The Return of Political Violence

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If there’s one thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today, it’s the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete. That’s true of the return of political violence here in the United States. It’s also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has made a career of studying these types of violence, whether carried out by American extremists, by suicide bombers, or by Russian and Israeli fighter jets. In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs, he explains why all of these phenomena are likely to endure, including in the wake of the American presidential election, with what he calls an era of violent populism here at home.

Robert Pape, thank you for joining me.

ROBERT PAPE

Dan, thanks for having me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to break this conversation into two broad sections, each based on work you’ve done for Foreign Affairs in recent months, that may seem at first glance unrelated, but both are, I think, at the core about how violence is used to shape political outcomes—whether that’s an outcome in a democratic process, as in the United States today, or an outcome in a clash between states or armed groups, as in Gaza or Ukraine today. I’ll start with the first of those broad categories, but we’ll be sure to get to the second as well. And the first of those is, of course, about the role of political violence in the United States.

For most Americans accustomed to the electoral politics of the last few decades, the last few years have come as something of a shock. That’s true whether you’re looking at the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021; or the assassination attempts on Donald Trump during this year’s campaign; the threats to election workers and local officials all over the place; even just the kind of crudely violent rhetoric that has become a daily part of political discourse. You write in your essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that we should not have been shocked by the rise of these kinds of developments. Why is that?

ROBERT PAPE

The reason is because we have this extraordinary high period of political violence. It’s not quite unprecedented—although January 6, I would say, was unprecedented. But you do have to go back to the 1960s and 1970s before you find another high period of what I would call our “era of violent populism.” That’s the name I give to this period. And you’re seeing violence mostly on the right, but also violence on the left, and it’s happening on both sides. And our best windows into political violence are looking at support for political violence in a body politic. This is extremely valuable information. And it’s not just information like a snapshot in time, it’s a canary in the coal mine. It helps us to see forward, at least to the extent information can do that at all.

And so, that’s why at our center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), we don’t just study the violent perpetrators, which we do. We don’t just study every person that has been arrested for invading the Capitol, which we do. We also conduct these nationally representative surveys, and we’ve been doing them since June 2021 and doing them about every three or four months—so 14 of these. And these are extremely expensive. They’re at the gold standard. And they have been telling us that support for political violence in our country has been high actually for some time. Pretty much from the beginning of when we started to do our surveys. Well, why does that matter? It matters because we know as scholars, that when there’s support for political violence among the public, this can nudge volatile actors who are maybe going to be violent for their own psychosocial reasons, but it can nudge them over the edge to take the actual violent action in the belief that it is popular—that they can become popular for doing this.

And so, if we look at, say, the individual who just was sentenced today for life without parole, who tried to assassinate Nancy Pelosi in October 2022; or if we look at the individual who was trying to break into Barack Obama’s house with guns and weapons in his vehicle in June 2023; or we look at the individuals who tried to assassinate Donald Trump, the two different individuals. Lots of differences here, Dan. They’re not by any stretch all the same type. But one of the things they have in common is evident search for publicity because they are believing that what they’re doing is going to be popular.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, just to make sure I understand the logic here, what is happening is as you see growing levels of respondents saying, “I’d be supportive of political violence”—which is not to say that these are people who would themselves commit political violence—individuals who are inclined to do something violent for reasons that may have nothing to do with politics, see that as the right opportunity and as a kind of socially approved or rewarded way of doing it.

ROBERT PAPE

Couldn’t have summarized it better myself. And that’s why the endless search you see in the news media to try to figure out if this perpetrator was a DNC [Democratic National Committee] operative or this person was an RNC [Republican National Committee] operative somehow—this is like the endless search for suicide terrorists being born in madrasas in some basement somewhere. Which it turns out they’re a handful of these cases, but this is not the overwhelming majority by any stretch. And what you’re seeing is the journalists here—there’s just a natural human tendency to want to focus on a single element in that way. But it’s missing what we know as scholars, which is this public support. And how does that public support get manifested? I think it’s manifested in lots of social media posts, lots of social media posts that can easily spin up.

Political violence is like studying wildfires, where we can scientifically measure the size of the combustible material just as scientists do to know you’re in a wildfire season. But what we can’t do and we can’t do this to wildfires either, is predict the timing of a lightning strike, or a cigar butt being thrown out the window, or a campfire being left unattended. Those are these triggers to the combustible material. Well, the same with political violence. We can scientifically measure the size of the dry combustible material, and then we can identify the types of triggers to be concerned about, but the true timing of the triggers we cannot really predict. Well that, though, is very helpful. Just that explanation is helpful to law enforcement and helpful to those who are actually on the front lines of political violence or that target, say, the election officials. It helps to have this broader understanding of the way political violence comes about and especially the consequences of having the significant support for political violence in the body politic—how that nudges these volatile actors to go over the edge.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And I should just to share some of the really striking data that is in the essay, you note that in your most recent surveys, 15 percent of Americans—which means 12 percent of Democrats, 15 percent of independents, and 19 percent of Republicans—agree that “the use of force is justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing.” And then to connect that to the actual incidents of violence, you note that between, I believe, 2013 and 2021, domestic terrorism incidents increased by 357 percent. So you see a striking connection there.

But let me turn to the forward-looking part of the essay. You argue that, to use your language, U.S. politics has entered an era of “violent populism.” What do you mean by that phrase? And what suggests to you in the research and analysis you’ve done that this is a sustained factor in our politics, in our civic life, rather than something that might recede after this election?

ROBERT PAPE

Yeah, so by “violent populism,” I mean the use of force to support a political candidate or movement or ideology. And the reason we’re in an era of violent populism is because this is a historically high period of political violence. So, in the essay, I’m going through multiple, both anecdotal data points, systematic data points to show that for about the last six or seven years we have been in a historically extraordinary period of political violence. This includes lone wolf attacks, this includes violent mobs, in all kinds of different ways that’s best understood as this collective period. And you would have to go back to the 1960s or 1970s to find anything like this period before.

Social change, Dan, is often a fundamental cause of significant political violence in a society. And you’ll recall the 1960s were a period of rather tremendous social change. And what happens with social change is that it itself can be discombobulating, so to speak, for the society.

And what’s the social change that we’ve been going through not just in the last year or two, but for the last ten years? We are now going through the heart of the transition from a white majority democracy, to a white minority multiracial democracy. This is happening in the United States for the first time in our nearly 250 year history. In 1990, 77 percent of the American public was non-Hispanic white. Today, it’s about 61 percent. In about ten years, 12 years, it’ll be 50 percent or 49 percent. That is starting about ten years ago, which corresponds to the rise of Donald Trump and the virulent reaction by the left against Donald Trump. We started to go through this transition 20–year window. The true crucial window of whether we will be a white majority democracy or a multiracial democracy. That is where American identity is up for grabs for real. And of course, immigration then is also right at the top of the agenda.

Now, have we had candidates like Donald Trump before? Actually, we did in the 1990s with Pat Buchanan. Anybody who wants to see that just should go read Pat Buchanan’s book, The Decline of the West, and you will see whole paragraphs that look like they’re part of Donald Trump’s speeches today, or JD Vance. I mean, literally, from this 1990s book. And it’s really stunning. Now, Pat Buchanan, he got a little bit of a political oomph, he managed to win the New Hampshire primary in 1996. But he never really had the power to go forward. Well, fast-forward here now almost 20 years where the demographic change has really gotten to the center. Now you see the real support almost instantaneously for Donald Trump as a candidate who identifies immigration as the crucial issue—starts talking about the carnage of America. But why popular now? Popular now because now we’re going through that demographic transition for real.

So, basically what you see in our surveys is a determined minority on the right that is not just supporting the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency—most recently, 6 percent of Americans, 15 million American adults. This is a group that wants to slow down and possibly reverse the transition to a multiracial democracy. And how would you reverse it? Mass deportations. Mass deportations.

So on the left, you see, in our most recent survey, about eight percent of the American public supports the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. And you could think of this as a determined minority that wants to continue that transition to a multiracial democracy and possibly accelerate it. What you’re really seeing here as we transition from a white majority democracy to a multiracial democracy, is classic security dilemma dynamics.

On the one side, they see security for themselves, their futures, their children and so forth, only if they can arrest this shift to a multiracial democracy. And that means they need a little bit of insurance to make sure it doesn’t change against them: deportation. On the other side, you see people who are extremely nervous and fearful about that shift on the right, and they are trying to stop it, and they need a little bit of insurance, too. That is wide open borders as fast as possible. We need to start really thinking that we’re—understanding we have a demographic shift that is a historic political shift. It’s a social change of the first order in our country. Other western countries, by the way, are going through similar shifts just later than the United States, and they too are going through their own versions of what we’ve been going through. Yes, social media matters. Yes, basic political gerrymandering and polarization matters. But these are like pouring gasoline on a fire that’s already smoldering.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And just to stick with that international context, which is really fascinating, there’s nothing exceptional about these dynamics in the United States, nothing unique about the American style of political violence. These are in fact trends in which we’re the leading indicator, but you expect to see this in lots of societies around the world and in the years ahead.

ROBERT PAPE

Absolutely. When there’s serious demographic change in a country, this social change like I’m describing, you have a situation where groups—and the groups are not always coherent right away, but groups worry that they will become in a position of subordination to the other. What folks on the right are concerned about is they will become the new subordinate class. And on the left, on the other side, their view is also they have been in a subordinate position, and they’re trying to move to a position of equality, but the fear is they will remain second-class citizens, you see? So, this is really about the relative position, political position of groups.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the new piece that we’ve just published, you warn of a major crisis of legitimacy, whatever happens in the American election. And I should say for listeners that we are recording this conversation on October 30, so six days before election day. The drivers of that concern are fairly clear to me from what you’ve said. But as you look to the days ahead and more profoundly beyond that, what worries you? What are you looking out for?

ROBERT PAPE

Unfortunately, for the dynamics that we are talking about, there is no safe harbor, so to speak, coming. Because whoever wins, we are going to see, likely, a deep crisis of legitimacy in terms of whether we believe the new government is deserving of our allegiance. I don’t mean our obedience, which is coming from the power of the government. I mean, do we believe that it is legitimate, and legitimate to the point that it deserves our willing allegiance and consent and cooperation? Well, we have already seen deep doubts. We know from other surveys, Gallup surveys, about deep doubts of institutions that have been eroding over decades. Our CPOST surveys, we have a “Dangers to Democracy” tracker, we call it, where we look at the erosion of support for democratic norms in the United States. We all talk about democratic norms, but we’re trying to measure and see how they change over time. This is just getting worse, and worse, and worse as I explained.

Well, on top of that, in 2016, it may come as a surprise to some of your listeners to know that a third of Democratic voters believed that—right away within a week—believed that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president. And this was after Hillary Clinton conceded. And then after the 2020 election, we know over half of Republican supporters of Trump believed that Joe Biden was illegitimate, and that has stayed sticky. Well, now on top of that, we’re having the next election, and whoever wins or loses, we’re likely to have a deep crisis of legitimacy. And in the short term, say November, December, January, this is then likely going to lead to a tinderbox of political violence.

And ultimately, I remain optimistic in the new piece as in the previous one in Foreign Affairs, that we will eventually have a soft or at least medium-soft landing. But we are going to be, I believe, tested, and tested rather severely. And it’s best we understand what we’re up against than, again, trying to put our head in the sand or pretending, oh no, these are all just statistical blips on a screen, there’s nothing here. No, this is just far too serious to be dismissive about these patterns at this point.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, we will now take a sharp turn to another grim topic that you’ve written about incisively, also drawing on a huge body of past research, and that’s the war in Gaza. You wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs in December of 2023, that was just a few months into the war, called “Israel’s Failed Bombing Campaign in Gaza”. As you’ve watched the war play out, what are the historical reference points in terms of bombing campaigns and fighting more broadly that you’ve looked to to try to understand how this war will unfold and what the effects are likely to be?

ROBERT PAPE

I think the most useful lenses here are really to stay within the bounds of Israel’s counter-terrorism policy itself. One of the most important things to begin with: Where do the real rise of threats happen? Well, it’s after 1973. So, before 1973, yes there’s the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], but it’s mostly states who are going at Israel. After 1973, it’s pretty much terrorist groups that are Israel’s biggest problem. And in 1982, Israel decides to invade southern Lebanon with 78,000 soldiers, 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles, in order to attack the PLO. There were about 15,000 living in PLO camps in southern Lebanon, and the goal was to eradicate those camps of the PLO.

Well, what happened is that they did attack those camps, and they were initially welcomed by the southern Lebanese population, especially the Shiite, who had basically gotten sick and tired of having the PLO living in their midst, because they had been there for quite some time. However, Israel didn’t just go in and out. They went in, and then they stayed, and literally a month after the June 1982 invasion, that’s what produced Hezbollah—that’s when Hezbollah was born. Hezbollah right away became an extremely dangerous group. And within just a year, Hezbollah was doing suicide attacks against Israeli targets. And then finally the famous Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in October 1983 that kills about 250 of our Marines while they were sleeping.

What’s happened since? Well, Israel spent all the way through 1999 occupying southern Lebanon, and all Hezbollah did during that period was grow, and grow more powerful. And this isn’t because they didn’t try many, many different tactics and so forth to try to undermine this group. But the fundamental reason is that because what Israel’s invasion did was it didn’t separate the terrorists from the local population, it unified the terrorists and the local population. In other words, the very fact of Israel’s invasion made Hezbollah more and more popular. And being popular is the core to a terrorist group’s power.

Yes, terrorist groups like to get money and resources, but what they need, is they need fighters. They need cadre. They need people to be willing to fight and die for their cause. And that’s because they get killed a lot. The power of the group is in its power to recruit, and to recruit the second—the next generation. So, it’s not just about, when you try to destroy a terrorist group, getting rid of who is part of the group today. That can be helpful, but it’s very temporary. The real issue is, can you stop the group from replenishing from growing stronger in the future? That didn’t happen for almost two decades, and Israel finally gave up and left southern Lebanon in 1999. And then what’s happened since? What’s happened since is Hezbollah has just continued to get stronger and stronger.

So, essentially, Israel created the birth of Hezbollah by its invasion. It helped build the core strength of Hezbollah, both politically and also, again, bonding with the local population. And Israel is still living with that Frankenstein monster that it built, essentially, in the 1980s to this day. Well, there’s a similar story I could walk through with Hamas. So, what happens with Hamas is that—it’s important to remember that in the 1970s, Israel gets possession of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Territories after the 1967 war. Well, in the 1970s and even in the early 1980s, this was a honeymoon period between Israel and the Palestinians. That changed because starting in 1982, Israel began to settle thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, that is, in the Palestinian territories. And it was thousands every single year.

Then we had the Oslo—so-called—Peace Accords, where—we’re all focused as publics and scholars on these peace deals. But what’s happening with those settlers? Every year there’s more Israeli settlers. Well, no surprise, 1987, Hamas comes up—the resistance to the settler movement. That’s how it emerges. So, that settler movement is producing a backlash. And notice how the key commonality here with both Israel in Lebanon and then Israel in the West Bank and Gaza is backlash. What their policies are doing is producing backlash, which is unifying a tiny number of terrorists with masses of the local population. And that is just creating an enormous recruiting bonanza for Hezbollah and Lebanon, southern Lebanon, and Hamas with the Palestinians.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One element of the war in Gaza that you focused on, and that is closely connected to the work you’ve done looking back historically, is of course on the use of air power. We could focus on the civilian toll, the human toll of that, which is certainly part of it. But you also really see what you call, I’m quoting you here, “excessive faith in the coercive magic of air power.” This is something that you see Israel doing, but Israel is hardly the first to assume that air power can achieve strategic objectives. What do strategists think? And what do they get wrong?

ROBERT PAPE

Yeah, so air power strategists here, really since the beginning of air power in World War I, became inordinately persuaded that air power could win wars by damaging the morale, and particularly the civilian morale, of the other side. And they just came to a deductive argument—I call it a theory because it has no actual empirical support. But the theory that if you punish the civilian population enough, and air power is a great tool for punishing the civilian population, that this will break the back of the civilian morale. And it’s turned out that in Gaza in particular, and you see this right from the beginning of Israel’s retaliation for the horrible October 7 attack, what you see is that a heavy emphasis on, you could call it lack of concern about discrimination.

In the case of Gaza, we know that a lot of air power is being used, and you can say you’re targeting a Hezbollah fighter, but a lot of air power is being used in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. So, that means if you use a 2,000 pound bomb, you could say that you’re precisely targeting, and you can also say, “Well, I’m going to blame Hamas, so it’s their fault.” Well, that’s not how the civilian population is going to respond. You see, the civilian population is going to know that it’s the Israelis dropping that bomb, and the Israelis can talk until they’re blue in the face about how they should just understand that it’s really Hamas’s fault. But what’s going to happen is, this is going to unify that population around Hamas even more.

So, there are public opinion surveys being done by a highly reputable group here of Palestinians. Well, what you see is that support from Hamas goes up. It’s actually the people that are a little farther away from the actual damage here, damage that get the maddest. If you’re right under the damage at that point in time, you just simply have a problem because you’ve got to fend for yourself. And you see people in Gaza, they’ve just got to figure out where to get water day to day. That’s a big deal. Well, the problem that you face here in Gaza, what you see in the opinion surveys is support for Hamas is pretty much flat in Gaza, even under all this pressure. Where it really goes up is the West Bank. Really goes up in the West Bank. And that means there’s a lot of anger here in that West Bank.

Now, the West Bank has not been a particularly active front. And for Israel’s security, hopefully it will stay that way. But the idea that there’s not an enormous boiling pot of anger there, oh my goodness gracious. So, if Israel’s strategy is stretching itself thinner and thinner and thinner as time goes on, and it’s taking on Gaza, taking on Hezbollah and Lebanon, it’s got Iran now. The United States after 9/11, we made many of the same mistakes that Israel’s going through. We helped encourage the rise of terrorism—that’s what a lot of my work on suicide terrorism is showing. However, we had one big advantage Israel does not. We had the big advantage of: we were the world’s sole superpower. We were the strongest state on the planet. Israel is a strong state in its region, but it’s not the world’s sole superpower. So, for Israel to be stretching itself so thin, yes, it can make temporary short-term gains, but it’s got to really think long and hard about its longer-term security. And that’s why my pieces are trying to give advice about how to reorient where they are today through say, 2030—a longer-term plan.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What would a better strategy look like?

ROBERT PAPE

Yeah, a better strategy—and by the way, I certainly believe Israel needed to respond after October 7, and I certainly would’ve tried to do surgical uses of air power. But what I would say is that we really need to think seriously about how to undermine Hamas politically. And what I mean by that is how to create some serious alternatives to Hamas that will be legitimate, as opposed to just force and power, and so forth. And I think a good way to do that would be to freeze the Jewish settlements until the year 2030, just literally freeze them. And to see if that can encourage some alternatives to Hamas, because I’m not saying everybody in Gaza and Palestine love Hamas. There’s a lot of resistance there. However, if the choice is, do you want to be governed by Israel or Hamas, they’re going to choose Hamas. That doesn’t mean it has to be that way.

And the idea that you’re going to pick the PA [Palestinian Authority], which is basically viewed as corrupt, that is a stooge of Israel. So, if Israel means the only Palestinians it is going to accept is going to be indirect occupation, that is, just their henchmen—not going to work here. And I think that this one policy here could change the dynamic significantly. Freeze the settlements to 2030.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close on one final grim topic, which is Ukraine. You are similarly skeptical of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine, which is focused heavily on punishing the civilian population, whether through direct strikes or strikes on energy infrastructure that would leave much of the country lacking power through the winter. You see that as similarly counterproductive.

ROBERT PAPE

Ukraine is just another data point for bombing to win, to show the futility and counterproductive nature of punishing civilians. All that’s happened by Putin’s strategy of punishing civilians is he’s stiffened the backbone of the Ukrainians and he’s made his hole deeper.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the pieces and your joining us.

ROBERT PAPE

Dan, thank you very much for having me today. I really appreciate it.