America Has a Problem With Political Violence—and It’s a Growing One

The recent rise of political violence in the United States is sobering but not surprising to the researchers who study this subject. “We know the factors that put countries at risk of political violence,” says Barbara F. Walter, an expert on violent extremism. “We also know the factors that put countries at risk of election violence, and the United States has all of them.”

Walter, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start, among several other books, told me on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive that she is worried about the coming election period—but doesn’t think the threats will abate afterward. “We’re in for a rocky few months,” Walter says. “We’re actually, I think, in for a rocky 10 years.”

That’s because the underlying risk factors are so apparent. “The countries that tend to experience violence around elections are countries that have winner-take-all elections, which the United States has; they have voters and a population who have become deeply divided,

especially by race, religion, and/or ethnicity; they have weak institutions, or they have a democracy that’s not as strong as it could be and where some of the electorate questions the validity of elections; and they have a candidate that has lost in the past,” Walter explains. “These are the conditions that social scientists have figured out by looking across countries and over time.” And those conditions all exist in the US today.

Donald Trump, she adds, is “setting up his supporters to believe that if he loses again, it was stolen again. So again, this is the perfect recipe for violence. We will have violence surrounding this election. And really, the key point is, will we be prepared for it?” Thinking ahead and preparing for the possibilities, she says, is “much better than keeping our heads in the sand and pretending that everything’s fine.”

Regarding the recent threats to Trump’s life, Walter says that “the two big drivers of the rise of assassination attempts are guns, and especially the easy access to assault weapons,” and the internet as a source of radicalization. People are “doomscrolling the internet and they’re on these chat rooms and they’re getting radicalized,” she says. “They’re starting to believe the conspiracy theories that they’re hearing. And many of these people are not mentally stable to begin with.”

On the topic of civil war, Walter observes that “there is a cancer growing here in the United States” because a subset of the population doesn’t think democracy serves them anymore. She says the two best predictors of civil war are “whether a country is a partial democracy,” as opposed to a vibrant democracy or a repressive autocracy, and “whether its citizens are divided, deeply divided by race, religion, or ethnicity.”

When you have a democracy that’s in decline, that’s when you start to get into trouble, says Walter. She asserts that political science data indicates America has, in recent years, dropped into this “middle zone.” “Most violence happens in the middle zone.” The key point is preparedness: “We need to pay attention. We need to take precautions against it. We need to be prepared.”