Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts. What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past.
The number of violent events declined, but targets shifted from property to people-minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents. Starting in the late 1970s, political violence shifted rightward with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia groups. They committed extensive violence, largely against property (with notable exceptions), in the name of social, environmental, and animal-rights causes. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these violent fringes were mostly on the far left.
Since the late 1960s, it was carried out by intensely ideological groups that pulled adherents out of the mainstream into clandestine cells, such as the anti-imperialist Weather Underground Organization or the anti-abortion Operation Rescue. Political violence has a long history in the United States. Political Violence in the United States Historically This organizational pattern makes stopping political violence more difficult, and also more crucial, than ever before. Violence can also be intentionally wielded as a partisan tool to affect elections and democracy itself. Violence may be catalyzed by predictable social events such as Black Lives Matter protests or mask mandates that trigger a sense of threat to a common shared identity. These shifts have created a new reality: millions of Americans willing to undertake, support, or excuse political violence, defined here (following the violence-prevention organization Over Zero) as physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities. Instead, ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. She was the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project and serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises. Rachel Kleinfeld is senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which maintains the Global Terrorism Database, most political violence in the United States is committed by people who do not belong to any formal organization. The media’s focus on groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Bois has obscured a deeper trend: the “ungrouping” of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement. 2 The nature of political violence has also changed. Capitol, acts of political violence in the United States have skyrocketed in the last five years.
1įrom death threats against previously anonymous bureaucrats and public-health officials to a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. In July, the Department of Justice set up a special task force specifically to combat threats against election administrators. An unprecedented number of elections administrators received threats in 2020-so much so that a third of poll workers surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice in April 2021 said that they felt unsafe and 79 percent wanted government-provided security. Coomer was one of many people in the crosshairs. Angry supporters of then-president Donald Trump, believing false accusations that Dominion had switched votes in favor of Joe Biden, published Coomer’s home address and phone number and put a million-dollar bounty on his head. presidential election, Eric Coomer, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems, was forced into hiding.
This essay describes the history of such forces in the U.S., shares the risk factors for election violence globally and how they are trending in the U.S., and concludes with some potential paths to mitigate the problem. Recent alterations to violent groups in the United States and to the composition of the two main political parties have created a latent force for violence that can be 1) triggered by a variety of social events that touch on a number of interrelated identities or 2) purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes.
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