Democrats vs Republicans: Who Is Actually More Violent? - Robert Pape #1154

Modern Wisdom

Political scientist Robert Pape discusses the emergence of 'violent populism' in America, a new era characterized by high levels of mass support for

Key takeaways

• 25% of American adults support using force to prevent Donald Trump from being president.
• The 'standard stereotype' of political violent actors as uneducated/rural is outdated; many are middle-class professionals like doctors and business owners.

Main topics

• Violent Populism
• The Domestic Escalation Trap

Notable quotes

The number one threat to America is not from a foreign government... It's from tens of millions of Americans who support political violence.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a warning that the normalization of political vi

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) People of the UK and Ireland, if you want to come and see me live, tickets are very limited for my live tour this October, but they are still available. Dublin is already sold out. However, if you're a fan of modern wisdom, if you love psychology, philosophy, human nature, personal development, and you want to hear stories that I definitely can't tell on the internet, then come and see me live this October. chriswilliamson.live has got all of the tickets. Dublin is completely gone, but there are limited Speaker 2 (0:22) tickets everywhere else. I'll see you soon. chriswilliamson.live. Speaker 1 (0:25) We discussed this recently on a debate, but I wanted to give it a full... treatment because I think this topical feels very critical to the current conversation. What is the number one threat to America in your opinion? The Speaker 2 (0:37) number one threat to America is not from a foreign government, even Iran. It's not from a fringe militia group. It's from tens of millions of Americans who support political violence. Once you have support for political violence lodged in the mainstream of society, this changes everything. Speaker 1 (1:03) Is this a new era of political violence? It's a new Speaker 2 (1:07) era. It's an era I call violent populism. Because I want to explain that we have had... Almost every year since the founding of our country, 250 years, some type of political violence, some type of militia group, an assassination attempt here or there. That's not what we are living through now. This is a new paradigm. This is a different world. Now, it has happened a few times before. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the 1920s, the 1960s, but as for almost... Everybody listening to this show, we are in an era of historically high political violence and historically high support for political violence that will change the election that we are about to go through in ways we may not really be prepared Speaker 1 (2:07) for. How unprecedented is this? Because, I don't know, I think back to the Vietnam War and there were protests around that. That felt like civil unrest domestically. And prior to that, there's been all manner of... I mean, there was a civil war not even that long ago, right? Speaker 2 (2:24) Well, the civil war... 1860. Let's just remind ourselves that that is a long time ago. Talking Speaker 1 (2:32) to someone with a country that's a thousand years old, you know what I mean? Well, okay. So maybe from your perspective, it was just Speaker 2 (2:38) the other day. Speaker 2 (2:41) For Americans, that is a long time ago. In the 1960s, we need to recall that that was over 65 years ago. So that's a long time ago. And that means that although there will be a few of us baby boomers who were born, I'm right at the tail end of the baby boom generation. So there will be a few of us who were born. even I can't really recall personally the 1960s because I was just way too young. So the fact is, yes, there have been precursors and other eras of violent populism where you have a whole spate, waves of assassination attempts, waves of violent protests. And side by side with that, large millions and tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence, but it is actually a historical anomaly in our country. It is not simply the same as it was 10 years ago or the same as it was 15 years before that. But the big picture here is that we are in an era where we have experienced not one, not two, but three assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Two when he was running for president, one when he was president. These three are just a small number. of the many assassination attempts and assassinations that we have seen over the last five years. You have to recall the assassination attempt against Nancy Pelosi, missed her but almost killed her husband. Brett Kavanaugh, that's a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Josh Shapiro, the arsonist burned down large parts of his house while his family was sleeping in the house, including him. He's governor of Pennsylvania. Just literally a year ago and two days, so we're speaking on September 12th, but on September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, a major political activist, a podcast host beloved by... tens of millions of Americans was assassinated while he was having one of his quite frequent debates, debating people on a college campus. So this only touches the assassination attempts, Chris. We haven't even talked about the... violent protests as part of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, where yes, most of the George Floyd protests were peaceful, but five to 7 % of them were not. And when you have 28 million Americans engaged in the summer of George Floyd protesting, five to 7 % is a terrifically large number. And we could go on and on January 6th, et cetera. Speaker 1 (5:53) How is violent populism different from ordinary populism? Speaker 2 (5:59) Ordinary populism, you can think of as political polarization. You can think of as peaceful protests. Violent populism is where you have mass support for political violence in the body politic. So the difference between populism where you have Many millions of people, tens of millions of people who are upset about the establishment. They believe the establishment has largely locked them out of many benefits that are there just due. That's the ordinary understanding of populism. Well, that's an understanding that. can be completely peaceful. It can generate wholesale changes of political parties. It can bring new people into politics. Violent populism is a different animal. Violent populism is taking a lot of that anger in the mainstream and it is transforming into political violent anger where there's support for political violence. which is going to then encourage actual political violence. Speaker 1 (7:15) What are the numbers around how supportive Americans are of political violence? Speaker 2 (7:19) So for the last five and a half years, at my center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we have conducted 20 national surveys of support for political violence in the United States. The book goes through all of them. The book, though, doesn't cover the most recent survey, which we literally just completed in the field 10 days ago, which means we just got the data six days ago, which means I'm revealing it here on your show for the first time in front of anybody. Nobody else knows what this data is on support for political violence. What we are seeing in the data is a not... a normal election coming. What we're seeing is a cycle that I call America's domestic escalation trap, where whoever loses in the midterms, we are likely to see not just simply passive acceptance or even peaceful protests. we are likely to see violent protests, whoever loses, that may be larger than January 6th. And I say that, Chris, not just to be alarmist, but it's because of the data. And that data is literally screaming at us. We fielded a nationally representative survey of support for political violence in the United States, as we have done. This is our 21st, so we've been doing this every three or four months for the last five years. And the numbers jumped off the charts compared to what we have seen before. So what do I mean by that? We ask questions such as, do you support political violence to remove President Trump from the presidency or to prevent President Trump from being president? That is the anti-Trump or anti-MAGA political violence. Normally, we would see several years ago, 6 % of the American public support. anti-Trump political violence, maybe 9%. In September 2025, just before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it was 14%. Already fantastically high. That's over 30 million Americans, just to put that in numbers. What did we find this year, the next year, that we just really, the numbers just literally came in off the presses? 25%. Speaker 2 (10:09) of American adults support the use of force to prevent President Trump from being president. That equates to 65 million American adults. That's 44 % of all Democrats self-identified as Democrats in our survey. This is a stunning number. Chris. This is not just another turn of the data. And the data doesn't bounce all over the place in case people think, oh, it's just randomness in the data. Also, we know what those numbers mean more than just with checkboxes. So, Chris, we have conducted over the years. focus groups. We have, and I mean, hours-long focus groups. Think of them as like a podcast, like what we're doing here, except with 70 people, done with a European moderator. So it's helpful to have a European moderator. So it produces a little bit less bias on the part of the people involved in the focus groups. But more than that, we've also done further what are called survey experiments to understand what people really mean when they say, the use of force is justified to prevent Trump from being president. And what we found is 55 % of the time, they mean assassinating President Trump with rifles as the attempt that failed at Butler. So they say this in so many words when you push them. Now, not everybody, but 55%. So just keep in mind, that's a very healthy number. So when I say 25 % support the use of violence, this is not, oh, they just mean yelling at President Trump. There's others beyond that 55 % that mean having a January 6th style Democratic riot like January 6th, but it's among Democrats. So there's a... That use of force phrase that we have, Chris, now, we also have, before we just only focus on the support for political violence on the left. At exactly the same time. I Speaker 1 (12:25) was going to Speaker 2 (12:25) say, Speaker 1 (12:25) what is the split between Democrat support for political violence and Republican support for political violence? Yeah, so let's still Speaker 2 (12:31) stick with pro-Trump, anti-Trump. Because this is the best way. We have lots and lots of questions, but this is a good way to capture this. So we also ask questions about the pro-Trump support for political violence. And in particular, since Trump has become president, and notice there is support, there has been Democrat support. protesters. We like the question, do you support President Trump using the U.S. military to suppress Democratic protesters? Now, he has not done that yet, but using the military to suppress Democratic protesters is a very violent way to suppress Democratic protesters. 16 % of Americans almost all of them, of course, Republican, 16 % of Americans support President Trump's use of the military to suppress Democratic protesters. That is approximately 40 million Americans. So you put these two numbers together, the... anti-Trump, support for anti-Trump political violence and support for pro-Trump political violence. And what do you end up with? A hundred million Americans supporting political violence as we are running into the midterms. This portends that the midterms will be the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. I don't mean just literally on the day of the midterms. I don't mean at the ballot box. There may well be issues. Exactly. It will be first and foremost about the counting of the vote and then seeding the, quote, winner in January, just as it was in 2021 on January 6th. that the actual violence related to the November 2020 election was not on the election day, November 2020. It wasn't even in December. It was literally on the day that Congress was going to certify the winner. And that happens in Congress again on this year. Most likely the day will again be, Chris. January 6, 2027. Speaker 1 (15:07) Again, a Wednesday. It seems to me like the political violence, at least that you focused on so far, is anti-Trump and then anti-anti-Trump. Speaker 2 (15:17) Very much so. A fair way to frame it. Speaker 1 (15:19) A lot of the time when I've heard some of this data that's been put out recently, the FBI or the CIA say that the single greatest domestic threat to America comes from the right, not from the left. What about... right-leaning threats that are like initiatory rather than reactive. So Speaker 2 (15:37) those studies, which I go through in detail, those studies that you just quoted were right until 10 years ago. So it's very important to understand, Chris, that... We need to lift the hood on some of the headlines that are often used as clickbait to get a lot of attention on the studies. Once you lift the hood, you will see that the studies that say... Most of the political violence is coming from the right. And then the other counter studies that say, oh, no, no, it's coming from the left. Once you lift the hood and actually go through the annual data point by point, you will see that they come to almost exactly the same conclusions. And where they disagree is, where's their starting point? Do they start in 1990 or 1980? In which case. Absolutely true. If you start in, let me just pick 1990. If you go for 35 years from 1990 to 2025, and you say in that 35-year period of time, of the lone wolves, and that's what we're talking about because they don't usually include at all January 6th or George Floyd. They're not counting the violent crowds at all in these studies. They're just focusing on lone wolf violence. The truth is, yes, it would be over that 35-year period a majority from the right. If you started in 2015, absolutely, it's going to be maybe not a majority from the left, but very heavily balanced left and right. And so the truth is that it's a matter of the timeframe. And what does that mean? That means... The nature of political violence in our country has changed over the last 10 years. We're not in the same era we were in in the 1990s. We're not in the same era we were in after 9-11 from 2001 to 2005. We are in a new era. That is why I gave it a name, violent populism. And that new era dates. pretty much to the beginning of President Trump's first term. And much of the violence since then, not 100%, of course, but much of the violence, as you correctly said, is either pro-Trump or it's sort of anti-anti. So you had a nice way to really see that as President Trump came into office, he represented a tremendous... angst about a certain set of social changes that I'd like to explain. But just as he was representing angst about those social changes, there were others who felt increasing angst that Trump was going to reverse those changes and send them back. That is what you're describing Speaker 1 (18:47) as there is the anti-Trump and anti-anti-Trump. There's the Speaker 2 (18:52) anti-Trump and the anti-anti. Yeah, it feels Speaker 1 (18:55) like reactionary and re-reactionary. Speaker 2 (18:57) That's right, because at the root of it is not just a personality. There are issues related to political rhetoric, absolutely. I've spent years studying that. But that is the second level. The first level, Chris, what's determining why we're in the era of violent populism now. as opposed to 20 years ago or 20 years from now, is that we're in the tipping point of certain social changes that are happening to our country. Trump is a symptom of those changes as much as he is a cause of those changes. And so once you understand the deeper social changes that are occurring, that are leading to this tipping point generation, Now we can see why we're in the era of violent populism and why it's likely to possibly get quite worse over the next five to 10 years. Speaker 1 (19:57) In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. Aren't you younger than me? Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10 % of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and Nutanix. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout's 36 % better on average compared to other platforms. And with ShopPay, it can boost conversions by 50%. So. upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Is there a difference between the style of violent populism on the right and on the left? Speaker 2 (20:58) Well... They certainly like to say there is. So I spend a lot of time, Chris, studying political violence on the right and the left. I study the perpetrators of political violence on the right and the left. I study the detailed cases of the three would-be assassins of President Trump. You can look at Luigi Mangione. We can look at the assassin who killed Hortman. She was a key leader in Minnesota and then also her husband, literally assassinated. And so I spend lots of time doing that because before I did this book, Chris, for 20 years, I studied terrorism. I compiled all the suicide terrorist attacks around the world after 9-11. That's over 18,000. 8,000 individual cases of suicide attacks. I'm very familiar with studying the individual perpetrators of terrorist attacks, including the most deadly in the world, and also tracking their manifestos, what they say, how much the manifestos reflect personal grievances versus social grievances. And so what you see... And I don't mean to paint a moral equivalence on the right and the left, but in terms of basic operations, how they relate to the mass support of political violence in the country, there's a lot of symmetry. There's a lot of symmetry between the right and the left. The key thing that most people don't know about political violence is that Mass support fundamentally changes the scale of political violence you can expect in a country. And this is happening in the United States, but it's not unique to the United States. It's true in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. It's true in Lebanon and other periods of time. What we're experiencing in the United States, we have specific social changes that are unique to what's occurring in the United States. But the basic pattern here that I'm trying to explain of once you have mass support for political violence, Speaker 1 (23:13) this Speaker 2 (23:14) matters because it nudges volatile individuals. who are volatile for their own psychosocial reasons. Yes, many of them have personal pain. Many of them have personal issues. But what it does is when there is mass support for political violence, it nudges those volatile individuals over the edge because they have an additional motive for carrying out the political violence, which is social approval. They can expect. that when they carry out their violence, there will be approval by many, Speaker 1 (23:54) many, many people. You definitely saw this with Luigi Mangione. I think like canonical example. Speaker 2 (24:00) Canonical example. And it's also in the age of people ask, well, is this all a product of social media? Social media matters, but it's like pouring gasoline on an underlying fire. And what's the gasoline? You can see the social approval almost instantly. Speaker 1 (24:18) I'm interested in what happens if you spread out from individual actors. I understand that if you're an assassin, one person trying to kill another person or successfully killing another person, that's a big deal. It tends to be kind of great men of history inflection points. It might get a lot of headlines. But when we're talking about mass support for mass political violence, if you're using numbers in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions. This is not going to be 100 million individual assassins. But as of yet, I haven't heard you really talk about folding in the rioters. What does it look like? January 6th was a lot of fucking people. Speaker 2 (24:51) George Speaker 1 (24:51) Floyd was a lot of people. Speaker 2 (24:53) So we have seen over the last, since the summer of 2020, we have seen three main instances of collective political violence in the United States. Some went on for a period of time. Some were just one day. So the first was the summer of 2020 with George Floyd. And starting at the end of May when George Floyd was killed and the video of his death went viral, there were in the top over 100 cities in the United States almost daily protests. And those went on for months, Chris. At my research center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we tracked on a daily basis all of the protests, both peaceful and violent, in the top 50 cities every single day during that summer. And what you saw was that most were peaceful. That's absolutely true. But there was a very clear pattern, which was the peaceful protests would start usually in the afternoon, often at about one o'clock and usually at a downtown area or a downtown square. And then it would go on. It would usually go on through the early evening, at which point a lot of times the protest conveners, the people who started the protest, they just wanted everybody to just go home. But that's not what happened. Most people went home. But a lot of people stayed. And that's when the violence happened, when the sun went down. So you could see a very, very, very clear pattern here. And this is maybe not absolutely 100%, but oh my goodness, it's stunning when you see this on a daily basis in 50 cities in America, how what starts as a peaceful protest effectively has Chris splinter groups, which splinter off. They're the ones who are burning down police stations. They're the ones who are destroying the businesses and so forth. And so you have for that summer of 2020, you have tens, you probably have 20 million, 25 million Americans who legitimately think that they were there and it was truly a peaceful protest because they went home. Speaker 1 (27:13) They just went to bed. They just went home. But that. didn't end when they went home. It's going to be highly frustrating if you are a genuinely