Newsletter 279 — September 26, 2023
As Guy and I were driving across the country earlier this month, we were listening to a lot of podcasts. One we listened to was Rachel Kleinfeld talking with Yasha Mounk about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July (when this podcast was made) and, more broadly, on political violence in the United States and around the world. They talked about how many people in the United States support political violence, noting that it is not nearly as high as is commonly believed.
It's Not As Bad As We Think — But It's Not Good
Rachel pointed out that there are a number of polls taken over the last several years that have the number of people who say they would support political violence in some circumstances to be somewhere around 30%. Indeed, we have referenced one of those polls in Newsletter 246 on Democratic Subversion. However, Rachel pointed out that those numbers come from “bad polls" — those that don’t clarify what the respondent means by “political violence” and/or what circumstances they believe it would be legitimate to use. “Good polls,” she explained, are those that ask respondents in what situation they believe political violence would be justified, and do so in a way that “forces their brains to slow down, to think about the answer.” When you do that, she said, the number of people who say that they favor political violence drops to about 3-4%, and the number, notably, she says, is “almost equal on both sides of the aisle.”
However, the U.S. population in July of 2024 is estimated to be over 345 million people, so 3% of that is still over 10 million people. And Rachel says that there are 3-4% of the population on both sides who think political violence might be needed – so that’s at least 20 million people! Rachel went on:
“And when you get to ‘Are you willing to do it?” those questions get really chilling because the people who are disproportionately willing to do it are people who bought guns since 2020 and always or nearly always carry. So I don’t take a great deal of comfort from that finding, but it’s very different from “30% of Americans are pro-political violence.” It’s really 3 or 4%, it’s a small fringe.” (https://www.persuasion.community/p/rachel-kleinfeld-on-the-attempted)
The problem is made worse, Rachel observed, because most people really are driven to fit in with their peer group. So, if they think that everybody that they know believes that political violence is called for in a particular circumstance (such as believing that an election is stolen, for example), then they, too, will believe that political violence is called for in that circumstance. This (we would add) is the dynamic that drives mob violence and collapsing taboo lines. It, very likely is a large part of the reason why so many people felt it was "okay" to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020. Everyone around them was doing it — everyone seemed to think it was "okay," maybe even a good idea.
Rachel also pointed out that "Once violence starts, it begets more violence." But, surprisingly, she said
America has very little violence right now. We have a lot of threats. We have higher violence than we should. Hate crimes are at an all-time high in the 21st century. But overall, compared to other countries that have political violence, like Kenya in 2007, we're really low.
But once violence actually starts and people say, “you killed my brother,” or ”you raped my sister,” it takes on an entirely different tenor and people act because people they love were harmed. And you don't need very political people to act in that state. So, the numbers can change very quickly in those kinds of situations.
This is why we have long said that escalation is "the most dangerous force on the planet." It can quickly unleash a series of ever-more destructive events that become almost impossible to control — events that can include large-scale violence and even weapons of mass destruction.
And the potential for political violence in the U.S. is very high. The U.S. rate of gun ownership is higher than any other country by a factor of two. (And this includes countries at war!) In 2017, U.S. civilians held an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people. We are also among the top in gun-related deaths, ranking fourth after Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico in 2019. From 2014 to 2020, gun-related deaths in the U.S. rose 35%. (U.S. News and World Report). Mass shootings are common. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 403 mass shootings this year in the U.S. as of today (September 24, 2024).
Another factor that contributes to the potential for political violence that Rachel only talked about briefly is the lack of trust in government, and particularly, in law enforcement. This is seen in urban areas across America, where Blacks particularly, but other groups of color as well, have little faith that law enforcement will have the will or the ability to keep them safe. Indeed, they are being told over and over again, that police are differentially targeting people of color, especially blacks.
This narrative gained a lot of attention in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd, which led to widespread calls to defund the police. In a classic positive feedback loop, these social, political, and economic attacks on police led many law enforcement officers to leave the profession, and others to greatly diminish the amount of effort that they put into their jobs. This further stressed the remaining law enforcement officers, further diminishing their effectiveness. This, then, lead to further distrust of the police’s ability to keep people safe. (See, for instance "Contrary to Media Myth, U.S. Urban Crime Rates Are Up," and "Ethical Agency Cultures and Public Trust."
The fact that the secret service failed to protect Trump at the July 15 rally — and now, as we write this there was just a second attempt on Trump's life — feeds into this narrative that the police are either “useless,” “incompetent,” or even “evil,” if one assumes that they failed to protect him "on purpose." These notions lead to the belief that citizens are on their own when it comes to their safety, and they had better, therefore, buy a gun, carry it, and be prepared to use it. (A September 20, 2024 article in the Wall Street Journal asserts that It's not just Republicans, but also liberals who are buying guns because they think guns are necessary for self protection.
In addition to delegitimization of the police, delegitimization of the court system, Rachel observed, is also a risk factor. The U.S., she said, is "moving in that direction." However (we would note), it is the left, currently, that sees the courts as illegitimate, and is calling for major changes in the courts in response.
But most people (including Rachel) believe that most of the political violence we are seeing currently stems from the right. But not all. As Rachel explained,
It's been vastly more on the right, but there is enough on the left: the attempt at [Supreme Court Justice] Brett Kavanaugh, the shooting at the Congressional baseball game, threats and "swattings" that have happened multiple times against multiple members of Congress. It [political violence] is very easy to paint it as defensive. And as you said, the BLM protests, while mostly nonviolent, a small percentage were quite violent and the left hasn't really dealt with that and the right really deals with that a lot. So the spirals of defensive justification are very, very strong already.
Another factor to consider, Guy adds, is whether there is a target for the violence. When you have two opposing demonstrations, as we had in many cities after the murder of George Floyd, or we had with the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the potential for violence is high. It was also high in 2020, when Trump insisted that the 2020 election was being stolen that he would never give up, never concede. “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore." He then called on his supporters to “fight like hell” because “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He later insisted that “fight” was figurative, not literal. But it is easy to see how many thought that he was urging them to engage in violence.
David Eisner explored this theme further when we talked to him in August. David has long been bothered by a contradiction that he sees in Democrats' behavior. On the one hand, he says, they decry political violence and insist (indeed, as Rachel did, above) that the Republicans are much more guilty of such actions, than are the left. But then, he points out, they continuously repeat the notion that Republicans are unremittingly evil, and if they win the election in November, American democracy will be lost. This notion that this election is existential, he thinks, is driving the support for political violence on the left. (He acknowledges that the right is talking this way too, though he he said at the time that the left is doing it more. (Our conversation was recorded before the September 10, 2024 Trump-Harris debate where Trump made that one of his key arguments.) Quoting David,
Both sides saying that the other candidate is an immediate abrogation of the country is just an invitation for people to take extraordinary means. It's a signal that the compact that citizens have with the government might become null. And once that compact becomes null, then we really have a hard time articulating why violence isn't an option.
Resilience Factors
Rachel did point out the the U.S. does have a number of "resilience factors." One of these, she said, is our professional military. "In most countries that fall into political violence," she said, "the military and law enforcement take a side." She went on to note that "There's never been a consolidated democracy like ours that's fallen into civil war. And the reason for that is because you need your security services to take a side for that to happen." During the US Civil War, of course, the military did take sides, with specific units and individual soldiers aligning themselves with the North and the South. The result was a conflagration from which we have yet to recover.
Cross-cutting ties between sides are also an important resilience factor. These are much rarer than they used to be, due largely to what Bill Bishop called "The Big Sort" — a process through which U.S. society is progressively sorting itself into liberal and conservative communities. But people do still come together — at work, at church, synagogues, and mosques, in community fora of various sorts. And thousands of bridging and building efforts that we talked about in Newsletter 276 are working to diminish polarization and bring people together. These efforts are growing fast. The more toxic American politics becomes, the more people are either withdrawing from it (and hence aren't likely to make things worse) or they are thinking that there has to be "a better way." If we can just avoid a trigger that sends us into a spiral of unstoppable violence, there is hope that momentum is building to turn American toxic polarization (as many people call it) around.
In the podcast we listened to, Rachel asked "So what do we need right now? She then answered herself by saying people need to realize that most people don't want the country to descend into violence. "And we do need them to speak up and act on that. And most importantly, we need them to vote on that." At that point, Yasha asked a question that took Rachel off in a different direction, but later she explained,
You need to vote. You need to give money against candidates that are speaking in violent or incendiary terms and bring in people who are more positive. And if it's a safe seat—more than 85% of our congressional seats are already locked up by one party or the other—you might need to give money to someone whose views you very much disagree with, but who are pro-democracy and anti-violence. Because those are the seats where you're going to get the most difficult people. It's not the battleground states where you're getting the real nasty rhetoric. It's in the safe seats. And so they need our help to elect a Republican or a Democrat whose views might be quite different from some of your listeners, but who stand for institutional values.
Good examples are the Republican Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, who made a political ad with his Democratic opponent in 2020, vowing to debate each other without degrading each others' character. They also both promised to respect the outcome of the election. An article in The Hill observed that this ad at least temporarily changed voters' attitudes about the legitimacy of undemocratic practices and political violence, though sadly, those attitudes didn't last long, nor did they extend to the larger society .
After getting elected, Cox became head of the National Governors' Association, where he began the Disagree Better Initiative. This initiative is an attempt to get such attitudes and approaches adopted much more widely across the U.S. The Initiative hosts events all around the country designed to show how we, "as Americans, can work though our differences to find solutions to the most difficult problems facing our states and our nation." They have created a "toolkit of interventions" that are customizable for each state or governor, which include:
- Hosting a service project in communities with people from both sides of the aisle.
- Recording an ad or writing an op ed with a politician of a different party explaining common views.
- Recording a brief civic education ad, explaining that the U.S. and particularly the Constitution were designed to enable people with significant differences to live and work together in peace.
- Hosting a debate (we might prefer the term "discussion") at a college or university that models healthy conflict engagement. They suggest partnering with an organization such as Braver Angels or Bridge USA.
And of course, you don't need to be a politician to do this. You can be a community organizer, a church leader, anyone who has access to people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about the deteriorating state of our country (as almost everyone is!).
Rachel added that we need to police our own behavior. While most people would never dream of saying "I want to kill a political opponent," many, she said, "might send around a meme that has a picture that jokes in that fashion. And that normalizes it [political violence] to the group that you're sending it around to. And it allows for further [violent] rhetoric. And what we see are these sort of spirals where people go further and further down."
She also says we need to
call people in from your own side. Nobody cares what you think about the other side. Democrats can wag their fingers all day at Republicans and vice versa. It really makes no difference. But to police one's own social and community worlds and talk about what the norms are and what's okay and what's not okay, that is quite important. If it's followed up with action in the political and social structures, so much the better. And if good people decide that they're going to run and insist on change, that's even better.
We would add to that, as David Eisner says, we should stop talking in such existential terms — saying that the victory of the other side is the end of all that is good in the world. That might, indeed, get out the vote on your own side, but if you loose, it could set loose a set of consequences that are extremely destructive and are caused — at least in part — by the losing sides' rhetoric before the election. What about, instead, talking about all the good things that will happen if your side is elected, and how you can include people on both sides of the aisle in that goodness. That, too, can drive people to vote, and garner votes from the many people on the other side who are unhappy with their own candidate (as many are).We should also be considering what we can do — both now, before the election, and after it — to try to heal our country before we disintegrate further.
Consider, for instance, thinking through the exercise we suggested in Newsletter 256: Thinking about What Democracy's Winners and Losers Owe One Another. How would we want to be treated, if the other side wins the election? If we win, shouldn't we treat the other side that way?
We will be addressing these issues a lot in coming newsletters.
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Lead Photo Credit: Picture found on https://www.flickr.com/photos/mobili/49419554052/in/photostream/. Picture by Mobilus In Mobili, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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