Last week, right -wing political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the University of Utah Valley. Kirk, a close ally of that of President Donald Trump, was thirty -one years old. Tyler Robinson, a Utah resident, twenty-two, was accused of murder. This is the last of a series of attacks on American political figures: the shooting of two Minnesota State legislators and their spouses in June, two attempts on the life of President Trump during the presidential campaign last year and January 6, 2021, to assault Capitol, to name just a few.
I recently spoke by phone with Lilliana Mason, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute and expert in political violence. In 2022, she co-wrote, with Nathan P. Kalmoe, the book “Radical American Partisanship: cartography violent hostility, its causes and the consequences for democracy”. During our conversation, which was published for length and clarity, we discussed what made our current era potentially more dangerous than the end of the 1960s, the link between partisanry and political violence, and how to alleviate supporters when your political adversaries are really extremists.
Regarding political violence, what seems different from our current time?
We collect data on people’s attitudes with regard to political violence in the United States since 2017. But there are older data that we have newspapers and Pew Research Center, which actually shows relatively similar approval levels for political violence to what we see in the Trump era. So I don’t think there is a punctuated point to which the era of political violence begins. We can say that there was certainly significant political violence within nineteen years. But the difference was then that it was not organized according to partisan lines. And what we see today is organized according to partisan lines.
What do you mean by “organized along the partisan lines”?
I mean that it comes out of an animosity between the Democrats and the Republicans. In the 1960s, there was a lot of violence, but it was not as if the Democrats and the Republicans were on both sides of this violence. It did not go perfectly with politics, or at least not in terms of partisan policy. At the time, it could be a little random. But when the parties help organize animosity, violence itself can become more institutionalized.
It is interesting, but, in the current era, when we read on people who commit political violence, they often do not resemble typical supporters. They have strange and strange views, and sometimes crazy views. How do you synthesize that with what you just said?
Thus, a way of thinking about it is that there is a kind of political violence in which a political figure is targeted to achieve political objectives. I think everyone would agree that it is political violence. Much of what we have seen recently, even a little in the past year, was violence targeting a political figure for non-political or perhaps disgusting ends. And in fact, these attacks almost more like school shooters, where it is a disturbed young person who tries to attract attention and wants to descend into history. It is violence against a political figure, but it is not entirely because they want to achieve a political goal. Do you attack the person because they are political or do you attack the person because they are famous? And I think it’s really easy to confuse these two things. But I think the attacker’s goal is important.
Do people in your field think that the partisan and toxic atmosphere in the country could motivate these attacks, even if the shooters themselves are not clear supporters attacking someone from the opposing party?
Many political violence are made by people who will be violent anyway. Some people are a bit like a loaded weapon, and the question is: where are they targeting? And this is where political leadership has power. Political leadership can tell these extremely volatile people what an appropriate target is. And so they could have exploded in one direction if they did not pay attention to politics or if they had no leaders saying to them who hate. But because of the political environment, they turn in this direction. So I think in a sense that it does not necessarily tell them to go be violent; It is that they are already unstable people and it is a question of knowing where their attention is drawn.
I want to return to 1968. The absence of the same level of partisanary, and the lack of main democrats and republicans advocating violence in the same way that they are now – even when these politicians did other terrible things, such as the pursuit of the Vietnam War, which disturbed the atmosphere – I think that democracy was less threatened. Is this your opinion?
Empirically, it’s different, right? This is different because the type of violence that we see at the moment, or at the very least, the type of animosity which motivates violence, concerns who is a democrat and who is a republican. I think it is more dangerous than a time of chaotic political violence, because our parties structure everything. When we enter the polling room, we think we are voting for a political program, but we also voted for these questions that many of us consider existential. Having violence integrated into this, there is a potential for violence anchored in our policy itself.
