THE WASHINGTON POST: Charlie Kirk’s assassination shows America entering a new age of political violence

A Minnesota state legislator killed in her home in June. The Pennsylvania governor’s house set afire in April. Candidate Donald Trump facing two apparent assassination attempts during last year’s campaign. And now conservative activist Charlie Kirk gunned down and killed Wednesday during a talk at Utah Valley University, horrifying a live audience and those who saw the shooting online.

America is facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are going through what I call an era of violent populism,” said Robert Pape, who heads the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “It is a historically high era of assassination, assassination attempts, violent protests, and it is occurring on both the right and the left.”

He added: “This is way beyond the usual minor ebb and flow of militia group violence we have seen for 20 years. This is a different level, a different historical period of political violence, and that is what you see. This is a demonstrable fact.”

Violence has always lurked beneath the surface of a country that has seen four of its 45 presidents assassinated and a fifth, Ronald Reagan, wounded in the attempt. But political leaders of both parties on Wednesday warned that the country is headed to a place of particular darkness if it does not pull back.

“Honestly, the first thing that came to my mind was a sense of ‘Not again! What’s next?’ and asking myself, ‘How do we arrest this cycle of political violence?’” said Tina Smith, a Democrat Senator for Minnesota. “It is a human reaction to just turn away in horror when you see these kinds of things happen, but it’s just relentless. I’m almost speechless with despair at how often it’s happening.”

When Democratic Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed over the summer - allegedly by a man who posed as a police officer and also shot another state legislator and his wife - Senator Smith’s name was found on a hit list in the suspect’s car.

The motivation and identity of Mr Kirk’s killer were not clear late Wednesday. But the drumbeat of violence against political figures has been growing louder for years, including the deadly attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

In October 2022, an assailant looking for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, attacked her husband with a hammer in their home. Last December, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk, allegedly by a man angry about health care policy. Earlier this year, a man was charged with arson attacks on a Tesla showroom and the New Mexico Republican headquarters. In April, an arsonist targeted the home of Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, setting his residence on fire hours after a Passover seder.

That followed other disturbing events. Republican representative Steve Scalise was shot and badly wounded at a congressional baseball practice in 2017. Three years later, a group of men sought to kidnap Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. In both cases, political rage was apparently the motivating factor.

In public comments after Mr Kirk’s shooting Wednesday, a visibly stricken Utah Governor Spencer Cox bemoaned the state of a country he said had gone badly off course.

“Our nation is broken,” said Mr Cox, a Republican. “We’ve had political assassinations recently in Minnesota. We had an attempted assassination on the governor of Pennsylvania. And we had an attempted assassination on a presidential candidate and former president of the United States, and now current President of the United States. Nothing I say can unite us as a country. Nothing I can say right now can fix what is broken.”

Experts who study political violence agree its frequency and seriousness is increasing significantly, as more Americans believe the system does not work for them and feel frustrated and helpless. A February poll by Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists tracking democratic norms and institutions, found that while only 2 per cent of Democrats and 3 per cent of Republicans support violence against opposition party leaders in general, that rises to about 10 per cent for opposition party leaders who enact “harmful or exploitative policies.”

While a great majority opposed political violence, that still left nearly one in 10 who were willing to tell pollsters they favoured it.

“The more support there is for political violence, the more it makes actual political violence more common,” Pape said. “It creates the mantle of legitimacy for individuals who may be volatile or have their own psychosocial reasons to go over the edge.”

It is only by luck, Professor Pape added, that the bullet aimed at Mr Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in June 2024 did not take a slightly different trajectory, and that Ms Pelosi was not home when her would-be assailant broke in. Otherwise, he said, the parallels between this era and the assassinations of the 1960s would be even more apparent.

Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said the country’s political factions increasingly see each other as mortal enemies who threaten the country’s existence, and from there, it is not a big step for mentally unbalanced people to turn to violence. Social media, Dr Dallek added, acts as a sort of accelerant in spreading these toxic ideas.

“We are in the most politically violent moment we’ve been in as a country since the 1960s and the 1970s,” Dr Dallek said. “It does feel like we are in a 1960s-era cycle, and it’s really hard to get out of.”

Other experts warned that more violence may be in store, as acts like Mr Kirk’s killing can lead to a cycle of retribution, in which each side believes that the attacks against it justify a similarly deadly response.

“We are at a very dangerous place in which an act of violence can spur reciprocal acts of violence,” said William Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. He added, “Rhetoric that dehumanizes different views or different orientations or different religions creates a permission structure for violence.”

Professor Braniff, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, advocates strategies such as education and “pre-bunking,” or training people pre-emptively to recognize manipulative or dangerous messages, to reduce the chance that they will turn to radicalism and violence.

“We’ve been in dark places before, darker than now,” he said. “We don’t have to go there.”

A precursor to this era’s violence - and a reminder that it has always been with us to some degree - occurred in February 2011, when then-Democratic Representative for Arizona Gabrielle Giffords was shot and gravely wounded outside a supermarket where she was holding an event for constituents. Ms Giffords has since created an advocacy group against gun violence, and on Wednesday she spoke out against the shooting.

“I’m horrified to hear that Charlie Kirk was shot at an event in Utah,” Ms Giffords posted on social media. “Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”

David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, said the 1995 bombing of the federal building in his city, which killed 168 people, shows where such violence can lead.

“I feel it’s my obligation as mayor of this city to use that as a reminder. There is no reason for anyone in America to repeat these mistakes,” Cr Holt said. “That was political violence on a much larger scale, but it’s the same kind of motivation, and the same dehumanization and rejection of compromise, that leads to individual assassination. It’s all sort of the same disease.”

Americans, Cr Holt added, too often forget that compromise, and even losing sometimes, is a critical part of democracy.

“We are not getting conditioned enough to understand that we are going to have to compromise, and that is part of the deal,” Cr Holt said. “Violence is the ultimate statement that you no longer have any interest in trying to change somebody’s mind, and we as a society seem to jump to that conclusion all too often.”

Dr Dallek noted that after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Bill Clinton travelled to the city and gave what is often regarded as the best speech of his career, urging the country to come together. It is not clear, Dr Dallek suggested, that today’s leaders are willing or able to make a similar unifying gesture.

“To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil,” Mr Clinton said in his speech at the time. “They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.”

Mr Trump, in his own comments from the Oval Office after Mr Kirk’s shooting, was more blunt in blaming one side of the political spectrum. “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Mr Trump said. “Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.”

Senator Smith said the angry rhetoric that now characterizes so much political debate has to be toned down, and that is in large part the responsibility of political leaders.

“I try very hard to not use metaphors or rhetoric in my political speech,” she said. “I’m sure I make mistakes, but we all need to try not to use metaphors that cross the line. People in authority have power, and they should be using their power to stem this violence and not to fuel it.”

Mr Cox sounded especially brokenhearted as he spoke of the accumulating bloodshed and asked what America had become. He noted that the Declaration of Independence lists “life” as the first of humanity’s unalienable rights, adding, “Today, a life was taken.”

“We just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be, to ask ourselves, ‘Is this it? Is this what 250 years have wrought on us?’” Mr Cox said. “I pray that that’s not the case.”

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