Threats of violence on Election Day never materialized, thankfully. But that hasn't stopped Americans from fearing what's next during these polarized times.
Political violence has been a part of this country since its founding. But right now, many people feel it’s a disturbing trend on a sharp and dangerous upswing. Such acts of political violence started ramping up long before the midterm elections. And the people who study it are worried.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times national politics reporter Melanie Mason
More reading:
‘We are a tinderbox’: Political violence is ramping up, experts warn
Read our full coverage of the violent attack on Paul Pelosi
Gustavo Arellano: Political violence has sadly been a part of this country since its founding.
But right now many people feel it's a disturbing trend on a sharp and dangerous upswing.
News Clip: David DePape broke into the Pelosi home asking, “Where is Nancy?” The same words uttered by Capitol intruders who threatened the speaker.
Gustavo: Such acts started ramping up long before the midterm elections. And the people who study it are worried.
Erica Chenoweth: One group wants to get real and talk about what's really going on in the country and reject and renounce political violence, and the other side wants to turn a blind eye. That’s exactly the sort of dangerous and precarious situation that our democracy is in.
Gustavo: Like, really worried.
Robert A. Pape: This is gonna be the end of the voting season, but it's only the beginning of the potential violent threats to democracy.
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to The Times: Essential News from The L.A. Times.
It's Monday, Nov. 14, 2022.
Today, this rise in political violence: is it just part of American democracy, or the beginning of its end?
Melanie Mason is a national political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Melanie, welcome to The Times.
Melanie Mason: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo: So, election day came and went, and thankfully there were no reports of violence, but a lot of people did fear something like that would happen. But then you read history books and well, things have been pretty bad throughout American history and trying to defend our democracy from within. So how bad are things right now compared to other eras?
Melanie: Political violence has always ebbed and flowed throughout this country. But what is unusual about this time is that there's a lot of potential targets for violence. I mean, that's what we saw with these most recent elections. And so we saw that throughout the country, there were several right-wing groups that had been mobilizing poll watchers: people to actually watch voters drop off their ballots at mailboxes. And some of them were even in tactical vests, had weapons with them, until a federal judge said that they had to put an end to that. So there was probably this air of menace that I think was somewhat unusual from the most modern political history that we've had. And I think that the best way to think of this moment is to compare it to the mid 1990s where we saw this other upsurge of right-wing political violence.
News Clip: Really, it happened so fast. It was just, everything went black.
Melanie: Of course that was the era where we had the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
News Clip: It was a large explosive of perhaps 1,000 or 1,200 pounds, but not too big to fit into a car.
News Clip: We were sitting in our desks and obviously working and heard an enormous explosion go off. The entire building shook.
Melanie: Which of course was this really seminal moment of understanding political violence in this country.
News Clip: So many people in the blast remain to be discovered.
Melanie: Killed 168 people.
News Clip: Several of those are confirmed to be children.
Melanie: And so I think that as experts are looking at this moment of political violence, that's the closest parallel that they're pointing to. I think that should tell us a lot about where we are right now.
Melanie: What we've seen in this current era is kind of this ramping up of, quite frankly, unprecedented incidents, right? Things like the overrunning of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
News Clip: I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of “Kill him with his own gun.”
Melanie: We've seen nothing like that in American history. And then there's kind of the more quotidian and almost day-to-day stuff, the stuff that you don't hear about on the news, but the politicians, even local officials getting deluged with telephone and email death threats.
News Clip: The Los Angeles County chief public health officer says she's receiving death threats in response to coronavirus restrictions.
Melanie: I think that that has overall contributed to this sense of something in the air.
Erica: Okay. I'm Erica Chenoweth. I'm a professor at Harvard University where I am a political scientist and I study social movements, political violence and democracy.
Melanie: An expert that I talked to, Erica Chenoweth, told me that this most recent surge dates back a couple of years.
Erica: I think the latest trend started in 2017 with the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.
News Clip: A horrific scene in Charlottesville, Va., a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence and chaos.
Erica: But one thing that's important to know is that it really kicked up in the past two and a half years starting most acutely with the assaults on state capitols that started to take place in April of 2020 and Michigan and elsewhere related to resistance to pandemic restrictions. These involved, you know, armed takeovers but also plots to kidnap and potentially kill different politicians, including Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, among others. And what we saw was really three bursts of that wave starting in April 2020, then building in the summer of 2020 as basically a counter-protest or counter-response to the uprisings that took place in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. And then renewing in the fall of 2020 related to the election.
Gustavo: Another expert you talked to named Robert Pape, he described the current climate as a tinderbox that's just ready to erupt into a huge wildfire. So what is he saying that could be the spark that sets that off?
Melanie: Yeah, I found that analogy to be really helpful, right? Because the point was really easy to visualize because first of all, it shows that there is this combustible material that actually exists on both sides of the political spectrum, right? There is just this heightened sense of volatility that exists on the far right and the far left.
Robert: You need a cigarette butt, a spark, some trigger to set off that combustible material. Well, that's where rhetoric often comes in.
Melanie: But the difference that Robert Pape, a professor at University of Chicago, was telling me about, is that the sparking incidents, like say the lightning strikes, seem to be happening far more on the right.
Robert: We have a situation in the country where there are millions of Americans in our surveys that support the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency and other goals that are related to Donald Trump. And those millions of Americans are that dry wood that I'm describing. Well, then you have leaders, Donald Trump himself has put logs right on the fire here. But you have leaders who are not necessarily just putting logs on a fire, but they're standing aside. They're bystanders, they're deflecting.
Melanie: You're seeing prominent figures, whether they're politicians or people in the media, either winking and nodding at perhaps some of these conspiracy theories or just not outright denouncing the violence. And what he said is that's analogous to these kind of lightning strikes in this highly combustible environment.
Robert: The main threat to our democracy comes not just from a violent individual or a violent extremist group, but from millions of Americans who support violence and the use of force rather than accept the outcome of elections they disagree with.
Robert: Volatile individuals, volatile groups, they can think they have a popular mandate. They can think the violence is normal and that can edge them on to go from being volatile and nonviolent to taking that step to violence. And so this is a bit like understanding wildfires.
Gustavo: When we come back, the impact all these violent acts have on our nation's democracy.
Gustavo: Melanie, I always like to put things into perspective, and as we said before, this is far from the first time in our nation's history where people feel our democracy is threatened from within, threatened with violence. It feels really scary right now, but we're not thankfully seeing widespread violence like the kind we used to see against Black Americans and other people of color. But regardless of history, how does the rest of the country feel about what's going on right now?
Melanie: We always wanna avoid recency bias. Of course, things have been bad in the past, but what stood out to me in this current moment is this sense across the nation that things are bleak. So there was this poll in August by YOUgov that found that a strong majority of respondents said that they believed that political violence would increase in coming years. And over half thought that America would be less of a democracy a generation from now. Another poll found that over 40% of Americans think that civil war is somewhat likely within the next decade. And 1 in 5 people who identified themselves as strong Republicans, they said that they believe that civil war is very likely, and that's more than any other political group. And so there's this sense even if people themselves aren't backing violence, there's this unsettled sense that violence is looming out there.
Gustavo: So how do we combat or change all that? Like, how do we go from an unsettled sense of looming violence, to a more settled civil democracy?
Melanie: Experts talk a lot about this idea of naming and shaming, calling out what we've seen as these incendiary acts. A great example would be the Jan. 6 committee, which had weeks, even months-long hearings about the lead up and the causes to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And that included breaking down these conspiracy theories about the election results that have really been undermining our democracy.
Robert: I know many of your audience will say, what's this professor talking about? I've been reading story after story that the Jan. 6 committee hasn't mattered. Well, is Trump favorability lower since the summer? And it's not that much. What about simply belief in the big lie or the steel? Has that gone down? The truth is not much. But what we face is not just people with disinformation; what we're talking about is violent threat to democracy. So our questions are sharply about the violent threat to democracy, and there we're seeing an actual change.
Melanie: So there is some reason for optimism. Professor Robert Pape, um, he found that the share of Trump supporters who think that the use of force is justified to restore him to the presidency actually declined by a third between April and September of this year. So that's a shift of roughly 13 million Americans justifying violence, down from 21 million, which is still a lot of people, 13 million. But even seeing that decline of 8 million in just a couple of months, which dovetailed with when the Jan. 6 hearings were on prime time in television, tells you that talking openly about these conspiracy theories, about political violence, can actually dissuade Americans from supporting political violence.
Melanie: I think that one of the things to keep in mind, though, is how partisan our media is and how very different the two narratives are that the country is getting, depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall. So if you were watching partisan media like Fox News you may not have been seeing in-depth coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, or you may not have been seeing coverage of the recent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, framed as somebody who had been inspired by some of this right-wing political conspiracy theories. Fox News had presented it as evidence of this spiking crime wave in California.
News Clip: San Francisco is a sanctuary city. There's a crime wave. It's touched everybody. The crime wave has now come to the speaker of the House's house.
Melanie: And so we're on this sort of dual track where depending on where you're getting your information, you're having a completely different sense of where the country is.
Gustavo: Yeah, definitely feels like we're on these two different tracks as a country and a lot of people just don't see those tracks uniting down the line.
Melanie: I can't really see them intersecting. It feels like both partisan sides, and particularly the partisan media on the right wing has been so bought into framing this one particular narrative and really playing down the impact of political violence, of conspiracy theories, in creating this unsettled atmosphere.
Gustavo: And what about the politicians themselves? Like how can they contribute to turning down — or turning up — the temperature, so to speak?
Melanie: So experts say that what prominent people, particularly politicians, do really matters. They have done research that says that that can be this influential effect. And let's be clear, there have been cases where Democrats, prominent Democrats have been criticized for using some provocative language. So for example, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, after the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, he had said that the conservative justices had released the whirlwind.
News Clip: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. [audience applause]
Melanie: And so then when we saw not that long later that somebody was arrested outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house with weapons. And an intent to kill him because of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade.
News Clip: And what authorities say is that he was armed with a gun, a knife and pepper spray, and threatened to attack or kill Justice Kavanaugh.
Melanie: People said, look, the rhetoric that somebody like Chuck Schumer had said may have contributed to somebody that may have been on the precipice of trying to commit an act like that. But I think that a key difference is that Democrats, by and large, have been really strong in their rhetoric in coming out against political violence. And the best example is President Biden, who has given two speeches that have talked about the tenuousness of American democracy and denouncing political violence.
President Biden: My fellow Americans, we're facing a defining moment, an inflection point. We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there's no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it's directed at Democrats or Republicans.
Gustavo: How much of this problem is the lack of bipartisanship right now? Like what if Biden and the Democrats don't get enough voices from the Republican side condemning all of this violence, and the tensions just keep escalating?
Melanie: Look, our democracy doesn't work if people don't accept the results of the election. And I think that it is just fact that there has been one political party, the Republican Party, that has either outright or played footsie with these attempts to undermine our elections or outright question the results of the elections. And so I do think that it cannot be just one party that is trying to sort of steer us back on track of a democracy. Let's take a look at a state like Arizona for example, which really was sort of a hotbed of this “stop the steal” movement back in 2020. Remember they had this sort of ludicrous partisan audit of the Maricopa election results, after the 2020 election.
And then what you saw in 2022 were several election deniers run for statewide office for positions that could really determine how elections are conducted in the state. And remember, this is a battleground state. This is going to be a crucial state for 2024. And so I think if you are seeing one party that seems to be tilting more and more, undermining of democracy, it's not gonna be enough for just the Democrats to speak out about it.
Gustavo: More after the break.
Gustavo: Melanie, we just went through the midterms and nothing too out of the ordinary happened, thank God. So that's a reason to be hopeful, maybe, that even more polarized times and the violence that comes with it aren't gonna be ahead of us?
Melanie: Sure. I think it is, uh, certainly good that we have not seen outbreaks of violence. And look, I do think that we'd see that there is a community effect, right, to how people who are maybe on the verge of feeling violent might be pushed into violent extremism. And so one of the things that experts have said is that this sense of kind of community acknowledgement or even maybe tacit approval of violence is something that begets more violence. And so when you don't see these incidents of violence break out, it could perhaps stop the cycle.
Erica: And we know from research that when people make those norms clear over and over again, that that really does change people's behavior, right? It isolates extremists. It generates conversations within groups that are kind of right on the line that brings them back from the brink. So I think that it's… it's up to all of us to find ways that we can look in our communities at where we can be helpful to one another to support people's engagement in this amazing project of trying to spell out what is acceptable and what's not, and I am really interested in how our civil society is gonna step up to this moment.
Gustavo: Finally, Melanie, we're both in California, famously a very deep blue state, so it's easy for Californians to see what's going on in Arizona or other places like, oh, that's just so horrible, it can never happen here. But California is where the Pelosi attack happened, where you had the L.A. City Council members saying incredibly racist stuff on tape, where the Minutemen Project was here, uh, in the early 2000s trying to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. So California itself has always been a fountain of political ugliness, and yet, a lot of people do see us as a way forward to calm down on that stuff. So what role is or should our state play right now when it comes to combating political violence?
Melanie: Well, think of where California sits in the constellation of the country. California is the largest state by population, and so no solution to political violence is going to exist without the state playing a crucial role. The other thing to keep in mind is, think of how many important political figures come out of the state. We have speaker Nancy Pelosi. We have House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who appears to be on track to be the next speaker. And of course we have the tech industry, Hollywood, a lot of media industry here. So much of an outsized influence, in the political culture and the culture overall in this country. And so I do think that if we are trying to reorient the overall mood of the country, California is going to play a crucial role.
Robert: California can play a huge role here just to say as a result of the attack on Pelosi and because of course it's happening in California, we need to act now to begin to build a bipartisan coalition against political violence. There are opportunities to galvanize politicians and the politics of California in this bipartisan coalition I'm describing. And so this is something that is within the power of the political leaders to move toward. And the attack on Pelosi hopefully is, uh, sort of a wake-up call that this is really serious.
Melanie: And so I do think that if we are trying to reorient the overall mood of the country, California is going to play a crucial role in a lot of different ways.
Gustavo: Melanie, thank you so much for this conversation.
Melanie: Thank you for having me.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of The Times: Essential News from The L.A. Times. Kinsee Morlan and Ashlea Brown were the jefas on this episode, and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.