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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemit Sebastu. Today, what's really driving political violence in America? Earlier this month, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University. The public response has amplified political divisions, leaving many people feeling anxious about the state of the country.
- [00:36]
B
I think we've seen two tragedies. So we saw the tragic assassination of Mr. Kirk, but that's been followed by a tragedy of blame, an escalation, and inflammation of tensions.
- [00:46]
A
That's Sean Westwood. He's an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab, which studies polarization and democracy. Sean has spent years surveying Americans and analyzing trends in public opinion. His research shows there isn't broad support for political violence in the U.S. but there are deep, deep divisions and widespread misperceptions of the other side, forces that can fuel fear, mistrust, and in some rare cases, violence. And he cautions that while there are a few voices stoking tensions, it's not what most Americans are doing or want to see more of.
- [01:24]
B
Social media isn't reality. Blue sky doesn't reflect the Democratic Party truth, Social doesn't reflect the Republican Party, and X doesn't really reflect anyone. There's a real danger in over learning from the loud voices that want to share their opinion and trying to take that and make sense of the mood in the country as a whole.
- [01:42]
A
In my conversation with Sean, we dig into what the data actually shows about political violence, what we know about who commits it, and what it'll take to turn the temperature down. I started by asking him how we should define political violence in the first place and where Kirk's killing fits into that understanding.
- [02:01]
B
So this is a really important point of differentiation in the literature. So there are some folks who argue that we should adopt a maximalist definition of political violence. So that is anything that could remotely be political. Attacks on the LGBTQ community, attacks on African Americans, anti Semitic attacks. Everything is political violence. And if you do that, you. You have this unfortunate view of the world where political violence has absorbed all of the other social tensions that exist in society. I think a more responsible definition is violence that is motivated by someone's partisanship or their political views. And the reason that this is important, I think, is that if you're giving a very broad label, you risk diluting the kind of repulsion that we have towards anti black violence or anti LGBTQ violence and giving people a cover to say that it's okay. You're saying, no, this isn't that bad. It's just political violence. So there is, I think, a need to be very, very precise here. And given the more precise definition, I think it is the case. It's clear that this is an act of political violence.
- [03:04]
A
Well, the other conversation I've heard a lot of in the past few weeks is this idea of political violence feeling like it is happening more frequently. I mean, certainly there have been a number of high profile incidents in the past few years. There have been assassination attempts on President Trump's life.
- [03:25]
B
Yes.
- [03:25]
A
How do you square these two realities between the fact that it feels like they're happening more often and what the data tells us and what the research tells us, which is that political violence isn't really widespread.
- [03:41]
B
It's ironic because it's so rare when it does happen, it just dominates media coverage. And that can give a false perception of how frequently it's occurring. But it is honestly the case that we are seeing an uptick of events. But the key point is that these are isolated. These aren't coordinated in any way. There's not a hierarchy. There's not any kind of centralized political violence terror cell in the United States. We have lone actors who are acting on their own, and that certainly is bad news, and that it means that it's going to be hard for us to intervene. There's no structure for us to dismantle. But it's good news in that it suggests that we're not going to face an organized onslaught against the dignity of our democracy. So we've seen an uptick, but it's hard from that uptick to say that it's any kind of pattern because of the lack of coordination and structure between these attackers.
- [04:30]
A
So what does the research tell us about who does commit acts of political violence? What tends to motivate them?
- [04:39]
B
When we look at those who commit political violence, what were often left with a very, very unsatisfactory view of their motivations. So in the modern era, most don't have manifestos, most don't clearly articulate the motivation for their attack. And we're left to kind of piece it together from their social media, their web searches, their parental familial political affiliations. It's not the case that we have a clear diagnostic on what's driving these folks or even what they have in common. If we look at some of the most recent incidents of political violence, we find that the perpetrators are largely ideologically incoherent. So Trump's first attempted assassin was searching for targets across the aisle. It wasn't clear that he was going after Republicans or even Mr. Trump, the arsonist who burned Governor Shapiro's house, just profoundly mentally ill. The man who attacked Paul Pelosi, again, profoundly mentally ill. So these were political officials who were subject to violence. And, and from that you can conclude that probably that had some role in the attack. But it's not as if we have a smoking gun saying I tried to kill Donald Trump because of his views on policy X, or I wanted to burn down Governor Shapiro's house because of his position on policy Y. Those are things that we can reconstruct kind of after the fact. But it's really hard, especially because in so many instances, these individuals either don't talk or, or die as part of their attack. We are profoundly unsure on what is consistent across these attackers and what we should look out for.
- [06:18]
A
It's so reflective of how people are thinking in moments like this. They want to categorize. Right? There's a desire to put someone in a bucket and know whose team you're on, whose side you're on, to see it as black and white. I'm hoping maybe you can shed some light on what the data tells us, because for decades, more political violence, and tell me if I'm characterizing this correctly, please. More political violence could be attributed to right leaning ideologies and actors than left leaning. I don't know if that's true today anymore or what has changed in that picture in the past few years.
- [07:02]
B
It's been very cyclical in this country. So if we go Back to the 1960s and the 1970s, a large portion of the violence was committed by the Weather Underground, by the Black Panthers groups that I think we would categorize as towards the left. We then moved through a period of our history where we had groups coming from the right. Timothy McVeigh and folks in that ilk. Depending upon how you define political violence, you might also include those who attack abortion clinics. That would key to the right. But in the modern era, I think what we've lost is this clear ideological worldview driving violence. It really does seem to be individuals who are loosely partisan or just completely ideologically undefined and incoherent. And again, that's probably troubling because it means that this violence is not random, but not systematically predictable. I think another key point to make is that the sense of tribalism is what is dividing this country in the first place. So the partisan hatred that we feel is not driven by, in most instances, policy disagreement. It's not even driven by policy understanding. It really is just this, I'm on my team and my team is good and the other team is bad. Just not even because of their views, not even because of their attitudes, just because they're not on my team. And we're seeing that manifest not just in our views of the other side, but, but in how we respond to these kinds of crises.
- [08:23]
A
I spent some time clicking around the research that you've made available on the Polarization Lab's website, which is really fascinating. I would encourage other people to do the same. One thing that your research has shown is that, and this is obtained through polling and surveying that you all do, it shows that fewer than 2% of Americans believe politically motivated murder is acceptable. It's a very small number. You also broke it out across party lines. So people who would self identify as being more Republican leaning or people who self identify as being more Democratic leaning, this is true across the board of people. Can you talk a little bit more about what you found about how ordinary Americans think about political violence?
- [09:10]
B
Yeah, I think it's important to set the context here. So there's a lot of disinformation on the level of support of political violence in the American public. Just to give you an idea of how we measure political violence, consider the question, do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals? I mean, that's a question that's so broad it could really capture anything. And it does. So if you ask that question and then you ask a follow up, you said that you support violence. What kind of violence do you support? Most people will actually not identify anything that we would consider as violence. They'll say nasty insults. So they're categorizing verbal invective as violence. But if you don't make that distinction when you're asking this question, you really risk inflating the numbers. But more importantly, it's entirely unclear what justification means. So as you pointed out, when we ask the question, we make it clear that this is someone who committed murder because of partisanship. And we take away all ambiguity on whether they're guilty or not. We say that they were adjudicated guilty by a court. And then we asked, do you support the crime that was committed? And when you do that support drops from 40, 50, 60% to less than 3%.
- [10:18]
A
Huge difference. Yeah, huge difference.
- [10:21]
B
But it's still non zero. It's still normatively bad. It's still something we should pay attention to. I'm not saying that violence isn't an issue. I'm Just suggesting that political violence is a more constrained threat than some of the more hyperbole focused media might suggest. But I think there are real consequences to this. There's some political scientists who've really traded scientific precision for headline grabbing results. This polling has gotten so much attention that we have members of Congress tweeting it to imagine that there's this broad conspiracy on the left against the Republican Party. The data has also seeped into the minds of citizens. So if you ask an American what proportion of the other party they think supports murder, they'll say more than 33%. So that's off by a factor of 10. And if you're worried about political violence, the last thing that you want is to give that lone wolf a false sense of mandate, that lone wolf a false sense that the country is with him. You know, if he were to just go out and do this, the country would stand behind him. I find that terrifying. So I'm not trying to aggrandize the work that I do, but I just want to suggest that if you see alarmist headlines, really think about the data. And I think if we clearly and carefully think about what we know about the American public, political violence is rare. And when it happens, we don't see celebration on the streets.
- [11:49]
A
You know, one thing that I see people trying to understand better at times like this is like, one question that I see come up a lot is sort of like, is this an American thing?
- [12:01]
B
Yeah.
- [12:02]
A
Is this uniquely American? I mean, what do we know about political violence and polarization in other countries versus America?
- [12:13]
B
Yes, that is the key question. I was really worried that America is exceptional in this regard, that we are a nation of increasing political conflict, of increasing tolerance for norm violations, and increasing tolerance for political violence. So we've started running surveys in other countries, in other democracies, some that are long and durable, democracies like Germany and others that have a long history of coups and violence, Brazil and India. And what we find is very counterintuitive. So America is more polarized than these other countries. We hate the other side more than almost every other country in our data set. But we support violence at a level far below those other nations. So the hatred that we're experiencing does seem to be strongly American. But it isn't the case that that is yet translated into the level of support for democratic norm violations and the level of support for political violence that we see in other democracies. It could, but these numbers have been relatively stable for the last two years. So it is a bit of Optimism, it does give a sense of hope. Mm.
- [13:22]
A
Is there any precedent in history for understanding how polarization feeds into political violence and what we're seeing happen right now?
- [13:34]
B
Yeah. So one of my pet peeves is when people say we're more polarized than we've ever been before, or there's more political violence today than there's ever been before.
- [13:42]
A
I think it feels true to a lot of people.
- [13:45]
B
I think it does feel true to a lot of people, but I think it also perhaps gives us a false sense of doom because we are a country that survived the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, Jim Crow, Reconstruction. We are a country that had decades of politically motivated lynchings in the south, and we have survived. So I think it's important to keep in mind that as bad as things look now, we've seen far worse. And that's probably not very comforting, but it does suggest that we're a very resilient country and that violence ebbs and flows. So we're in a period now of increased number of events, but there's no reason to assume that we're on an infinite point of escalation, that we're approaching a new era of populist violence, as some would say. I think what we need to do is focus on where we are, understand it, and compare it to the past for context.
- [14:36]
A
Well, Sean, I'll give you my short list of things that keep me up at night that I think about just in terms of circumstances that feel very different in today's times than ever before. One of them is social media, certainly. And you touched on that already a little bit. And then the other thing is the rhetoric that we are hearing from our elected officials. Not to say that there's never been a time in American history where elected officials have engaged in inflammatory rhetoric. Of course, it feels different right now.
- [15:10]
B
I would completely agree. And I think that's also, unfortunately, a misperception. So the truth is. So we collect everything that every member of Congress says, everything that every state level elected official in the United States says through social media, through floor speeches, through press releases, through newsletters, and we actually measure who's using insightful language, who's attacking and denigrating the other side. And what we find is that it's a really small group. It's a really attention seeking and attention getting, but small group. Hmm. The average member of Congress goes to D.C. they go to hearings, they talk to constituents, they do their job and they go home. But that's just not going to get a viral social media post that's not going to get a headline story on cnn. What is going to get that attention, though, is if you say that there are Jewish space lasers, right? Or if you try to divide the country with just incredibly insulting and racist language, or many of the other pathologies of negativity that we've observed, those are the folks that get the attention. And because of that, Americans have a false perception that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the median representative. She's not. Or that we're in a world where members of Congress just aren't doing anything for their constituents, which is not true. The fundamental problem here is that in the past, the media could act as a gatekeeper. They could decide who's going to get coverage and who's not going to get coverage. In the modern era, you go straight to the public. You go straight to the citizenry through social media.
- [16:41]
A
Well, that brings us to the other part of the national response to this moment, which has been a conversation about free speech and what that should look like, who should be allowed to say what in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing. One example that's come up in the past few weeks is I've definitely heard people on the right saying that people on the left are denigrating Kirk's memory by saying that they didn't agree with his views or by quoting him directly. It's been a difficult time to distinguish, make nuance, which some Democratic leaders have tried to do in this moment, and say, I didn't agree with this person. I didn't agree with his views. I denounce political violence. These can all be true at once. But then you hear some voices on the right saying, that is all disrespectful. That should all not be allowed to be said in a moment like this.
- [17:36]
B
So I'd say two things. So the first is that there is an incredible lack of introspection going on by our politicians. So many of the things that the right is accusing the left of doing today are the things that the right was doing itself two months ago. Secondly, I don't know if it's an actual genuine response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk or just a desire for retribution against political enemies. So it's not clear if President Trump is pushing back against traditional media, pushing back against social media, pushing back against the Democratic Party because he actually thinks that they are responsible for motivating Charlie Kirk's assassin, or just that this is a convenient way to exert pressure on a political enemy. And I think that the real tragedy here is that it's being used to gut our civil liberties. And that's something that certainly is going to have a strong effect on the left, but it's also going to have a strong effect on the right. I think one thing that the right is forgetting is that they're not going to permanently be in power. And the things that they're doing now to free speech and to civil liberties are going to set a precedent for the future. I really worry that this has become kind of an iterative game of blame and escalation and constriction of our rights.
- [18:55]
A
Are there any leaders that you've observed who are handling this moment well, in your opinion?
- [19:03]
B
There are a number of leaders.
- [19:04]
A
And are they breaking through? I think that's the second and important question. Is anyone doing it well? And is anyone doing it well and breaking through?
- [19:13]
B
That is the fundamental problem. So the truth is that there are a number of elected officials who've been very reasonable, very constructive in their response. Bernie Sanders gave an excellent social media address where he redoubled the nation's commitment to dialogue and to careful discussion. A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views. Governor Spencer Cox from Utah did the same. We will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about, if we can't have a clash of ideas safely and securely, Even especially, especially those ideas with which you disagree. The problem is that if you're talking about a need for calm, that's not going to get you attention. Erica Kirk said that she forgave the assassin. That young man, I forgive him. And Donald Trump then goes on stage and says, I want the worst for my opponents, I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. If it were just Erica, that would have been amazing. That would have been a potential point of ingress into the discussion of a rational figure trying to cool things down. But it was just immediately swamped by Trump. And if you go online, you find clips of Trump saying that getting much more attention than the beautiful clip of Erica Kirk. And our president and his followers have effectively convinced much of this country that there is a radical left, that it is conspiring against our government and against Republicans. So instead of those more measured responses resonating on social media, we have the most inflammatory responses resonating on social media. And in response to the first assassination attempt against President Trump, we had leaders of both parties issue very strong statements declaring that this is not how America does its politics. That. Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he does not deserve to die. That we need to cool the national temperature and return to the America that we know and love and are proud of. That could have happened this time, and it didn't.
- [21:43]
A
Why do you think it didn't? I've actually, I've been thinking a lot about this, about our national response to that moment versus this one.
- [21:50]
B
Yeah, I don't have a really good answer to that. I think it really is the case that the first person to respond sets the agenda, sets the tenor, and. And in this instance, the first people to respond were the most inflammatory. We saw a very aggressive response coming from the Trump administration and those in the Trump administration's orbit. That didn't happen after the assassination attempt, possibly because the President was isolated and unable to communicate directly via social media and others more adult like states, people stood up and began the public discussion. But it just does seem as if the first voices were the loudest and the most inflammatory and they just set the discussion. They set the bounds for how we're going to frame this event and how we're going to respond to this event in the public mind. I don't know how we fix that. I don't know how we get Americans to pay attention to those rational voices in an environment where every incentive is designed to focus on the inflammatory. When social media works that way, when cable news works that way, without a fundamental structural shift to how our media environment operates, I think these voices are just gonna continue to get lost. Spencer Cox has advocated just stepping back from social media. Touching grass, I believe, is how he put it. I'm not sure that's wrong. It does seem as if public attitudes are being perverted by social media. Probably one of the worst things that we could do, though, is intervene legally. Right. Pass legislation that censors or that bans social media or that restricts free speech. But it is in our power to say, if I'm on social media and I see the worst of America coming out, I feel uncomfortable. It's in our power to just tune out, step away, step back. And I think that for a lot of Americans, that might be the most responsible thing to do.
- [23:40]
A
It puts so much of the onus on individuals to navigate this. Right. And to decide for themselves which voices deserve amplification in their own heads.
- [23:51]
B
Yeah.
- [23:52]
A
How do you think about bigger picture solutions for this?
- [23:56]
B
So I think that the easy fix is to, as journalists, as academics, to hold ourselves to a higher standard, to ensure that we're not feeding bad data into the public mind, into the public consciousness. That's the easiest thing we can do. The harder thing to do, though, is to go out and fix the misperceptions that exist in the mind of the public.
- [24:16]
A
Right.
- [24:16]
B
So there is research that suggests that you can actually do that. The fundamental problem is it doesn't last very long. So if you start with someone who thinks a third of the other party supports political violence, you can correct that misperception. You can move it down by 10 or 15 percentage points, but it'll go right back up to a third after a couple of weeks. So we're in a world where these false attitudes have just become like the baseline opinion in someone's mind, which makes it very, very hard to correct them. I know that your listeners want me to say, here's how we fix political violence, or here's how we fix misperceptions towards political violence. And I wish I could. All I can say is that it is a problem. There are ways that we can address it, but it's going to take a while.
- [25:04]
A
Sean, what would you say to people who are feeling discouraged, disheartened, worried about the threat of political violence in America right now?
- [25:17]
B
Take that worry and deploy it the next time you are considering who to vote for. If one of the candidates disagrees with you on some policy, but is going to responsibly represent you in Washington, D.C. and the other is going to use their platform to build hatred and division, sacrifice. Vote for the candidate that will lower the temperature. Vote for the candidate that that is going to better our democratic system. When you're deciding what news to watch, incentivize and reward news platforms that don't elevate tensions. When you're on social media, unfollow those who are building our divisions. I think that the fear is appropriate, the fear is righteous, but we should harness that fear to try and improve the state of our democracy. And that's a really tough ask. That's a lot of work, and that's going to require Americans to do uncomfortable things, to vote, potentially, especially if you're a Democrat for a Republican or if you're a Republican, to vote for a Democrat. But this is a situation where the most powerful tool that an American has is their vote in the voting booth. And I really hope that that's something that we keep in mind. I am the most pessimistic person you will ever meet. I am negative about everything, but I am still optimistic about American democracy. I'm still bullish on on a healthy American Congress. I still believe that we are not doomed to be defined by political violence. Don't give up. Maintain involvement in the political system. Maintain hope for this country. It is not too late. We have not crossed the Rubicon.
- [26:54]
A
Sean, thank you so much for explaining some of your research to us. And thanks for your time.
- [27:00]
B
I'm super glad to chat with you.
- [27:05]
A
You can read more from Sean Westwood on Apple News. We'll include a link on our Show Notes page.