Robert Pape: “We are heading toward more violence” — UpFront

[0:05] Professor Robert Pape, a pleasure to have you on Upfront. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Thank you. So you said that we are living in an era of violent populism. The latest shooting at the White House Correspondents Association dinner was at least the third alleged attempt on President Donald Trump's life. What was your reaction to it, firstly? And does it indicate that the country, the USA, is headed towards more violence? [0:34] It is a very tragic event. And to answer your question directly, yes. Unfortunately, there are indications that we are heading toward more violence. I call this era the era of violent populism for a reason. [0:54] The most important fact about political violence in America today is this. Tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum now support political violence for their political goals. [1:13] And this changes everything. This changes the risks of political violence. This changes the way you have to approach stopping political violence. And this fact that today, tens of millions of Americans on the right and the left support political violence for their political goals is what I mean by America in the age of violent populism. [1:41] Does your research tell us anything about causality and reaction to violence? You're saying on both sides, the research is telling us that Americans support the use of violence for their political goals. [1:58] Is there some nuance there about what is causing this position and which part of it is a reaction to the status quo? [2:08] Yes, we can actually diagnose the key factors driving this phenomenon. [2:18] First, it's important to know that when I say tens of millions of Americans support political violence for their for their goals, I'm not saying they will all pick up guns. [2:29] What I'm saying is political violence. What I'm saying is political violence has been substantially normalized in the mainstream of America, not just confined to the fringes. [2:39] And we document this. I've done about 20 national surveys of support for political violence in the United States over the last five years, one about every three or four months. [2:50] Do this at the University of Chicago project on security and threats and the biggest risk factors that causes our social changes. [2:58] This is beyond simply polarization. What you are seeing is, number one, America is transitioning from a white democracy that is a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. [3:12] In 1990, America was about 76 percent, non-Hispanic white. Today, we're 57 percent. It'll be another 10, 15, possibly 20 years before we really reach that 49 percent threshold. [3:28] But we're now in this transition window, this transition generation. [3:33] And what that transition is doing is it's riling up politics on both the right and the left. [3:38] You have portions of the right, not everybody who's a Republican, but portions who want to reverse, stop and reverse that demographic shift and support violence to do so. [3:50] And you have people on the left, not everybody who's a Democrat, but portions on the left who support political violence to keep that change going and possibly even accelerate it. [4:03] And that is what's leading to this inordinate support for political violence, which then leads to inordinate political violence, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1960s. [4:14] I wonder, Professor, whether time and patterns matter here. I'll tell you what I mean. Law enforcement, as well as independent studies in the United States, have consistently found that far right and white supremacist violence are the most persistent and deadly threats in the US. [4:33] Is it misleading to compare a long term pattern, a historic pattern of organized violence on the right with recent, going back to that idea of time, with recent acts from individuals who may lean more left wing? [4:50] So I have a whole chapter in this forthcoming book on this, a 40 page chapter where I'm going to review all of the available databases. [5:00] And what you see when you lift up the hood is essentially the same pattern, which is starting in 2015. [5:07] There is a blip up and it's a blip up on the right and on the left. [5:11] Now, we also did a study looking at 25 years of threats to members of Congress from 2001 to 2024. [5:20] That spans multiple administrations, et cetera. [5:23] And what we did is we focused on threats that were prosecuted by the Department of Justice. [5:28] So a clear benchmark what counts as a threat. [5:31] And what we found is starting in 2016, there is a five fold increase in annual threats to members of Congress every year. [5:40] And it stayed high from all the way through the end of 2024. [5:44] No reason to think that came down in the last year. [5:47] And they're up about evenly against Democratic members of Congress and Republican members of Congress. [5:54] That's probably the most definitive assessment that there has been a change. [6:00] And this will come out again in just a short period of time here where people can review the evidence for themselves. [6:07] I'm not asking people to trust me. I'm going to show them what the patterns look like. [6:12] But I find it very fascinating that you keep making reference to 2015 and 2016. [6:18] And I think those years are significant. Are they not? [6:22] Because Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2015 and he became the president of this country. [6:27] He won the elections in 2016. What does that tell us then about the scenario that you've described? [6:33] Well, it tells us that Donald Trump is both a symptom and a cause. [6:38] So there's very little doubt here that Donald Trump has independently contributed to political violence. [6:45] Without Donald Trump, there wouldn't have been a January 6th. [6:48] So just for example. But he is as much a symptom as a cause. [6:55] Because what explains why he meteorically shot to the top of the Republican Party here in 2015? [7:03] And why was immigration his meteoric issue? [7:07] And when he ran for reelection in 2024 again, immigration was the meteoric issue. [7:14] Why is that the case? [7:15] Well, I'm giving you the explanation, which is there's a deeper social change occurring. [7:20] It's not just simply about Trump alone. [7:22] And that's why when we deplatformed Trump, you remember we did that because many people thought, [7:28] well, Trump alone is the lion's share of the problem. [7:31] So let's just deplatform him or tar him with trials and show that he's a bad guy and he's been a rapist and so forth. [7:41] Well, none of that worked here. [7:43] In fact, it may have actually helped him win reelection and get into the Oval Office again. [7:49] And the reason is because he is reflecting this social change on the right. [7:55] And I'm not saying everybody who voted for Trump is doing it to stop the demographic shift to whites becoming a minority in the United States. [8:05] So I'm not saying that everybody is supporting violence based on this social change. [8:11] But what I'm saying is it is a quite a serious factor. [8:15] And if we ignore that and we keep focusing on Trump, the problem is that's been failed. [8:20] That's shown to be a failure now over and over and over again. [8:24] And and I think we need to understand there's a reason why that focus on Trump is not stopping the problem. [8:31] It's because there's deeper things happening. [8:33] I want to just zone in a little bit on the whole concept of political violence, how we define it, how we categorize it. [8:41] The ICE agent who shot and killed Rene Good in Minneapolis has faced no consequences. [8:47] Temporary leave and he's back at work now. [8:49] It's not just the shootings and the killings. [8:52] When a masked federal agent forces someone from their home, their workplace off the streets and detains them without due process. [9:01] Is that considered political violence? [9:03] So this is something that, of course, it's a major issue. [9:07] And I'll make two really important points. [9:10] Number one, ICE, of course, is an agent, a body of the state. [9:16] And, yes, the state can use political violence. [9:20] And I explain what that means in this context, which is when the state is executing a narrow political agenda that is not supported across the body politic. [9:33] And how do we know that the ICE violent immigration is not supported across the body politic? [9:41] We know because the courts, including the Supreme Court here, do not support the use of violent means such as the military that Trump wants to do. [9:51] So this is not like the 1950s or the 1960s where, yes, Eisenhower used some of the National Guard to deploy to southern states. [10:01] But he was enforcing Supreme Court decisions, many Supreme Court decisions. [10:07] This is not the case. [10:08] So, number one, we can explain when political violence, even by the United States, occurs by the state. [10:16] The second point is you say, well, the ICE officers were not prosecuted. [10:20] That's a separate issue. [10:21] And that issue is we have no law in the United States defining the crime of political violence. [10:30] That just simply does not exist in the United States. [10:34] We have a law that says it's a crime to attempt to assassinate the president or assassinate the president of the United States. [10:43] It is a crime to murder anybody. [10:46] But we don't have over and above that for political violence laws against political violence or domestic terrorism for the same reason, [10:55] which is Congress cannot agree on what that should mean. [10:59] And now the idea that you're going to pass laws where you're going to agree the Republicans and Democrats here, [11:05] the problem is we're in the era of violent populism where it's not just about the leaders. [11:11] It's about the masses. [11:13] And that's what we need to come back to. [11:15] We need to see that violent populism is mostly, not exclusively, but mostly a bottom-up phenomenon. [11:22] Yes, elites do matter. [11:24] I'm not trying to give them off the hook. [11:26] But they are mattering, say, 30%, 40% of the problem where the bigger part is coming from underneath. [11:33] So if all we do is keep worrying about the part that's the smaller part, it will not work. [11:39] That's why it's important to understand the full picture. [11:42] I just want to cast our lens on Gaza and Israel for just a minute, [11:47] because it is so central to U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs now. [11:52] Both the Biden and the Trump administration have enabled Israel's genocide in Gaza for two and a half years, [11:59] despite tens of thousands of civilian deaths and documented war crime, the erosion of international law. [12:06] There's been absolutely no accountability, more than anything, determination from the U.S. administration to keep supporting Israel. [12:16] How can we expect to end the normalization of violence when the world has legitimized two and a half years of a genocide in Gaza [12:26] and readily accepted the erosion of international law and human rights norms? [12:34] You're quite right to point to the international political violence that's occurring side by side with that domestic political violence in the United States. [12:44] And notice that what I'm describing as the normalization of political violence doesn't stop at the water's edge. [12:51] It can extend, and that in and of itself is a giant phenomenon in our day. [12:58] And I would extend it to certainly Gaza. [13:00] I've written multiple articles about the atrocities that are happening, the near 100,000 now dead, I estimate, in Gaza in foreign affairs. [13:10] So detailed articles laying this out, that this is the most physical death of civilians caused by a democracy on a per capita basis, [13:22] probably in history, at least going back to World War I, on a per capita basis. [13:28] So this is really quite an extreme thing, and it's been a big part of my research. [13:31] What I would simply say is that we need to understand here that when you normalize violence at home, [13:37] you're going to normalize that very same public to accept violence abroad. [13:42] And notice how a big part of the MAGA coalition, not everybody in MAGA, [13:48] is supporting violence here against Iran and including violence against the civilians in Iran. [13:55] They're not stopping it. They're not shutting it down. [13:58] They're saying it's a necessary evil given the worry they have about Iran's, say, nuclear weapons and other issues. [14:09] But that's what it means to support political violence. [14:12] When you say it's a necessary evil and it's acceptable given your political goals, [14:17] that's what it means to support political violence. [14:21] And I'm saying that what we need to do is we need to understand the actual taproot social change causes, [14:28] because if we keep ignoring that, it's like saying I'm going to stop stage four lung cancer [14:33] and ignoring that smoking is the biggest cause of lung cancer. [14:37] So we can do all this other stuff on the edges. [14:39] But if we don't actually address the true taproot cause, we're just not making any progress. [14:44] Professor Robert Pape, thank you so much for joining us on Upfront. [14:48] Thank you for having me.