‘Our era of violent populism': the US has entered a new phase of political violence

The Guardian

4 days ago

It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America.
Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates.
The same day, during national 'No Kings' demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed 'safety volunteer' associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester's leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters.
Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was 'run off the road' by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling.
'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.'
He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump's first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left.
In 2017, the first year of Trump's first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court's rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman's bullet missed Trump's face by a few centimeters.
The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails.
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.
He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was 'more of an anti-system extremist' who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, 'when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it's almost identical to Stephen Miller posts', he added, referring to the White House aide.
Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against 'little crackers' with 'white privileges', investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety.
This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect's family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems.
In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don't fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described 'pro-mortalist' – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction.
Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump's polarizing politics.
'He's as much a symptom as a cause,' he said. The more important factor is 'a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that's been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation', Pape said.
The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders.
There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal.
Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history.
Lewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that 'political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it's your in-group … against the 'other side''.
American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: 'The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.'
After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized.
Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman's death.
'I think it's fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they've used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,' he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however.
'I don't know how we unwind this,' he said. 'The optimistic side of me hopes that it's going to translate into a different approach.'