Political Violence Is Rising. What Can We Do? - CNN Political Briefing - Podcast on CNN Audio

Gov. Tim Walz (clip)
00:00:01
This was an act of targeted political violence. Peaceful discourse is the foundation of our democracy. We don't settle our differences with violence or gunpoint.
David Chalian
00:00:13
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota addressed his state and the country after the killings and attempted killings of two state Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses. He condemned the violence and urged others to do the same.
Gov. Tim Walz (clip)
00:00:27
We must all, Minnesota and across the country, stand against all forms of political violence.
David Chalian
00:00:34
In the days since the shootings, many have. We saw statements this week from politicians across the political spectrum. President Trump posted on Truth Social that, quote, "Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America." These shootings are the latest in a rising tide of political violence, one that my guest today has been closely tracking. Robert Pape has studied political violence for 30 years. He's a political science professor at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. For several years now, the center has observed an increase in support for political violence on both the right and the left. We talked about what he describes as a normalization of political violence in America, why it's happening, and what, if anything, can be done about it. I'm CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director, David Chalian, and this is the CNN Political Briefing. Robert, thank you so much for joining me, really appreciate it.
Robert Pape
00:01:40
Thanks for having me, David.
David Chalian
00:01:42
'You wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week that you believe we may be, quote, "on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics." Obviously, we saw the horrific assassination and attempted assassination in Minnesota over the weekend. But as you know better than anyone who studies this, political violence is not new in America, but the research shows that we have seen perhaps an uptick in political violence. So, why do you think we are on the brink of a potentially extremely violent era?
Robert Pape
00:02:18
David, I have been studying political violence for 30 years. For most of that time, I've studied international political violence. For the last five years, I have spent an enormous amount of time focusing on America itself. And the reason for that is for the last 5 years, we have begun to see not just upticks of political violence and not just one off events. We've begun to see a string of acts of political violence that, over five years, when you put it together, it's an era I call America's era of violent populism. Now, yes, we have had political violence, we've had acts of political violence here before the last five years. But you have to go back to the 1960s to see the whole set of events that have happened in the last 5 years. But let's just go back. Let's go back to the summer of 2020 when there were many, many peaceful George Floyd protests, but 5% of those George Floyd protest were riots.
News Clip
00:03:28
A wave of protests over the death of George Floyd spread from coast to coast on Saturday and spilled over into the morning. Peaceful protests took place, as well as acts of vandalism in cities large and small.
Robert Pape
00:03:39
Then we have January 6. Over 1,600 individuals, Trump supporters, stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election.
News Clip
00:03:48
An angry mob was whipped into a frenzy yesterday. President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, incited the crowd before they went to storm and terrorized the Capitol.
Robert Pape
00:03:59
Let's go to 2022. We see the attempt to assassinate Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House. It doesn't get her. She doesn't happen to be there, but it almost kills her husband.
News Clip
00:04:10
Paul Pelosi still in intensive care following surgery after a violent attack at his home Friday that left him with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and his hands.
Robert Pape
00:04:20
Right after October 7, we see campus unrest, essentially students storming buildings in ways we have not seen again since the 1960s.
News Clip
00:04:32
At campuses across the country, once peaceful protests turning violent.
Robert Pape
00:04:36
Let's just keep going to farther in 2024, two assassination attempts against Donald Trump.
News Clip
00:04:44
The FBI, as I speak, is investigating a second assassination attempt of former President Trump just about two months to the day after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Robert Pape
00:04:55
And then of course he wins, and now we come to he is inaugurated and what happens almost immediately on the heels of his inauguration, we have dozens and dozens of attacks, political attacks against Tesla stations.
News Clip
00:05:10
Police responded to 911 calls early Tuesday morning reporting gunshots and flames at the Tesla repair center.
Robert Pape
00:05:16
Let's go into April. In April, we have the arson attempt against Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania.
News Clip
00:05:23
Josh Shapiro and his family evacuated in the early hours this morning as police responded to what they're calling an act of arson.
Robert Pape
00:05:31
'Then let's go still further. Let's go into May. We have the murder of two Israeli staffers in a pro-Palestinian act of political violence.
News Clip
00:05:41
Two Israeli embassy staffers killed outside a Jewish museum here in D.C. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel is calling the shooting a quote, "horrific act of terror."
Robert Pape
00:05:50
And then what happened just last weekend? We have last weekend, assassination and attempted assassination against Minnesota lawmakers, and he had another list of 45 targets.
David Chalian
00:06:05
I'm curious how you tie the polarization, meaning the sort of Republican and Democratic divide and sorting ourselves and the way that our politics informs so much of how we sort ourselves in the country, how that intersects with this moment of this uptick in violence.
Robert Pape
00:06:23
'So what we have done is we've done research to get at the taproot of what's occurring in that polarization. Yes, there's institutional reasons. Yes, there's social media, but there are deeper things happening, David. And what we are seeing is we'd been going through an era of dramatic social change. And that is what's underneath this polarization and what's in common with the 1960s, which was another era of social change that led to violent populism. So what are the social changes I'm talking about? Change number one is demographic. We are shifting from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy for the first time in our 250 year history as a country. Now, that's been happening drip-by-drip over the last several decades. So if you go to 1990, you would see about 75% or so of the American population was non-Hispanic white. Today, just in the last year that we have the census data, it's 58%. So we've seen quite a change. And in fact, what we're experiencing on that front started about 10 years ago, we started to move to what I call the tipping point generation. It will take about 20 years to go through this point where you're going from about 60% to about 48%, and that corresponds with the rise of Donald Trump, why he became a meteor when he rose and why his lightning rod issue was immigration, because as we're going through this change, David, this will affect politics, and it's very obvious that it will, which will then have other consequences. And so you have people on the right who don't want that change to go on. They'd like to reverse it and therefore support things like stopping immigration and also deportations in very aggressive ways. And now you have also then that provokes the left to be concerned, well, wait a minute, maybe these changes which they see as social good aren't going to happen. And therefore they want to keep the change going and also maybe even accelerate the change. So you get a spiraling effect, David, that's really dramatic. Now, there's another social change that's been happening parallel with this, which is economic. In the last 30 years, we've also shifted a dramatic portion of our wealth to the top 20% of America. And that, of course, a lot of it to the top 1%. And this is the top 20% and top 1% who are both Republican and Democrat. So this is not a Republican-Democrat issue. This is an elite versus everyone else issue. The more people are energized and really deeply worried on both the right and the left about the issue of demographic change, the more they support political violence. And what we've done to study this is we've conducted nationally representative surveys of support for political violence by Americans. We've been doing them since 2021. We just did the last one in May. And what you can see is the more they are concerned that elites now completely run the country and they can't have a say, the more they support political violence. So these factors are not just happening like out there in a culture war that doesn't matter. No, we're now having, we are going from cold culture war to hot culture war. And why it's not just these words polarization.
David Chalian
00:09:59
We've just described this moment, the current state of political violence in America. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about what can be done. Stay with us. All of this to me begs this question, which is, what is the antidote? How do we fix this? You hear after some of these tragic events that occur of political violence, we've got to turn down the temperature, we got to lower the rhetoric. Is that sufficient? What are the fixes here?
Robert Pape
00:10:43
Well, we have to understand that because political violence is political and because we have about 10 to 15% on the right and another 10 to 15% percent on the left supporting political violence now, the behavior of our leaders, our political leaders is really, really helpful. Is it totally sufficient? No, but it's the key first step because after all, if you can't get leaders to condemn political violence, how would you take more serious steps? And what I've been calling for, for several years now, is for leaders to step up and not to condemn just violence by the other side, but to condemn violence even when it's adjacent to their own constituents. And in fact, just with Minnesota, we see Mike Johnson making a statement. We even see Donald Trump issuing a statement.
David Chalian
00:11:33
'And we saw the complete bi-partisan delegation in Minnesota issue a joint statement with one voice condemning the political violence.
Robert Pape
00:11:41
Well, and that's where I was going to go because you see now we've reached such a pitch, and it's become so intense, and we're starting to mobilize now. And so what we need now is we need more serious joint statements. The Minnesota delegation, absolutely the best beginning, but I am calling directly for President Trump and Governor Newsom to make a joint statement and, ideally, a joint video where they will jointly say they condemn violence across the political spectrum, whoever that comes from. And I realize that sounds like a tall order, David, but so, too, did several years ago when I started calling for political leaders simply to condemn violence when it was adjacent to their own party. And that's now happening. We need to identify what would really help, and we need as people, as ordinary citizens, we need to demand that our leaders condemn political violence and make more joint bipartisan statements, and where better than the president of the United States and the Governor of California.
David Chalian
00:12:50
Yeah, I just wonder beyond our political leaders, you know, does everything really permeate from our political leadership, or is there some other input that needs to be happening here as well?
Robert Pape
00:13:01
The political leaders are actually a way to push back. And you see our surveys also find that 75% of Americans abhor political violence and they want our leaders to make these bipartisan statements. The real thing those leaders do with those joint statements, David, is they empower the 75% so if somebody's at the water cooler and they start laughing, oh yeah, we got to get those shooters of Donald Trump, some better training. You can get some pushback from others at the water cooler and say, hey, no, I know we don't like Trump, but we don't have to go there, okay. Well, that's how you actually turn the dial back. But where does that all begin? How do you develop that? Well, you have a national conversation like we're having right now on this podcast, and then you also have national leaders come together, and this starts to push things back, and this is how we really will do it. And if we don't, then I'm afraid the summer here could be quite dicey, and we're heading into a tumultuous 2026 midterm.
David Chalian
00:14:06
My last question for you is you pointed a couple of times to the 60s and the political violence we saw in the 1960s. Is there a lesson to be learned about how the country emerged out of that era of political violence that can be applied here?
Robert Pape
00:14:21
There's actually a couple of lessons here. So lesson number one is, in the first part of the 1960s, the left mobilized the civil rights movement, and they adopted very peaceful means. Now there was some state violence, but the left was very peaceful, and they achieved a lot of success. In the later part of 1960s, this was where the violence on the left was most manifest, and what did that do? That brought in Richard Nixon, so law and order. So one of the big messages here is that it's very important for people to hear that protest is the heart of democracy, and it can work, but if it gets into violence, it is very likely to produce the exact opposite of what people want. The other thing to say is that in that era, one of the big accelerants, it wasn't just the civil rights movement, it wasn't just the women's rights movement and gender issues, it was also the Vietnam War. And so we were able, because the Vietnam War was having such deleterious effects on who we sent to the war. We sent the people who were the poorest people to die in Vietnam, not the rich people like Donald Trump, not Dick Cheney. And so what we need to see is that yes, there can be some steps we can take, but those steps were bipartisan when they were taken. They were not one side. And what we did is ended conscription, and we also pulled back from the Vietnam War, but those things were bipartisan. So David, what I'm talking about on the bipartisan is not the be all and end all. I don't mean to say one video by president Trump and Gavin Newsom is going to solve everything, but we've got to start there. If you can't get the joint statement, how are you ever going to get the bipartisanship on these more difficult issues? And so this is why I say we start here and then we go forward.
David Chalian
00:16:12
Professor Robert Pape, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it.
Robert Pape
00:16:15
Thank you for having me, David.
David Chalian
00:16:17
That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. Remember, you can reach out to us with your questions about Trump's new administration. Our contact information is in the show notes. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.

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