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The US has entered a new phase of political violence
The Guardian
06/22/2025
“We are in a historically high period of American political violence,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. “I call it our ‘era of violent populism’. It’s been about 50 years since we’ve seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.”
Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the “use of force” to achieve political means.
The May survey was “the most worrisome yet”, he wrote. “About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.”
Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible “mobilized blocs”, Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming “increasingly premeditated”.
Quantifying political violence or “domestic terrorism” can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those “have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump’s first term”, he said, adding that the threats have been “essentially 50-50” against Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
The US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated “has climbed for the second year in a row”.
While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. “We haven’t seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,” he said.
