How Can the U.S. Address Political Violence and Threats?

From the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, political violence in the United States is on the minds of many around the country and around the world. As the 2024 election draws closer, now is a useful moment to reflect on the threats of political violence, to consider how other nations have dealt with similar risks, and to evaluate where government and civil institutions can improve. 

Joining the show to discuss the risks of political violence in the United States and what can be done to address them is Rachel Kleinfeld. Rachel is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she focuses on issues of conflict, governance, development, and security. 

Show Notes: 

• Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld)
• Paras Shah (@pshah518)
• Rachel’s Just Security article “Political Violence in the United States Is Rising – and It Might Be Up to Americans to Say ‘Enough!’”
• Just Security’s Democracy coverage
• Just Security’s Political Violence coverage
• Just Security’s Domestic Extremism coverage
• Just Security’s Rule of Law coverage
• Music: “Broken” by David Bullard from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/david-bullard/broken (License code: OSC7K3LCPSGXISVI)

Transcript

Paras Shah: From the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, political violence in the United States is on the minds of many around the country, and many around the world. As the 2024 election draws closer, now is a useful moment to reflect on the threats of political violence, to consider how other nations have dealt with similar risks, and to evaluate where government and civil institutions can improve. 

This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah. 

Joining the show to discuss the risks of political violence in the United States and what can be done to address them is Rachel Kleinfeld. Rachel is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she focuses on issues of conflict, governance, development, and security. 

Hi, Rachel, thank you so much for joining the show. We're so fortunate to have you here to share your expertise with our listeners. I wanted to get started with an overview question. Political violence is on the minds of many Americans, especially after the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, and in some ways, those might feel like outlier events, like things that don't happen frequently. What are the more common forms of political violence or political threats that you have observed in your work?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. Well, so glad to be here, and sadly, you know, the reason is, is because we've been seeing political violence rising in this country, not for the first time. We've obviously had a number of times in our history where we've had a lot of political violence, but since about 2016, what we've seen is the rise in threats against members of Congress. They went up 10 times between 2016 and 2020. Threats against federal judges more than doubled just between 2019, and 2021 — serious threats. We've seen threats against state legislators. Now about half of them say they're being threatened against election officials, against elected officials at the local level, where in any given three-month period, about a fifth say that they're being threatened. That number's gone up actually during this election year. And it's even worse in places that are more urban. So, in San Diego County, for instance, about 75 percent say they've been threatened.  

So, this is the kind of background noise. Now, I do want to say a lot of that is not violence. Threats are way up. Violence against most of these groups is happening, but not at a very high pace. But the problem is that the threats are believable, and in part, that's because the violence that is up is things like hate crimes. Hate crimes started rising in 2015 during that election season. They're now at the highest point in the 21st century, and they're tied to political violence, because when politicians “other” other people, you get a rise in hate crimes. 

We've also seen — and I'll stop on this one, because it's so stunning — a huge rise in cars driving into protesters. So that used to be a foreign terrorist tactic. You never saw it in the United States until 2017, the Unite the Right rally, when a car obviously killed a protester. Since then, we've seen it over 150 times just in those few years, and most of those don't even really make the national news.

Paras: Wow. Those really are some very sobering trends. And you mentioned a little bit of this political leaders “othering” other people, maybe a rise in ideological partisanship. But what are some of the drivers that we see for these trends and this spike in political violence?

Rachel: I would say there's three main drivers that we're seeing in the US, but also in other countries where we're seeing this rise. The first and the biggest is when a political party or leaders of a political party believe it helps them to polarize the country, and particularly to “other” other people, and America's political system is particularly incentivized to polarize. Right now, with the safe seats that we have, you don't try to get out the vote among the mainstream in a general election after getting out your base in the primary. It's just about getting out the base. And so, there's a real incentive to kind of intensify anger, and that leads to a rhetoric that can be violent. And when you have political leaders willing to go there, willing to move beyond trying to get out their base with energy to trying to get out their base with anger and hatred, that's the main cause of a rise in political violence. 

The others are when you have a political system that doesn't hold people accountable. You tend to see more political violence when people think they'll get away with it. And so, when we have a Supreme Court that reduces the sentences of January 6th protesters, for instance, by saying they didn't disrupt a political hearing, or that expands immunity understanding for a president, really unhelpful. But also, there's been a lack of accountability in many state courts as well. 

And then finally, you need people to uphold a sort of democratic norm and a set of beliefs that violence is not acceptable in democracy. When people get frustrated with democracy and they start eroding those norms, they let their leaders get away with things, often because they want their leaders to prevail because they're so afraid of the other side. And we're seeing that in America too. We're seeing — still a very small percentage of people who actually believe that political violence is justified. There’s a lot of really bad polling out there that says, you know, it's a third of Americans, or what have you. Nobody should believe it. The polling is just atrocious. The good polls show about three or four percent on either side of the political aisle, and about even, that support political violence. But in America, every percentage point is 2.5 million people, so three or four percent on either side is still way too many millions of people who justify very specific forms of political violence, like killing members of the other party.  

So, when those norms break down and people think that they can't achieve things through normal politics, they have to resort to these violent means because they're so afraid that the other party is going to take away their rights and freedoms. That's kind of the third pillar that leads to this kind of violence.

Paras: Thanks for that overview. And that case that you mentioned from the Supreme Court is called Fisher v. United States, and it is about the charges under one of the federal obstruction statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c). And the court narrowed the scope of that statute and affected a certain number of the January 6th cases, though not all of them, and many of those defendants were charged under other statutes as well. 

Rachel: That's right, and you're quite right that the cases didn't affect a whole lot of them, but it sends a signal. And that's what I'm trying to get at, is that accountability has a lot to do with deterrence, and you're trying to tell people that if you do something wrong, you'll be punished. And what we know about deterrence is that ideally, it's swift, it doesn't have to be long — long sentences don't matter that much — but being fairly assured, so, being fairly quick and assured that if you do something wrong ,you're going to be punished, is a very strong deterrent. And when you lessen those rules, or when you're just really slow with justice and somewhat inconsistent, that makes it harder to serve as a deterrent.

Paras: Right, and I want to turn to the piece that you wrote for Just Security, which was published in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. And you write that political leaders, political parties, Congress, the judiciary, and perhaps most important of all, the American people ourselves, all have a role to play to reduce tension and bring the country towards a steadier path, if we choose it. And I want to unpack each of those institutional actors that you mentioned. But first, I wanted to see what motivated you to write that piece, and what was going through your mind as you were writing and reflecting in the aftermath of the assassination attempt.

Rachel: So, I have to say that that assassination attempt was not unexpected. It felt pretty clear to me that if we continued on this path of very high levels of threat, aggrandizement of violence, and normalization, that we were going to see more of these sorts of things. You know, we had seen Paul Pelosi get harmed. We'd seen Steve Scalise, the Republican member of Congress, get shot at a baseball game by a Bernie Sanders supporter. We'd seen January 6th. We’ve just seen this uptick in major events. And one thing that you know when you study violence is that a lot of people who commit violence like the notoriety. They like to be famous, and so you get copycat attempts. So, I wasn't really surprised to see an assassination attempt. I was very, very grateful that it didn't work, and that the person seemed to be one of these who really wanted notoriety more than having a political axe to grind. 

But there are many ways that we as a country could start working to bring down the threat, and I thought it was really important, as a knowledgeable person in this sector, to help spell that out a little bit to people. First, to tell them to be a little less worried about immediate violence. There was a lot of talk during that post-assassination period about, you know, were we headed for civil war? We absolutely were not headed for civil war, and people needed to understand that that wasn't the worry. The worry was this long trail of threat and violence that I mentioned at the beginning here that was already affecting our country. It wasn't some big, spectacular guerrilla warfare. It was the fact that we've already had gigantic numbers of election officials leave their jobs because they don't want to put up with this. We've had Mesa County schools in Arizona refuse to host voting this year because they said their school officials were getting too many threats, and they didn't want to bring that on. I mean, this is what erodes democracy. So, that's why I wrote the piece.

Paras: Yeah, thank you for that. There really are so many good points in the piece, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And as you think about these different institutional actors, because you name a number of them, what can these institutional actors do? And let's start with Congress. 

Rachel: So, there's a lot that can be done, and the piece, frankly, only scratched the surface. Congress is probably the most important actor. First, Congress could actually start governing as it should be governing our country. You know, it's the first branch of government. It is supposed to be making laws — not the Supreme Court — and it's supposed to be adjudicating between the different belief sets of Americans. That's what our parties are supposed to do in Congress. Congress has really failed at that mission for a long time, resulting in a lot of gridlock, and also a failure to translate majority beliefs of the American people into legislation. 

I mean, the immigration case is a great one. This immigration issue has been on the decks of the legislature for 15 years now, and nobody's acted. When the legislature doesn't do its job, it pressures the whole rest of the system. It pressures the executive to use executive agency powers. It pressures the courts to step in. It makes the American people feel that democracy isn't working, and eventually, that leads regular people to sometimes resort to violence because they lose faith in the system, and it leads to greater polarization as the executive and courts take roles they're not supposed to do. So, Congress could simply do its job. 

In the absence of Congress doing its job, you need other actors to step up. So political parties are really important here, because one of the reasons Congress can't act is that they're so ideological. They're so polarized. I've written a paper about polarization in America, and basically, we've been electing representatives who are vastly more polarized than the American people for well over two decades. And what that does is, it means that there's no overlap right now between the parties in Congress about legislative policy beliefs, whereas there's quite a lot of overlap in the American people on those things. So, what we need is for parties to restore their gatekeeping, restore their ability to keep out real extremist belief sets, and also do their job of aggregating and representing interests. 

That means that they would need to probably focus a little bit less on the extremes of small dollar donors, who tend to be pretty extreme in their belief sets, and using anger to get them to come up, and also primary voters. So, that suggests political reform to both help the parties strengthen creating super delegates and that kind of thing, but also reform to reduce the power of primaries, which is really tying the hands of parties in a lot of ways. So, things like ranked choice voting with instant runoffs that have created some really good incentive structures in places like Alaska and Maine. Those are important to getting Congress to work and getting our parties to work so we get less extreme leaders. That makes democracy work. It also means that the extreme leaders aren't incentivizing violence.

 And then, there are other actors who can do their jobs better. There could be federal penalties for threatening election officials and elected officials. We could have more laws and funds from campaigns being allowed to go to security. We could have federal and state penalties for damaging voting places and property drop boxes and tabulation centers and so on. So, there's lots of legislative solutions here at the federal and state level that could disincentivize violence and make it easier to act on it. 

We could also have some basic activity sets that would help people trust in law enforcement, better law enforcement. Trust is really important for law enforcement to do their job and people not to turn to extremist groups to sort of act as vigilantes. But a lot of people don't trust the police in our country for, frankly, some pretty decent reasons. So, the Defense Department has a directive on extremism. That's pretty good about trying to get extremists out of the DoD. We could legislate its applicability to all federal law enforcement officers. We could have rules on screening and reporting extremist behavior so you didn't get extremists in Customs and Border Patrol, for instance. You can make cops and burn grants to local police contingent on them adopting similar rules to try to get rid of extremists in the force. So, there's so many things that could be done at the legislative and executive levels, at the federal and at the state level.

And then finally, the American people just really need to insist on it. They need to stop supporting the leaders who are more extreme with their money and with their votes, and they need to start insisting on civility. And we're seeing that in places like Wisconsin, Arizona. You've seen business leaders say, we're going to ask ahead of time who will support whatever election outcome happens to come out, and if you don't promise to support that election outcome ahead of the election, we're going to throw our support behind the other candidate. And in Wisconsin, the business community has come out saying that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said they would abide by election results and the Republican didn't. That's really important, not from a partisan standpoint, but just to say, actually, it's important to agree to the rules of the game before you play the game. You don't change them in the middle. And if we have more people in this country insisting on that and standing up for it, will strengthen the guardrails again. 

Paras: And some of this may seem difficult in terms of the politics of it. For example, Liz Cheney lost her seat after serving on the January 6th committee and seeking accountability for it. How much of this do you think is really a framing point, and as you say, kind of delineating what is beyond the pale, what is unacceptable behavior. And where is the political calculus there for members of Congress who might be in vulnerable seats?

Rachel: Well, we act as if political calculus and these incentives are outside of our control. But of course, this is all created by people. We've had different political systems at different times in our history. Until 1968, everything was smoky, backroom politics. We didn't have party primaries that were determining things. Liz Cheney lost her seat in part because the party primary voters in Wyoming are more extreme than the regular voters, and in part because one of the leaders of the Republican Party in Wyoming is supportive of the Oath Keepers and allowed a great deal of threat and violence to be used so that Liz Cheney couldn't even announce events beforehand, because of the level of threat she was under. Imagine if instead, you had a Republican GOP chair who said, there will be no threats on my watch, and you had Republican parties at the local level who followed that and who said, you know, to anyone who was looking problematic in a meeting, that their security would take out those people, instead of those people sometimes being the security for the event. 

So, it's a norm cascade, as they say. It's a set of norms that flow from the top about what you're going to allow within your group. You know, a party is just a club, really. What are the rules that you're going to enforce in your club, and then, how is the government going to help you enforce those rules making it harder or less hard to do? 

Paras: Yeah, and I think it is important to note that we have many comparative examples from countries around the world which are also facing similar trends and similar threats of political violence. For example, in Brazil, their Supreme Court, which does have broader investigative powers than the US Supreme Court, but nonetheless, launched its own investigations and really had a forceful response to protests in January 2023 from Bolsonaro supporters that sacked the presidential palace, Congress and the court. So, what do you see as salient from other countries, and what can we learn from those examples? 

Rachel: Sure, so, this is not only not America's first rodeo with political violence, but sadly, there are a lot of other countries that have also faced it. aAd as you say, there's a lot we can learn. The courts have been real bulwarks for security of democracy in a lot of Latin America. Latin America, of course, has lost their democracies in many countries before. So, it's within living memory. In Brazil, as you mentioned, you know, there was a coup in 1964 and freedom of speech and other really core rights only came back in 1985. 

So, when they saw a threat to democracy from Bolsonaro, Brazil's Supreme Court recognized that this could be very serious and that they needed to act. And they, as you said, already had greater investigative powers, but they'd never had the power to unilaterally start an investigation. They chose to take on that power kind of in a way how the Supreme Court took on new powers in America in Marbury v. Madison. And even though Bolsonaro supporters threatened the justices, threatened their families, there were explosives that were found near one Justice's home — the courts focused on the law. They barred Bolsonaro from running for eight years and have been investigating his supporters and so on who used violence against the presidential office and their legislature and their Supreme Court.  

But it's not just Brazil. In Mexico, AMLO, the populist president there on the left instead of on the right, had also been really trying to stack the court and undermine the institution, slashing the budgets of a lot of autonomous bodies in the government and so on. And the courts eventually heard a challenge to legislation that he was passing to try to affect the electoral system itself, basically, really, starve it of money, and they declared those changes unconstitutional. Colombia has done similar things in their courts. Uribe, who is an incredibly popular president — Alvaro Uribe really did quite a bit to quell the violence that was making Colombia nearly a failed state, but he also used means that weren't democratic. He tried to run for an extra term and sort of kept — he used his justice department to try to spy on opponents and so on. And Columbia's courts chose to punish him for those things, even though he was just wildly popular. They declared his attempted referendum for a third term unconstitutional. They convicted his former chief of intelligence and other senior staff in a whole series of cases — more than two dozen cases — of undermining the rule of law. 

So, courts play a really, really important role in upholding the guardrails of democracy. But they're not alone. In Germany and France, we've seen a real uptick in political violence as well in the last few years, and one of the things their political party system has done has maintained what they call a cordon sanitaire against the most extreme party that's been really pushing a lot of the violence, refusing to allow them into government. In France, that cordon sanitaire broke a little bit. Half of the right decided to join the National Rally after they had had won a first-round election. But the other half of the right said, no way, we're not doing that, and this party is beyond the pale, they're supportive of neo-Nazi ideas, and so on. And they broke away and formed a new party, they felt so strongly about it. So, that kind of party policing of democratic norms is something we need more of in the United States too.

Paras: And in the French example, the coalition did form very quickly. In just a couple of weeks, they were able to respond to the first round of elections. 

Rachel: It was a stunningly fast move in France. More in Common has a great report on what happened in France, but basically, when it became clear that Macron’s snap elections were very likely to put the National Rally in power based on the polling, the left — really, the far left — started to form a united front. And they were at each other's throats. I mean, the greens and the socialists and the communists, they did not like one another, but they came together and they said, you know, we're actually going to join together to give us the best chance of fighting off this threat. And that convinced the center left that they were going to be reasonable. And they joined in too. And that allowed the center right to say, you know, if everyone else is going to take this threat so seriously and work so hard to overcome differences to save our democracy, then we're going to do that too. We're going to do the right thing. And they stood up and joined that coalition, which spanned, really, from the far left to the center right, in order to keep this extremist party out of power. 

It was pretty astounding. Now, they're having trouble agreeing on things at this point. Not surprisingly, it's a very broad coalition. But they held up an idea, and that idea of a republican front in France is really important, because France remembers when they lost their government to the Nazis. They remember what happened when they lost the republican front and had a Vichy French government. America doesn't remember that kind of thing. We sort of swept Jim Crow under the rug, so we don't have in living memory that we had authoritarian spaces in our own country, and we don't remember what to do and how important it is to do the right thing in these historical moments. But France does show us what that would look like.

Paras: Many important and helpful examples. So, the 2024, election in the states is less than three months away, and when we think about how local, state, and federal officials are preparing for it, what do you think they should be thinking about in terms of preventing political violence and maybe trying to have forethought in their response plans?

Rachel: So first, I think it's worth just telling everyone, we rarely see violence on election day. I know that some people are worried about voting, and that these fears of election violence have gotten them real scared. You don't see the violence that day. Every once in a while, occasionally you'll see, you know, there were a few places where there were armed people at the front of drop boxes in the last election. Very few places, I mean, less than a dozen across the whole country. And lawyers got on it right away and got those people moved very quickly. So, people should feel very confident voting. Nobody who's a violence expert expects violence on election day. 

The real problem is afterward. You know, we've got a couple of swing states that aren't allowed to start counting their ballots that are absentee ballots until the day of election — in one case, not until the evening of the election. So, what you're likely to have, if it's a close election, is a number of swing states, where on the TV they'll say, oh, the state is trending red, because you tend to get more Republican voters coming in person, but there will be like 3 percent of the precincts counted, or 5 percent of the precincts. So, it won't mean anything, but people will go to sleep hearing, oh, Pennsylvania is trending red. Then they'll wake up the next day or check the news the next evening and find out that as the absentee ballots got counted, you get more absentee ballots, generally, from Democrats who trust that system more. Suddenly, it's trending blue. Then people get worried, and they say, oh, that's not fair. Well, of course it's fair. You know, if you had 3 percent of your precincts or 5 percent of your precincts counted, there's an awful lot of votes that weren't counted yet, but people don't pay a lot of attention to that. So, the post-election period, where we're expecting to see probably a more red map right away with in person voting that moves more blue over time as absentee ballots get counted in these states that can't count right away — that's likely to create more worry.  

And of course, there's things people could do. The states that have those laws could allow those ballots to be processed ahead of time. Most states that have laws about absentee ballot processing say that you can start processing them ahead of time. That doesn't always mean you count them. It means you check the signatures, you make sure that the ballot itself is okay, and you have a pile of ballots that you know can be counted and a pile that can't be counted. And by doing that preprocessing ahead of time, you speed up the count enormously. So, Florida, for instance, has a very quick count of many, many absentee ballots, being such a big state, because they've passed those laws. So, we need the other swing states, like Pennsylvania, to pass the laws that allow us to have a count the night of the election like we used to do. 

You could also have time and place gun ban rules that would probably reassure a lot of people. Again, we're not very worried about violence on election day, but it's not comfortable to go into a voting booth and see your neighbor is carrying a gun. And there's really no need for a gun in that place. We have time and place bans on school property, for instance, with school kids. So, you could just say, look, guns aren't for polling places, and we've had about 18 states pass laws like that. Other states could pass laws like that too.  

States could also make sure that they were working with CISA, the federal government, to correct mis and disinformation. There was a little while where some court cases made it unclear whether it would be allowed for CISA to work with platforms, social media, platforms, to correct mis and disinformation, but now it is allowed, and that could be stepped up quite a bit, because, for instance, we've seen in past elections someone spreading rumors like, oh, if you're a Republican, you should vote on Tuesday, and if you're a Democrat, you should vote on Wednesday. Well, first of all, that's absolutely ridiculous. That would take away the secrecy of the ballot, but if the election's on Tuesday, then only one group is going to get to vote. So that kind of mis and disinformation that's just, you know, false polling place locations and stuff, is stuff that can be cleaned up. And this is not quelling anyone's freedom of speech. This is just bad information, and getting that cleaned up would help a lot. 

And then finally, but maybe most importantly, we need to regain the sense of Election Day as a joyous day. You know, it's much harder to commit violence, it's much harder to think of violence when people are happy and things are joyous, and we used to have big parties on election day. In fact, people used to get so drunk on fermented apple cider in the 1800s that kids didn't go to elections because it was kind of a grown-up day, but they were kind of a big community party. We could get back to that. In 2020 there was a whole movement of joy to the polls. There were dance parties during that waiting period. The week after, when we weren't sure how the election would come out, DJs and so on. More of that would be good. People should remember that we're really lucky to have a democracy. We can vote people out when we disagree with them. We're not stuck with them for twenty, thirty, years, the way so many dictatorships are. That's a big deal, and we can be happy about it. And that would also bring down the temperature quite a lot.

Paras: Yeah, that certainly would be nice to get back to that idea of joy in voting. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on yet that you'd like to add? 

Rachel: I think the most important thing for people to remember is that they have agency in this. They're not at the whim of forces that they can't control. These conspiracy theories about elites who control this and that. You know, this is a democracy, and most people are feeling pretty helpless, but, gosh, an awful lot of people don't even bother to vote. If you don't vote, then you don't get a say in things. And it's really important for people to take the agency that they have, and that means you can get out there and register people to vote. You can get out there and try to change the laws that you don't like. You can work with people across the aisle to do that. We can get back to the idea that some things don't have to be partisan. You know, it doesn't have to be partisan whether you have guns at a polling place, or whether you count the ballots on the day of the election, or you start processing them ahead of time. Those are technical issues that could be technical. 

And if we took that agency to say, okay, who agrees with me on this? And if they don't agree, can I convince them? And then started to work together on things we can agree on, we would first of all recognize that the other side of the partisan divide are human beings. They don't have horns and tails, and they might have ideas that are different from us, but often they can be convinced. When you take things out of the shouting match and start to discuss real beliefs, there's a lot of overlap in real beliefs. And also, the more we take agency, the less we believe in these crazy, conspiratorial forces controlling our lives, and the more we realize that things are just hard. There are incentive systems that are different. We're a country of 333 million people, about 260 million adults who can vote. It's just a lot of people to get to agree on things and do things, and that makes things complicated. But that's not nefarious. It just means you have to roll up your sleeves a little bit and work on it. And I think the more people tried to do that in their system, the more they would recognize the importance, first of all, of our democracy, and just the difficulty of getting things done and the need to make alliances and the other kind of old-fashioned beliefs that made democracy work.

Paras: Thank you so much for all of these insights. I have learned so much in this conversation, and I know our listeners have as well. We'll be tracking all of this at Just Security. Thank you again for joining the show.  

Rachel: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Paras: This episode was hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah, with help from Harrison Blank.

Special thanks to Rachel Kleinfeld.

You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of democracy, political violence, and the rule of law, including Rachel’s analysis, on our website. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen