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Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. After a California man was charged last week with attempting to kill the president, marking the third assassination attempt against Trump, many have been left wondering where this apparent cycle of political violence we’re in will lead.
Last year, gunmen killed Charlie Kirk and Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was firebombed. And a couple of years before that, Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their home.
This hour, we’ve invited Garen Wintemute and Adrienne LaFrance to help ground us in data and context for what we’re seeing. Garen has been researching and surveying Americans on their attitudes toward political violence at UC Davis for years. Garen, welcome to Forum.
Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H.: Mina, thanks for having me.
Mina Kim: The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, has been reporting on political violence for two decades. Thanks for coming on as well, Adrienne.
Adrienne LaFrance: Thank you.
Mina Kim: So, Adrienne, I’ll start with you. As someone who has covered political violence for so long, how do you define it?
Adrienne LaFrance: Oh, that’s a great question. I mean, I would really actually love to hear how the actual researcher would answer this question rather than a journalist. I would say I sort of take the easy way out in my definition and keep it simple. I tend to define it as someone taking action in order to prevent or provoke political change. But there are many ways to define it, and that’s one of the things that makes it so hard to track or understand.
Mina Kim: Yeah. But even under that sort of simpler definition that you use, you find that the vast majority of Americans fully reject political violence.
Adrienne LaFrance: In everything I’ve read, and from everyone I’ve interviewed who studies this closely, that has always been one of the more reassuring constants, that most people really do reject it. Unfortunately for us, it takes only one person to wreak tremendous havoc. So it’s both reassuring and not.
Mina Kim: Yeah. Well, Garen, what do the statistics show with regard to a broad rejection of political violence? And do you define it similarly?
Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H.: Let me switch the order. I do define it similarly. We restrict political violence to the use of force in our surveys. We define it in the surveys as physical force sufficient enough to injure somebody or harm them, and we say that the force is being used to advance a political objective. Then we supply a bunch of political objectives and ask our participants how they respond.
There are lots of definitions. All of them tend to be general, and it’s understood that this is a concept that’s really kind of hard to corral.
Mina, you’ve led with the most important thing, I think, that the single most important finding from everybody’s research on political violence is that the vast majority of the population rejects it. That’s true in our surveys.
And I’ll add briefly, and we might get further into this, that of the minority who endorse political violence in principle, the vast majority say they wouldn’t want to do it themselves. And of the small minority who say, yes, I’m willing to do it, more than half say, but you can talk me out of it.
Mina Kim: At the same time, though, Garen, we’re hearing about an uptick in political violence on the left, that last year violent plots on the left outnumbered those on the right. How worried should we be about that?
Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H.: We should be concerned about political violence. But the specific finding that you’ve mentioned has given rise to a lot of unjustified concern about a switch in the polarity of violence.
We’ve all looked at a graph, but we’re on radio, so give me just a second to describe what’s on that graph. Over time, right-wing violence has vastly outnumbered left-wing violence, going back decades now, about a decade and a half.
Last year, after the twenty twenty-four elections, violence on the right plummeted. As Enrique Tarrio, head of the Proud Boys, put it, “Honestly, what have we got to complain about?” That’s a direct quote.
Violence on the left was always infrequent, going up a little, down a little, up a little, down a little, around an infrequent baseline with no trend. And it just so happened last year that that plummeting on the right coincided with an uptick on the left. And it is true that violence on the left last year was more frequent than violence on the right, but that was entirely due to a decrease in violence on the right.
Mina Kim: So what I’m hearing then from both of you is that it’s broadly rejected by the American people. And then, as Garen, you were saying, the statistical shift in violence by left-wing actors is probably being overblown and is more complicated than it appears.
So, Adrienne, why are we seeing what we’re seeing, and why is political violence such an important force to keep in check? I mean, you noted it a little bit when you said one person can really have a very big impact. Can you talk a little bit about what concerns you most?
Adrienne LaFrance: Absolutely. So, I mean, I agree with everything Garen has said. And I think it’s really important to ground all of this in the fact that the state has a monopoly on violence generally.
So in any period where one party is in power over the other, it’s not necessarily surprising to see that people who identify strongly with their political party or their political views, in a period where they’re feeling disempowered, might be more prone, again, among that minority of people who would turn to violence in the first place, to see violence as a path toward political resolution in a way they wouldn’t if they felt their worldview or party was represented by those in power.
And then in terms of what I worry about, I mean, I think when you sort of look around at the conditions we see in our society, knowing the conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence, there is a lot to be concerned about.
I mean, you have highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in civic institutions, this sort of widespread perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories. I mean, I could go on and on. And then, of course, layer on top of that what our information ecosystem looks like and the way that we communicate with one another on social media. It’s a potentially explosive situation that we’re in.
Mina Kim: Yeah. One of the things I was struck by, you wrote a piece called Rise of the Blood Populists. You wrote, “Most Americans fully reject political violence. It’s time to differentiate between those who tolerate it and everyone else.” Are you worried that political violence is becoming an ideology, or could become one?
Adrienne LaFrance: In some ways, yes. I want to be as nuanced as possible here, and I think it’s really important that people like Garen and others who deeply research and understand this and look at the data underlying these trends are slicing up the data in whatever possible way they can so that we do understand why right-wing violence or left-wing violence might trend up or down at any given moment.
On the other hand, I think for most of us who are not researchers focused on the subject matter, I wish that people would just say political violence is wrong, full stop. And it doesn’t matter if the political violence is happening on whatever a person’s perceived ideological side is.
So, yeah. I mean, I personally do see that every individual has a threshold for violence. And so you could, across the whole population, try to understand what people’s potential to commit acts of political violence is.
But the simplest way for me to think about it, and it’s probably overly simple in some ways, is just to say: No. This is not the society we want to live in. Political violence is wrong, full stop. And those who believe that and agree with it should coalesce around trying to figure out what the solution is.
Mina Kim: And so how did you come up with “blood populism” as a way to coin that loose coalition?
Adrienne LaFrance: Right. So, I mean, this is where you need someone who’s an expert in populism to come in and tell me that I’ve misused it.
Look, on one level, you need a headline and you try to get people’s attention. On the other hand, I do think that, in the same way that populist forces are changing society in the various ways that they are now, you could think of this turn toward political violence, or these recent episodes and potentially worsening cycle of political violence, as part of a broader populist movement.
And the reason I framed it that way was, again, I really wish that most people, like the layperson, would get beyond, “Well, it’s your side.” “No, it’s your side.” And just think: No. This is not what we want for our country. Let’s look beyond partisan differences and agree on the thing we hopefully can agree on, which is political violence is hurting all of us.
Mina Kim: Let me invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, what questions or reactions do you have to the political violence we’re seeing now? What do you think is driving it? And how concerned are you that it will increase or worsen?
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Garen, I want to ask you: A lot of people point out that there have been lots of periods of violence in this country. Often they point to the sixties as a particularly violent time, the seventies as well, and that the country has seen worse than we’re seeing now and survived.
But is there something about this moment that feels different with regard to the character of the violence we’re seeing?
Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H.: Yes. I think so. I grew up in the sixties and seventies and can tell you exactly where I was when I learned that John Kennedy was shot, that Robert Kennedy was shot, that Martin Luther King was shot.
Mina Kim: Yeah.
Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H.: We have seen worse. I think what’s different this time is the role that the federal government is playing.
Our definition of physical force, and others’ definitions as well, extend to the kind of violence that we’ve seen with immigration enforcement. And if you include those as acts of political violence, it is simply true, based on the numbers today, that the leading source of political violence in the United States is the federal government.
We are seeing violence as an instrument of federal policy enforcement. And, Mina, as you know, I’ve been writing about this since January. I think there is real risk of institutionalizing violence as a means of suppressing opposition in the United States. That is not something that we’ve seen in a very long time.
Mina Kim: We’re talking with Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, who also practices and teaches emergency medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine. And we’re talking with Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic.
We’re talking about what’s driving recent incidents and shifts in attitudes toward political violence. We’ll have more with them, and with you, after the break, listeners. I’m Mina Kim.
