Political violence in America: Why it’s on the rise

The Sept. 10 shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University - which is still under investigation - follows the June shooting deaths of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting of Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his spouse. Just a few months earlier, Donald Trump was targeted during the 2024 election campaign and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's home was firebombed.

UCLA law professor Jon Michaels, an expert on political violence and co-author of the new book "Vigilante Nation," spoke with Newsroom about the causes, effects and long-term impact of the recent spike in political violence.

How did we get here?

We've been experiencing a shocking level of violence and politicized violence that seems to be intensifying on a yearly - if not monthly - basis. The kind of constant bombardment of instances of violence is so great right now, and it's hard to figure out exactly what is causing it and why aren't we able to turn away from it. I think the answer lies, to a large extent, with a coarsening of our politics that is turning us against one another.

We are leaning heavily into our tribal identities and essentially abandoning our underlying commitments to reasoned disagreement, however strong those disagreements may be. It reflects either despair with or an overt repudiation of our democratic politics. If we can't solve things through the ballot box, we're going to solve things through intimidation, aggression and murder, if necessary. And I want to be careful: we don't yet know the full story behind the murder of Charlie Kirk. I'm talking in generalities about political violence.

You've written about political violence in the Jim Crow South. Would you say we are currently in comparable times?

I had understood us as having learned the cruel, painful lessons from that era when violence was an extension of law and politics. We responded by making explicit social and legal commitments not to revert to that type of anti-democratic politics wherein "other" Americans are treated with disdain and disagreements between cohorts (political, demographic, etc.) are resolved by force.

Without at all excusing what happened in the past, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. We've internalized the lessons of those moral failings and, through law and education, we've developed systems that should have obviated the need to resort to violence and prevented us from backsliding. Yet here we are, again.

This has become a central theme - and source of concern - across several of my courses. In my constitutional, regulatory and national security classes, we study the systems of governance, public safety and welfare, and dispute resolution that we have developed and improved upon over the centuries. All of these systems, while hardly perfect, ought to ensure that we work out our differences through the ballot box, campaigns of persuasion, and adjudications before impartial judges and juries. When we embrace violence as an extension of politics, we are saying we don't care about democracy, we don't think you - the target of violence - is worthy of being in our democratic community, or we don't believe the legal and political systems are functioning.

You're implying that, over time, we've strengthened the "social contract" - the political theory of how humans formed societies with rules and laws, preferring those arrangements to a lawless state of nature.

Yes, in the post-Civil Rights era, our social contract became more inclusive, sweeping in previously marginalized groups, and more comprehensive, covering more relationships and circumstances, such that, again, we shouldn't have to resort to private violence. For us to disregard or degrade that contract, just as that contract grew to be more just and more democratic, is incredibly alarming and dismaying.

Today, we have a more diffuse set of actors engaging in political violence. In addition to those you mentioned from the outset, I would add the firebombing of the hostages' vigil in Boulder that killed an 82-year-old woman, the execution of the United Healthcare CEO in Manhattan, the CDC shootings in Atlanta resulting in the death of a local police officer and the murder of a young couple departing from a Jewish museum in D.C. I'd also fold in attacks on election workers in 2020, car rammings targeting BLM protesters in 2020 and campaigns of harassment and intimidation against government officials ranging from Arizona state senator Rusty Bowers in 2020 to the lieutenant governor of Michigan just a few days ago. At least several of these attacks were justified, rationalized and even celebrated by small but vocal cohorts intent on enforcing a particular social or political order, if necessary through violent means.

Utah's governor stands on a platform calling for Americans to "disagree better." Based on the research you've done, how do we do that?

I think that's a really effective framing. How do we do it, though? If our past responses carry forward into the future, we are not setting ourselves up for any type of healthy and much-needed course correction.

That's the real challenge: Who is going to say, "All right, things have gotten out of hand. How do we work together to fix it?" and not just (to) scream and have intensifying threatening behavior, which is going to create even greater ruptures in our society. The real lesson is, can we transcend the tribalism that invites this type of horrific "othering" of people?

To their credit, the Democratic establishment has held the line. But if there's little reciprocity - and there's countervailing pressure from within the Democratic party not to yield too much ground, certainly not unilaterally - then it's hard to see how we stamp out political violence once and for all.

Are we heading for what political philosopher Thomas Hobbes characterized as a state of nature / state of war?

Our democratic institutions are crumbling, we're debasing our universities, we're compromising our media infrastructure, we're challenging long-standing scientific truths and undercutting our public health regime. We are in a position where many of us feel weak, vulnerable, and disenfranchised. I don't think we're going to devolve into a dystopia of the sort depicted on TV and in movies. But there's a real possibility that we may just stumble along in a really precarious way for the foreseeable future, with our quality of life diminishing as we become more physically, financially and environmentally insecure. Our society's continued propensity to violence, political or otherwise, will discourage people from participating fully along social, civic, religious, economic and political dimensions. If we're not careful, we may all end up walking around with a degree of discomfort and guardedness that we're not accustomed to - yet have little choice but to get accustomed to.