Robert A. Pape
The United States is in the grip of an era of violent populism. Threats and acts of political violence have been on the rise for roughly a decade, affecting a wide variety of victims, including Republican Representative Steve Scalise, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. In September 2024, I argued in Foreign Affairs that Americans must be prepared for an even more “extraordinary period of unrest” involving “serious political assassination attempts, political riots, and other instances of collective, group, and individual violence.” Sadly, this prediction has been borne out in 2025. An arsonist attempted to burn down Pennsylvania Governor Joshua Shapiro’s home (while he and his family were inside), an assassin killed Minnesota House Representative Melissa Hortman—and in September, a shooter murdered the commentator and activist Charlie Kirk in the most significant assassination in the United States since the 1960s.
Kirk’s death, in particular, has prompted bitter arguments among partisans about which political “side”—the left or the right—is to blame for the turn toward political violence. The truth is that neither is most responsible. Because it is notoriously difficult to assemble a comprehensive list of incidents of political violence and then accurately categorize them by their ideological motivation, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a University of Chicago research center I run, studied threats to members of Congress prosecuted by the Department of Justice. By focusing on a discrete, well-defined group of potential targets, this study largely avoids the subjectivity that muddies much research on political violence. We determined that, since 2017, the total number of threats to lawmakers has risen markedly, and Democratic and Republican members have been equally targeted.
This finding supports other research that shows that political violence in the United States now stems from both the left and the right, a rare and unusually dangerous phenomenon. Left to its own momentum, political violence is likely to escalate further, with major consequences for American liberal democracy: it drives fear in communities and among leaders who perceive themselves to be under threat and, in turn, a willingness to accept constraints on civil liberties or wield government power to suppress the danger. That only increases the likelihood that the legitimacy of future elections will be questioned. But the broad nature of the threat also suggests that if political leaders join forces to condemn political violence, they could push back the tide.
HE SAID, SHE SAID
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