Episode 18: Democracy on the Brink: America in the Age of Violent Populism

Thanks.

And so, in other words, what you were seeing already in the early days of the pandemic was political violence beginning to emerge in a more systemic way, both on the left and on the right.

And now you're warning, or you warned a couple of years ago in a foreign affairs article, that the United States is approaching a period of sustained political violence.

One of the things that really caught my attention in the preface to your new book is the following sentences.

The greatest threat to democracy is not extremists.

It's when ordinary people quietly decide forces justified.

The real danger isn't one side or the other.

It's that millions of Americans now see violence as a normal political tool.

Tell me more about that.

You're right.

The number one fact about political violence today in America is that tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle support political violence for the political goals they also endorse.

And once tens of millions of Americans support political violence, this changes everything.

It means political violence is no longer a fringe phenomenon.

It seeps into the mainstream.

Why is that? Because tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence are normalizes political violence.

It makes it more acceptable.

And once political violence becomes acceptable, volatile actors who may be on the edge of political violence for their own psychosocial reasons can far more easily go over the edge to actual political violence.

Because the expectation of social approval is that extra straw that nudges them over the edge.

And that's why what you have witnessed side by side with this mass pool of support for political violence in the United States is political violence on the right and the left, as a historic wave of political violence that we have not seen in our country since the 1960s, since the last time tens of millions of Americans supported political violence.