Details are still emerging about Saturday’s shooting at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania. However, while the full picture may not be available, there are ways to think about the political and social moment we live in and how it may contribute to violence.
we know the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about a 75-minute drive from Butler, where the rally was being held. He was a registered Republican (though he also donated $15 to a progressive group), shot an AR-15 style rifle bought by his father, and There were at least two explosive devices with him And he was killed by a Secret Service agent when he killed 50-year-old Cory Compatore and wounded two others in addition to Trump.
It’s entirely possible that the shooting wouldn’t count as “political” at all – we just don’t know enough about the motive. But it is fair to say that the assassination attempt has raised the political temperature in an already volatile country. Since Trump’s 2016 election, other events in the United States have seen the Charlottesville protests, the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, the 2022 Buffalo shooting, and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots; Now, the specter of political violence looms over our future.
To better understand the anxious and volatile moment we live in, Vox spoke with four experts to help explain how political polarization, state violence, online radicalization and feelings of disenfranchisement can drive political violence.
Based on our conversation, here are five ways we should think about political violence at this historical moment — why it spreads and why violent times often get worse before they get better.
Extreme polarization can exacerbate political violence
Violence of this nature is unexpected; Part of what makes it terrifying. Mass shootings, terrorist attacks and political violence like Saturday’s shooting are deeply destabilizing, especially in a deeply violent time, with multiple wars and civil wars ongoing. But we know that there are social, political, and interpersonal factors that contribute to mass, politically motivated violence.
Liliana Mason, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University: Political violence is more likely to emerge when a society is politically divided along identity-based lines. When parties are on opposite sides of the racial, ethnic, or religious divide (like our parties in the United States), it’s easy for people to think of their political opponents as enemies.
In the US, we are also geographically divided, so partisans have little exposure to regular people on the other side. This creates what we call “moral alienation,” which consists of demeaning and dehumanizing attitudes toward our political opponents. These attitudes allow us to harm our fellow citizens without feeling like bad people ourselves.
Eric Nisbet, Professor Policy Analysis and Communication at Northwestern University: We are incredibly tribal and our political identity has almost become a mega identity. They supersede all our other social or cultural identities. For some, this coincides with this perception and rhetoric of dehumanizing the other side: “The other side is immoral – and an existential threat to our group, to our identity…”
And if the other side is immoral, not humane, and a threat, then violence becomes almost morally justified. “I can still be a good person and engage in violence.” And that’s how many of them, for example, saw themselves around January 6: they were good people. They were correcting mistakes. And in that case the violence was justified.
Political violence is more American than we care to admit
Violence has always been a part of our politics. as Today, explained the host Sean Rameswaram recently put it, “Joe Biden spoke about this assassination attempt on his opponent about three times in about 24 hours … The first time he said, ‘It’s not us.’ The second time he said, ‘It’s not us.’ The third time he said, ‘It is not us.’ But I think students of history might think it’s ‘our’ kind.”
Nisbet: Unfortunately, it is us, but there is something different about this historical moment. What’s different in the last 10 years is that political violence is no longer just political violence – it’s party violence. It is violence that is central to and central to our political identity as Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, political violence was actually quite symmetrical between left and right; It was centered around a more general ideology. Maybe focus on a single problem. Now, political violence, the trend in recent years, is more focused on, “I’m a Democrat, and thus I support violence against Republicans” or vice versa. And it has leaned more right than left in recent years, at least in terms of the number of violent acts tracked by the FBI and domestic terrorist databases.
Today’s extremism did not appear anywhere
Politically motivated mass violence does not occur in a vacuum; People don’t plan assassination attempts or bombings without reason. Political radicalism, personal grievances, and psychological illness all interact with social forces like political polarization — as well as the stark reality of widely available lethal weapons — to make political violence more likely.
Curt Braddock, Asst Professor of Public Communication at American University: We’re finding that extremists are often motivated by the way they engage with content online, whether that content is on social networks or the content they’re consuming. It never happens in a black box and never in isolation.
There is always some way that an attacker can understand that their actions are part of a larger movement that they have learned about and inspired in terms of their interactions, usually with people online.
An assassination attempt leads to some social upheaval. This often has to do with the shooters perception of that social upheaval. Often, they feel as if they are personally victimized, or they perceive that there is a threat to them targeted, or their own safety, which is why I think there is a connection between state repression against politicians and actual violence. .
Violence can come from the perception that people are losing their rights
Loss of privileges and rights – whether real or perceived – is another motivation for political violence. This is a fairly easy pattern to recognize in American history throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Violence committed by the state against citizens also plays a role in violence against the state or its representatives. When the state visits a disproportionate power of violence over the people—whether through repressive laws or police brutality—violence against the state becomes a more logical response.
Braddock: There’s quite a substantial literature that shows that one of the things that generally increases violence—not just terrorism, but rebellions and riots and things like that—is state repression and the idea that people are losing their rights, people have an idea that they’re victims in a way. . It has been in the literature for quite some time.
There is a theory of radicalization that argues that as one “side” becomes more radicalized, the other side feels the need to engage in defense – they themselves become radicalized in order to engage in defense.
Nathan Kalmo, executive director of the Center for Communication and Civil Renewal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Many political scientists define the state as an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. In other words, the state can commit violence, and no other individual or group can do so to the state or to each other with impunity. It places the threat of state violence against its citizens at the center of our understanding of government, even for good government.
State violence and political violence by citizens are often mutually supportive. For example, violent white supremacist responses to the civil rights movement often combined Klan violence alongside police violence against activists and ordinary citizens. Sometimes they coordinate or even work together, other times they work only toward the same broad goals of maintaining white supremacy.
research by Professor Christian Davenport University of Michigan and colleagues show that people view the appropriateness of violence by states and violence by citizens as proportional to each other, which parallels proportional/disproportionate violence in war. Thus, police treating protesters with disproportionate violence makes the public more willing to support proportionate violence against police in response.
Jealousy breeds violence
The US body politic is already highly polarized, and an apparent attempt on a presidential candidate’s life isn’t going to change that. Indeed, there is some reason to be concerned about the possibility of more violence of this nature in the coming months.
Nisbet: One of the drivers of political violence is what we call meta-perception. If a Democrat thinks Republicans are violent, they are more likely to engage in violence themselves and vice versa. It’s “if they pull a knife, we’ll pull a gun.” And so acts of political violence will actually breed violence because it makes each group more willing to engage in violence as a self-defense function. And it becomes like a self-reinforcing spiral.
Kalmo: I am very concerned about the possibility of further political violence. What we learn about purpose can have a big impact on it. The vast majority of Americans oppose political violence, but that changes considerably when the other side is first seen to be acting violently. The most inflammatory scenario would be an ideologically motivated killer from the political left, though it helps that Democratic leaders have similarly condemned the violence.
Braddock: I am glad to see that people on both sides, whether politically motivated or not, are coming out against political violence. And I expect that this is a trend that will continue. I wouldn’t say I’m confident, but I’m hoping for it. I worry, though, that we’re going to see more violence from this.
Peter Balnon-Rosen and Sean Rameswaram contributed reporting to this article.
