Holding Public Office Now Includes a Lot of Personal Safety Risks
Political violence had been something we associate with third-world dictatorships, weaker governments replete with crime, corruption, and fascism. Here it has always been an anomaly. Until now.
Running for office requires sacrifice.
Candidates on all sides of the political spectrum must be willing to give up free time, time with their families, sleep, weekends, vacations, and money.
They have to expect to see their names in the press, sometimes portrayed unfavorably, and have to be able to respond professionally to criticism, some of it unwarranted, while trying to stay a few steps ahead of their opponents.
But until fairly recently, there was a factor about which most political aspirants didn’t need to worry.
Violence.
Of course politicians have always been targets of violence.
We all know what happened to Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and RFK.
Lincoln may have been the first president to be assassinated, but he wasn’t the last.
Political violence had been something we normally associate with third-world dictatorships, weaker governments replete with crime, corruption, and fascism.
Here it has always been an anomaly.
Until now.
A new report from researchers at the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) reveals an alarming number of 8,600 respondents — one in five — believe political violence may be necessary to achieve certain political goals.
According to the survey, half of Americans somewhat agree the country will engage in civil war “in the next few years.”
Nearly one in five assert they will soon arm themselves in situations “where political violence is justified.”
Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Carnegie Endowment senior fellow specializing in democracy and security, stated:
“This is a very strong methodological study that backs up what we are seeing in a lot of other data. America is at risk of experiencing major political violence.”
This data comes at the same time members of the House of Representatives are going to start receiving up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes amid increasing threats.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), chair of an appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Capitol Police, told Axios “everybody’s on high alert” after two recent incidents in which a man was arrested for threatening Wash. Rep. Pramila Jayapal with a handgun outside her home, and a man attacked NY Rep. Lee Zeldin, who is running for governor.
Ryan said:
“The threats are real, the increases have been unbelievable. We’ve got to do everything we can to try to make sure people are safe. Lot of wild cats out there.”
Liliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University political science professor and co-author of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy, agrees political violence is trending upward, explaining:
“I think of it as pretty low numbers of people who actually approve of violence at all. The problem is that, if you go from 7% to 20%, that means that there are certain social spaces where the norms around anti-violence are eroding.”
US Capitol police reported 9,625 threats and “concerning actions or statements” against congressional members last year.
Five years ago, there were 3,939 reported.
44% — nearly half of respondents identifying as republicans on a CBS and YouGov survey administered to 2,021 — answered that we should accept mass shootings as the price of living in a free society.
There are a few groups new to the political violence milieu, however.
So much hate and violence have been lately directed at school board members and school district personnel, the FBI has gotten involved.
Librarians have also become targets of extremist threats from neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Since the last presidential election, threats to poll workers spiked as right-wing Donald Trump supporters targeted their animosity toward those they baselessly felt were helping to “steal votes” from Trump.
Now they’ve expanded the conspiracy to “votes being stolen” from all republican candidates.
Protect Democracy policy advocate, Jennifer Dresden, warned:
“To be clear, we’re not yet at a point where political violence has fundamentally undermined our democracy. But when violence is connected to other authoritarian tactics, like disinformation and efforts to corrupt elections, that sets a dangerous path for our democracy that we cannot ignore.”
Political violence is a traditional fascist tool because it is used to intimidate those who dare oppose a seemingly “stronger” agenda.
Over the past year, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
“The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.”
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
Yet here we are, beginning to look more like Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia, Slovenia, and Poland, countries the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance states the United States’ “backsliding” democracy is beginning to resemble.
Over the past forty years, we have been in the midst of a slow-moving coup that got accelerated five years after Donald Trump’s election.
Can we yet count ourselves among the banana republics in which political violence is a feature instead of the bug it has traditionally been?
If not now, soon?