Political violence isn’t new in America. But the reaction to it today feels different.
After the killing of Charlie Kirk, the country didn’t rally around a message of restraint. Instead, key leaders treated it as ammunition. That shift, combined with a rise in tit-for-tat attacks and a politicized security apparatus, points to a more dangerous phase in our politics.
Barbara Walter is a political scientist at University of California San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start. She studies how democracies slide into instability — and how they pull back. I invited Walter onto The Gray Area to talk about what makes this moment distinct, why lone-actor violence is rising, how leaders’ rhetoric can normalize force, and what it would actually take to lower the temperature.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve seen a lot of political violence over the history of this country, and certainly there have been more violent periods than this one. But you’ve said this moment still feels different — and more dangerous — than earlier waves of violence. Why?
There are three big differences. The first is how our leaders are responding. Historically, when tragedy struck — whether it was an assassination, a terrorist attack, or a domestic bombing — the instinct among political leaders was to unify the country. That’s especially important in a place as diverse and heterogeneous as the United States. After events like 9/11, after the Oklahoma City bombing, after political assassinations in the 1960s, you saw Democrats and Republicans stand together, condemn the violence, and reassure people that we were one nation.
This time, that didn’t happen. Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s killing, key figures on the right used it as a political weapon. Instead of calls for peace or restraint, it became a rallying cry. We saw people like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon go straight to “civil war” language. Even the president spoke about “going after them,” even though, as we later learned, this was a lone actor — a young man radicalized online. The immediate response wasn’t unity. It was vengeance. That’s new, and it’s dangerous.
You have a useful phrase — “violence entrepreneurs” — to describe people who take chaotic or random events and weaponize them for political gain.
That’s what we’re seeing. A single act of violence becomes propaganda. Instead of treating these as isolated crimes, political actors fold them into a broader narrative of existential threat: “They’re out to get us.” That language radicalizes faster than any ideology.
You’ve also written that violence is no longer one-sided and that this shift makes the situation even more volatile. Tell me about the dynamic that emerges once we get caught in a spiral like that?
It does make the situation more volatile. For a long time, political violence in the US came overwhelmingly from the far right. Now we’re starting to see incidents from the other end of the spectrum. It’s still fewer, but the rise is real and significant.
A recent study by Dan Byman at Georgetown found that attacks linked to far-left causes are at their highest levels in 30 years. That doesn’t mean equivalence. The far right remains far more lethal, but it does mean the dynamic is changing. And when violence stops being one-sided, it becomes self-sustaining. Each side points to the other as proof of an imminent threat.
In the 1990s, after the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI was able to identify and infiltrate militias, prosecute leaders, and dramatically reduce membership. That was possible because the threat was concentrated in one place. Once you have reciprocal violence — right and left, each using the other’s attacks to justify its own — the logic becomes self-feeding.
What’s the “self-feeding” logic? That violence is no longer seen as a choice but rather as an act of defense or self-preservation?
That’s right. And that shift — from ideological violence to defensive violence — is when democracies tip into instability. Every country has a fringe that dreams of revolution. Most people want safety. But if you convince enough citizens that their safety and survival are under attack, they’ll tolerate almost anything. They’ll arm themselves. They’ll look the other way when opponents are targeted.
Your third reason for concern is about the state of law enforcement — that our institutions aren’t what they once were. What do you mean?
“And here’s the key: Incoherent violence is still politically useful. Opportunistic leaders can project any narrative they want onto it.”
I mean the leadership. The FBI, Homeland Security, even the Defense Department — these are crucial guardians of internal stability. For most of modern history, they were led by professionals with deep expertise, people trusted to operate above partisanship. That’s no longer the case.
Today, we have leaders who are political appointees first, experts second. We’re talking about people with little experience and strong partisan loyalties. Imagine if someone like Kash Patel had been FBI director after Oklahoma City. He wouldn’t have known how to dismantle militias, and he might have been told not to. When the people at the top don’t believe in the mission or don’t understand it, even the best agents beneath them can’t function.
So the danger isn’t the rank and file so much as the politicization of the top.
Exactly. You can have brilliant, dedicated public servants throughout those agencies, but if leadership is partisan and cowardly, they won’t act on the intelligence they have.
You study civil wars. If there’s a spectrum where one end is perfect social peace and harmony and the other pole is Mad Max: Fury Road, where is the United States right now?
I’d say that we’re in the high-risk zone. That doesn’t mean armies facing each other in the field — modern civil wars rarely look like that. They look more like insurgency or sustained domestic terror: sporadic attacks, targeted killings, the erosion of safety in daily life. Think of Israel’s long struggle with Hamas. It’s not a conventional war, but a constant, low-level threat that makes normal life feel precarious.
Americans tend to treat events like Buffalo or El Paso or Pittsburgh as isolated tragedies. But seen together, they form a pattern: steady, ideologically charged violence that’s been normalized. That’s the danger — when a society stops recognizing violence as extraordinary.
What are the underlying conditions that create that “high-risk” environment?
I’d focus on three things. The first is a weak democracy. Most political violence happens not in dictatorships or strong democracies but in partial democracies — regimes that are neither fully open nor fully closed. That’s where the US sits today.
The second condition is identity-based political parties. When parties are organized around race, religion, or ethnicity, competition becomes more existential. The Republican Party is still about 80 percent white in a multiethnic nation; that makes it an identity-based party by definition.
The third condition is status loss. The group that once held dominance and feels it slipping — politically, culturally, demographically — is the one most likely to turn to violence.
How much has public acceptance of political violence changed? What does the data tell us?
Surveys show it’s growing. When asked if violence is justified “under some circumstances,” more Americans now say yes. In some polls, as many as four in ten say violence can be justified in self-defense. Historically, that number was near zero. It’s rising on both sides, though still higher on the right.
Going from “near zero” to four out of 10 is…concerning.
It is. The models political scientists use put the annual risk of significant instability at roughly 4 percent for countries like ours — partially democratic, identity-divided. Four percent sounds small, but if nothing changes, it compounds. Ten years later, you’re in coin-flip territory. Twenty years later, near certainty. The key question is whether the fundamentals improve or degrade.
What about from the top down? We talked about the reactions of leaders to violence earlier, but there’s also a long history of leaders manufacturing acts of violence to cement their own power.
That’s another piece I’m increasingly worried about, something I haven’t written about yet but Americans should understand. Most civil wars begin from below, driven by factions or militias. But wars are also started by leaders. In these cases, war is deliberately manufactured to keep a ruler in power, to slam the door on democracy.
Look at Putin. After his initial democratic election in the 1990s, he consolidated power by starting a war in Chechnya, then Syria, then Crimea, then Ukraine. Each conflict stirred nationalism, created a rally-around-the-flag effect, and allowed him to declare emergency rule — suspending normal democratic constraints as long as the fighting continued.
When I wake up in the middle of the night and worry about America, this is what I think about: that before the 2028 election, when he’s supposed to be term-limited out, Donald Trump could fabricate some kind of emergency — one that includes organized violence — and use it as a pretext to stay in the White House.
The one big variable at play now that wasn’t in the past is the internet and social media, which you’ve described as an “accelerant.” How does that fit in?
Imagine the same demagogue without social media. We grew up in that world — three TV networks, editors who filtered what aired, shared sources of truth. Today, leaders don’t need traditional gatekeepers. They can communicate directly with millions, amplify division, normalize violence, and target enemies in real time.
The technology isolates people in echo chambers, feeds them outrage, and makes them feel constantly under threat. That’s not just a communication problem. It’s a structural vulnerability and a force multiplier for polarization and radicalization.
In the past, much of America’s political violence felt more organized. The Weather Underground, the Klan, militias, even Oklahoma City — there were clear ideological projects behind all of this. A lot of recent attacks seem almost post-ideological — less coherent movements than chaotic individuals. Does that change how we should understand them?
The ideology now is often incoherent, but that doesn’t make it harmless. Many of these attackers are steeped in online culture — memes, irony, trolling. It looks unserious, but it’s a gateway to radicalization. The mix of “jokes,” conspiracy, and alienation becomes its own belief system.
And here’s the key: Incoherent violence is still politically useful. Opportunistic leaders can project any narrative they want onto it. Whether the killer’s motives are fascist, leftist, or nihilist doesn’t matter. It will be spun as evidence that the other side is evil and a reason for revenge, or for crackdowns.
So the danger isn’t just violence itself, but how it’s interpreted.
When the motive is muddy, narrative fills the vacuum. And when the loudest megaphones belong to people eager to exploit chaos, the narrative almost always escalates fear.
Are you surprised that we don’t see more political violence than we do? Given how polarized we are, given how many guns we have, given how much we’ve deranged ourselves online?
Not really. Americans are, on the whole, remarkably kind and generous. If you travel this country — even to its reddest or bluest corners — most people are friendly. What’s heartbreaking is how that basic decency coexists with political dysfunction and gun saturation.
Other advanced democracies don’t live like this. Our gun laws make every outburst more lethal. If we simply kept firearms out of the hands of people with domestic-violence histories or untreated mental illness, the number of tragedies would plummet. That’s not partisan. It’s just basic harm reduction.
So solutions have to come from the bottom up?
I think so. Congress has ceded much of its checking power to the presidency. Neither party has delivered serious democratic reforms. Real change will come from civic action: massive voter turnout, broad-based peaceful protest, and local pressure for fair elections.
If 75 or 80 percent of eligible Americans voted, even in midterms, the composition of Congress would look entirely different. We know from history that when just 3 or 4 percent of a population engages in sustained, nonviolent protest, regimes shift. The math is on the people’s side — if they use it.
Some people will hear this and think it’s an overreaction, that bad things happen, they’ve always happened, they’ve been much worse than this in the past, and the system always self-corrects.
I wish that were true. But democracies rarely collapse overnight. It’s a gradual slide — what Hungarians call “death by a thousand cuts.” Each violation of a norm feels small, forgivable, even reasonable. Over time, those cuts add up. By the time citizens realize what’s been lost, it’s too late to reverse.
That’s what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. He was elected democratically, then slowly rewrote the rules: changed voting laws, captured the courts, silenced the press. Each step was survivable; together, they ended democracy.
So what gives you hope?
The American public. I don’t believe most Americans will roll over for authoritarianism. They’re used to freedom. They value it deeply, even when they disagree about everything else. If they realize what’s at stake, they’ll act. That’s my hope.
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