“Violence has no place in America.” On the afternoon of September 15, the news spread like wildfire: a special agent from the US Secret Service had spotted the barrel of a gun in the trees in West Palm Beach. And for the second time in nine weeks, the Republican candidate was clearly under threat. Barely two hours later, the Democratic candidate denounced this reality on X. Yet this statement carries little more weight than the “thoughts and prayers” that pepper politicians’ statements after one of the 650 (on average, since the pandemic, according to the Gun Violence Archive) annual shootings.
The facts are there: violence is indeed part of the American political landscape.
It is almost as if it persisted, in a latent state, in this country that was built in a war of independence, then a civil war, and has experienced turbulent recent decades of which 1968 has become the emblem. In this country where four presidents have died under the bullets of an assassin (Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield and Kennedy), 2024 is hardly more exceptional than 1975, the year in which President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts in less than a month. Just think of the attacks on President Reagan in 1981, Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, Republican Representative Steve Scalise in 2017. There are also the plots hatched, but failed, against Democratic Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, or Judge Kavanaugh in 2022. And so many others.
If the term “political violence” has appeared on the agenda in recent weeks, it is because several developments, such as a viral mutation, seem to indicate increased contagiousness.
First, guns are proliferating in the United States: more than 394 million guns are in circulation—a figure that remains approximate, due to the lack of records of production, acquisition, and destruction of weapons. Scientific research establishes the link between the circulation of firearms and actual violence. But the acuteness of this issue also lies in the nature of the weapons in circulation. Professor Barbara F. Walter, author of How Civil Wars Startpoints to the accessibility of assault rifle-type weapons – precisely those used against both Representative Scalise and recently against the Republican candidate – whose range is infinitely greater than that of handguns.
Second, the 2021 attack on the Capitol, the culmination of a crescendo of dissent, resentment, and threats, contributed to a normalization of the use of violence for political ends. Its social acceptability has grown in the years since, and it is now viewed by nearly a quarter of Americans as a patriotic option. While only a small portion of the population considers lethal violence, according to a UC Davis survey last year, the normalization of violence is notable.
It is also accentuated by its glorification, for example in election ads like Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s “Georgia Reloaded” in 2020. It is seen in the trivialization of the use of firearms (as seen in Kamala Harris’ statement on September 19 alongside Oprah Winfrey), and also in its glorification in election ads, where candidates are shown with assault rifles.
Third, the two opposing visions that now confront each other in what is called a “polarized America” nevertheless have the same credo: the November election is decisive, vital, existential. They differ, however, in their diagnosis, opposing those who fear losing their nation to those who believe they are losing their democracy (the former no longer believing in what the latter defend)…
Here, the populist discourse, explains Professor James A. Piazza, which opposes on one side the patriotic, pure, good people and, on the other, the corrupt, arrogant, disconnected elites, fuels violence, in particular because it is anchored in the fear of societal changes. However, this split of society into two antithetical forces seems, according to the authors of Radical American Partisanshipirreducible to the extent that the other side is now perceived as “the enemy within”, to use the expression used by the Republican candidate on Fox News this summer.
Finally, this movement is translated in a concrete way — and this is perhaps the most revealing change — through the proliferation of systematic threats against agents of the State and the workings of democracy. We speak of “stochastic terrorism,” a mass communication that uses indirect or coded language, flooding social networks — passing through a multiplicity of channels, it generates violence that is “statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable.” Thus, the effects of this type of communication have been felt in full force in the small town of Springfield for a week: the authorities have had to evacuate several schools and municipal buildings and place two hospitals in barricaded confinement because of the theories peddled by the Republican candidates during and after the presidential debate.
And what’s unique now is that the guardians of the rule of law (election workers, judges, Justice Department officials) are — literally! — in the crosshairs. To the point where the Justice Department has had to set up a task force on election threats, where U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly denounced the now routine violence against a Justice Department that is facing an unprecedented phenomenon, what Reuters has documented as a “fear campaign.”
Does this mean, as the Canadian author Stephen Marche (The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future), that we are heading towards a form of civil war? Or that, at the very least, as Professor Barbara F. Walter explains, the warning light of democratic decline (documented by V-Dem, Freedom House or the Economist Intelligence Unit), which is one of the prevailing risk indicators of civil war, is now flashing?
Should we consider, as journalists Anne Applebaum and Adrienne LaFrance do, that only a cataclysmic event can interrupt this inexorable rise? While this term never stops bouncing around in the public space, the question often comes up, and it is difficult to decide. On the other hand, the only certainty we can have is that in the American Pressure Cooker, the pressure is now rising a little too quickly, and that political leaders are not strangers to the phenomenon.