Matt Field
Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, has been studying political violence for 30 years. He says he’s advised every White House since 9/11 as well as the US military on various topics, including, for example, how to respond to the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s. That’s all to say Pape has firm ideas about what causes political tensions to boil over. There’s one central factor, he says, that is responsible for the increasingly violent tenor of US politics, most recently evidenced by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s on-stage assassination: massive demographic change. Since 1990, the United States has gone from being about 76 percent white to 58 percent white, and in 15 years, give or take, Pape says, whites will be in the minority.
Such demographic shifts can change the trajectories of political parties. It’s even possible that they have destabilized governments for centuries, playing a role in civil wars, revolutions, or rebellions throughout history. As Columbia University sociology professor Yao Lu puts it, tension over immigration has exacerbated political polarization in the United States and elsewhere, “giving rise to surging nativism and a democratic decline.” The arrival of newcomers can lead to a backlash against a supposed economic and cultural threat. (Think of the rise in the fortunes of the KKK in the 1920s or the era’s notorious Palmer raids to clamp down on dissent—which came on the heels of a decades-long massive surge in immigration to the United States.)
“That’s why immigration became Trump’s number one issue almost overnight,” Pape says.
But while the population shift in the country “is the big, big thing that’s radicalizing our politics,” Pape thinks that there’s something else that will need to be dealt with first—highlighted by the aftermath of Kirk’s murder.
Left to its own, Pape says, the emotion created by startling acts of political violence—such as terrorist attacks, for example—can grow and push a society in previously unimaginable directions, a cycle that has happened in other times or other countries.
The Kirk assassination “was done politically to wound a community,” Pape says. When a community faces a terrorist attack or political violence, “what you see is that they have initial emotions of sorrow and fear that morph into anger—and that can morph into very large support for political violence.”
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