The increasingly hostile political climate is showing no signs of abating, and some political scientists are worried about what that could mean for Americans in the near future.
That's according to a Tuesday essay by the New York Times' Thomas B. Edsall, who spoke with various experts about how the recent killing of far-right activist Charlie Kirk has inflamed political tensions across the United States. Some were particularly worried that President Donald Trump's harsh rhetoric toward the political left could significantly increase the chances of further political violence during his second term.
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape said that Kirk's death was the "most consequential assassination of an American political leader since the 1960s." He also pointed to past research he had conducted showing that tens of millions of Americans on both sides were showing an increasingly favorable attitude toward violence as a way to solve the country's problems, and harkened back to Americans' rush to go to war in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"There are powerful reasons to worry how Republicans will react to the assassination of Kirk, but the main one is simply the most obvious: Kirk was beloved by millions of Republicans and now many millions more," he said. "As America saw after 9/11 in our politics leading to 70 percent of the public supporting the invasion of Iraq on flimsy evidence: mass sorrow can evolve into mass anger and then mass willingness to pursue aggressive policies that can lead to spirals of violence beyond anything imagined before the event."
Other experts pushed back on Trump's repeated claims that the political left bore sole responsibility for political violence. University of Krakow, Poland psychology professor Katarzyna Jasko said the president's argument was "not justifiable" given the ample examples of right-wing political violence in recent years. She noted that her past research found that far-right political violence was not only more frequent than violent acts carried out but the left, but the intensity of violence committed by right-wing actors was far greater.
"Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals," Jasko wrote in a 2022 study.
Despite Trump's insistence that the left is exclusively responsible for the rise in political violence, the Trump administration was found to have deleted a Department of Justice study finding that far-right political violence far outpaced "all other types of terrorism," including both left-wing violence and Islamic terrorism. There has so far not been a specific ideological motive tied to the alleged shooter who has been charged with Charlie Kirk's murder.
Click here to read Edsall's full essay in the New York Times (subscription required).