“What Have You Got to Lose?”
As Americans withdrew in 2020 from public spaces due to social distancing measures, lockdowns, and work-from-home orders, attitudes toward government polarized further. After three decades of partisans not recognizing the moral authority of out-party presidents (to wit: the NRA’s bumper sticker slogan “My president is Charleton Heston” popular during the Clinton presidency), Donald Trump’s term in office ended with a very real physical insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to halt certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
Many Americans watched the assault on the Capitol in horror. Here was a violent confrontation replete with mock gallows and a crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence” while the assault took place, injuring 140 law enforcement officers. The real-time spectacle, played out before a national audience on televisions and livestreams, included insurrectionists using flagpoles and bear spray to assault Capitol police. Organized, right-wing paramilitary groups (some of whom were tasked with security at that morning’s political rally where Trump spoke) took part in the assault, and a subsequent House select committee recommended criminal charges against the former president for his role in instigating the violence.
Scarcely a year after the insurrection and eyeing a return to office, Trump pledged to pardon January 6 participants if reelected. He subsequently, in 2023, released a charity song that featured a choir group of individuals imprisoned for their actions on that day. Following the 2020 contest and Republican claims of election fraud, a majority of ordinary rank-and-file Republicans came to question the legitimacy of the American electoral system.
The steps of the US Capitol are far from the only scene of political violence in recent memory. Several right-wing plots targeting statehouses were planned (and foiled) including one aimed at kidnapping the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. At the same time, the growing response to police violence and racial inequities in the criminal justice system—brought together under the banner of Black Lives Matter—boiled over into protests across the nation following several high-profile police killings. Activists and reform advocates called for the abolition of police departments in major cities; most municipalities increased law enforcement spending in response, with state and federal governments (under Biden) adding to the pot.
Rarely stated as such, the dramatic rise in mass shootings in recent years can be described as another related form of political violence.
Regardless of political background, most Americans despaired as these events unfolded. Arguably, the violence on the ground is not unrelated to the vehemence we see in our political system today. Decades-long processes of sorting and polarization of members of the two major political parties led to a survey shortly before the 2020 presidential election that found four out of every five Americans—that’s 80 percent—who supported either major party candidate believed that supporters of the opposite candidate had “fundamentally different views of core American values”
Deane, C., and Gramlich, J. 2020 Election Reveals Two Broad Voting Coalitions Fundamentally at Odds. Pew Research Center (blog). (Accessed August 4, 2023).