encouraged.

Rising violent rhetoric corresponds with a rise in violent plots, attacks, and threats against leaders. Our research has found that threats against Congress grew tenfold between 2016 and 2021. In 2020, ABC News identified more than 50 criminal cases in which the defendants had invoked Trump’s name to explain their own violent acts, threats of violence, or alleged assaults. After January 6, 2021, many fellow Republicans blamed Trump for inciting the storming of the Capitol. They have nonetheless endorsed his 2024 run for president.

Political rhetoric can create an environment in which violence is tolerated or encouraged. But that is not the only force at work. Culture can also foster violence, and the United States has a society that disproportionately tolerates bloodshed. The United States currently holds the record as the most heavily armed country in the world, with over 120 firearms per 100 Americans. The next-closest competitor, the Falkland Islands, boasts only 61 guns per 100 people. The vast number of guns in the United States gives violent threats credence and makes it easier for individuals to kill, particularly on a large scale. (The Trump shooter’s gun was legally purchased by his father.)

The way people interact with their social circles can boost or dampen tolerance for political violence, too. In a survey run in March 2024, we found that Americans who agreed that they talked about politics with “a good mix of Democrats and Republicans” or who did not talk about politics with anyone were more than twice as likely to reject the legitimacy of political violence compared with respondents who talked about politics only with Democrats or only with Republicans.

PARTY WHIPS

In the wake of the July attack on Trump, politicians and pundits—Democrats and Republicans alike—were careful to call on everyone to turn the temperature down on inflammatory rhetoric. Such statements imply that political violence is as much a problem on the left as it is on the right. Republicans have even suggested that Democrats are largely to blame for the attack on Trump. Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, for example, has blamed Democrats for espousing violent rhetoric.

But the truth is that the American right is now disproportionately responsible for politically violent acts—a contrast with the 1970s, when political violence was predominantly associated with the left wing. A 2024 study by the National Institute of Justice—the Department of Justice’s research wing—found that since 1990, far-right extremists have committed many more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left extremists or radical Islamist extremists. Over that period, 227 incidents of extremist right-wing violence took more than 520 lives. In the same period, left-wing extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that claimed 78 lives. In 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, right-wing attacks and plots (around 110) outnumbered far-left attacks and plots (just under 40) by nearly a factor of three in 2020—a sharp rise from the 18 far-right and ten far-left attacks and plots that occurred in 2009. The right also far surpasses the left in incidents of armed intimidation, which are also on the rise.

Why do violent rhetoric and acts now emerge mostly from the right? Part of the answer is that violent actors disproportionately belong to the Republican Party. Although similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans professed support for political violence in our most recent survey, the reality on the ground is that many more right-wing actors translate these views into action. The most obvious reason for this discrepancy is that Republican leaders have been far more willing to endorse violent views in recent years.

A fuller and more nuanced explanation, however, must turn to the divide between Democrats and Republicans on their views of American social and political equality. After all, if leaders’ rhetoric was the only thing that mattered, then Democrats’ anti-violence messaging ought to have diminished right-wing extremists’ threat perception. But Republican leaders and voters are simply more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism; to believe the conspiracy theory that Democrats are trying to replace white, Christian Americans with non-Christian people of color; to believe the United States should be governed based on conservative Christianity; to believe—according to a survey we ran in 2022—that women’s efforts to gain parity in society are an attempt to get “control over men”; and to believe that society was better when it was organized according to traditional hierarchies. And our research shows that if people hold inegalitarian views, they are more likely to support both state-sponsored violence and general political violence. In fact, in our surveys, inegalitarian views were among the strongest predictors of support for political violence, matching the predictive power of aggressive personality traits.

CONTAINING THE FIRE

Whatever his motivation, the young man who shot at Trump in July grew up in an environment in which support for political violence is on the rise—and in which violent threats now emerge directly from Republican leaders. Deepening political polarization adds fuel to these fires: extensive research on other countries has shown that when a polity becomes divided along racial, ethnic, or religious lines, it is at far greater risk of experiencing widespread political violence and even more so when political parties are organized along those fissures.

But broad appeals to “both sides” to calm down are misplaced when specific leaders in one party are driving the volatility. Democratic leaders tend to oppose political violence no matter who is targeted, as evidenced by their rapid condemnation of the July assassination attempt on Trump. Especially when episodes of political violence do not result in deaths, Republican leaders do not always do the same, given how often the perpetrators are from their side. It is crucial for ordinary people to speak up, too, when they hear others in their social circles talk about committing violent acts or even report them to authorities if personal intervention seems unlikely to succeed. Many studies in the fields of political psychology, sociology, and political science have that interpersonal influence by trusted friends and family members is generally the strongest persuasive force in politics.

The violent rhetoric regularly espoused by Trump and the Republicans who support him, however, may be even more inflammatory than many pundits acknowledge. It has certainly boosted support for political violence in far more people than a single shooter in Pennsylvania. The fact that Trump himself was a victim of violence is disturbing; perhaps it could inspire a decrease in Republican leaders’ violent and dehumanizing rhetoric. But an even deeper necessity is a Republican shift to accept the country’s pluralistic multiracial democracy, the rejection of which motivates right-wing violence. Without these shifts in course, the United States’ political future could be more violent than our recent past.