Name: What's driving political violence in the United States? | DW News
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It's often said that politics is high stakes, but is it also becoming more high-risk?

The second conditional

If events over the weekend in the U.S. were anything to go by, the answer would appear to be yes.

Police in the state of Minnesota have arrested a man for the murder of a Democratic lawmaker and the attempted murder of another.

The suspect fatally shot State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their residence early on Saturday.

He also opened fire on State Senator John Hoffman and his wife at their home several kilometers away.

State officials say the shooter's actions appear to have been politically motivated.

Officers found a list of nearly 70 names in his car, including prominent state and federal lawmakers and community leaders, along with abortion rights advocates.

And the United States has a long history of politically motivated violence against presidents, lawmakers, and prominent figures.

It reached its peak in the 1960s and 70s.

Just think of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F.

Experts are now warning that we could be witnessing a return to those dark and dangerous days.

In April this year, a man set fire to the official residence of Pennsylvania's Governor Democrat Josh Shapiro.

He and his family were asleep at the time.

Inside the building, they escaped the blaze unharmed.

Donald Trump, remember, was the target in last year's presidential campaign.

He was holding a rally in Pennsylvania when he was shot and wounded in his right ear by a 20-year-old shooter.

On January 6th of 2021, of course, Trump supporters forced their way inside the U.S.

Capitol building, while Congress was meeting to confirm Joe Biden's election victory.

Lawmakers were forced to take shelter, and the building was put into lockdown.

Matt Dalek is a professor of political management at George Washington University.

Now, the Minnesota attacks are, of course, absolutely shocking.

But to someone who monitors the political culture in the U.S., are they surprising?

I mean, of course, they're horrific, but these are, you know, this attack in Minnesota comes after more attacks, politically inspired attacks, than I think I can even count.

You know, ever since at least the Charlottesville, white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the United States has seen a fairly steady stream of political violence.

And you know, it's both terrible, but it's also become endemic to the culture.

And my sense is that one day in the future, the period we're living in now will seem to be akin, at least at the level of political violence, to what Americans lived through in the 1960s and early 1970s.

How dangerous would you say it is to be a politician or even just politically active in the U.S. today?

Yeah, well, look, statistically, I don't know if anyone has modeled this, but statistically, I think you're still highly unlikely to be a victim of an attack.

But that's not to say that political violence does not have other costs.

So one of them is that a lot of these officials who 10, 20 years ago would not need security now need security.

They're starting to take their addresses, their home addresses off of their public websites.

They're more concerned about going to town halls or any sort of public event.

And I think some of them are understandably reluctant to run for office or stay in office because why would they want to put their families through just the prospect that they're going to be targeted?

So you know, the costs are still, I think they operate on multiple levels.

And even if one is not directly a victim of the attack, I think it affects actually all Americans.

It's it's it has a spillover effect in that way.

Well, I think there's a lot of a lot of factors going on.

The country has been polarized for decades.

I mean, there's always been divisions, but it's been increasingly polarized.

But the polarization has grown worse, I think, over the past 15, 20 years to the point where the other side seems to be more of a threat of an enemy than a fellow American who just has different views.

Social media is an obvious one, kind of fracturing a reality.

I think Donald Trump has been both a victim of political violence, but also an accelerant.

And and also his his actions, pardoning the January 6th rioters, including many of whom who were convicted of beating police officers, essentially condoning political violence as long as it's done in his name and to defend his legitimacy.

Americans have also suffered a decades long loss of faith and trust in institutions.

And it's not only that, but it's really a kind of roiling anger at government.

And I think that, you know, the the restraints in a way which were always imperfect, there's always been some degree of political violence.

But to the extent that there were institutional and cultural restraints in place, I think those things have have been lifted.

And we are seeing now we're living through the effects of that right now.

So the lifting of these cultural restraints and the threat of political violence and the actual execution of political violence, how would you say all of that is transforming America?

Well, what is to me both fascinating and also scary is that when an act of political violence happens, there's not a sense of the country coming together in any sort of way to condemn that act.

In fact, the violence serves as a further irritant because depending on where you sit, you're going to interpret the act in one way or another through your partisan lens, through an ideological lens.

The other thing is, I think it emboldens extremists and extremism because it creates more room for conspiracy theories.

It inspires maybe copycat shooters and acts.

And and so it's I think it has contributes to a further kind of coarsening.

And in the same way that I think a similar pattern unfolded in the 1960s or other particularly fraught moments.

And so that's not to say it's indefinite.

Of course, you know, history is always changing.

But but we are in a particularly perilous moment where I think it does affect at least psychologically the lives of most Americans.

And what's striking is that studies suggest that on both sides of the political spectrum, actually, there is bigger acceptance of violence as a means for political change.

What needs to change to reverse this trend?

Yeah, well, yeah, you got to get those poll numbers down to where they were maybe in the 1980s and 1990s.

So the wars in the Middle East, those ending would help this period of economic uncertainty and inflation.

Ending that would help having Donald Trump no longer in office, having served his second term.

And and then finding ways for both the center right and the center left to be empowered within America's two party system and finding ways.

And this is a long term, maybe a generational fight to empower and real legitimize some of the main institutions of American life.

The courts, public service, politics, nonprofits and research scientists, just to name a few.

So, you know, those things, none of them are obviously easy.

Maybe social media one day will be regulated and it will be harder to spread conspiracy theories as easily as is now true.

And but I do think all of those things could help at the margins.

And I am hopeful that over the medium to long term, there will be a reduction in the level of political violence that we've experienced over the past five, 10 years.

That was Matt Dalek of George Washington University.