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Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Archon Fung): So I think that it’s of course wrong to threaten and intimidate and cause violence. But it is also necessary for people, political leaders and citizens, to express what they think is going on and it is just a horrible consequence that saying those things earnestly and in the rough and tumble of a political debate may have these horrible, horrible consequences, and we should do whatever we can to mitigate those consequences for sure. So, I think maybe one thing, I think this is Erica’s suggestion, is in the very same breath that you say, Donald J. Trump is a fundamental threat to democracy and the American way of life, you also say, political violence and intimidation by anyone is wrong. And we need to settle this at the ballot box and through debates on CNN or Fox News or in the town square. 

Intro (Erica Chenoweth): One of the things that’s really important to note is that we shouldn’t just be having these conversations when an assassination attempt takes place, we should be having these conversations when the rhetoric is escalated to the point where people are feeling totally dehumanized by people in the other political party and that dehumanization is creating an even worse kind of affective polarization, which is this type of social polarization—really not even political polarization, but social polarization where people carry very high levels of animus for people in the other party. And high levels of animus are not good for a democracy. We want to have a sense that we are in it together, even though we have deep disagreements about policy, about values. That’s all fine. One of the main norms of democratic culture is that you accept that you have to live at peace with people who are different from you and have different views from you. And sometimes you have to share power with them.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Hi, it’s Ralph Ranalli. Welcome to a special summer episode of the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast. We’re normally on our summer break until the start of the semester later this month, but the attempted assassination of former President and candidate Donald Trump has catalyzed an important discussion about both actual violence and threats of violence against political candidates, office-holders, policymakers, election officials, and numerous others whose efforts help make our democracy work. The motivations and political leanings of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who shot and wounded Trump with an AR-15-style assault rifle, Thomas Crooks, remain murky, making it difficult to fall back on facile, stock explanations for the incident. For some, it was a continuation of an unfortunate 189-year-old tradition of assassinations and attempted assassinations of U.S. presidents. But for many scholars, researchers, and political analysts, it appeared to be a culmination of a more recent uptick in the willingness among a subset of the population to use violence to achieve their political aims—an uptick that can in part be traced full circle to Trump himself and his seeming encouragement of violence going back to his early campaign rallies and during the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Joining me to talk about political violence today are Harvard Kennedy School professors Erica Chenoweth and Archon Fung. Fung is director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at ����vlog���� and has talked to numerous local officials about their first-hand accounts of being on the receiving end of violent threats. Chenoweth is director of the Nonviolence Action Lab and is a longtime scholar of both political violence and nonviolent alternatives. They’re here with me today to talk about political violence, what it is, what it isn’t, why it has grown, and—most importantly—strategies for mitigating it to ensure the health of democratic governance in the United States and beyond.

Ralph Ranalli: Archon, Erica, welcome to PolicyCast.

Archon Fung: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, thanks for having us, Ralph.

Ralph Ranalli: So the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was obviously a shock, as all of these sorts of occurrences are, but was it a surprise? Or could you say it was more of a confluence of some unfortunate trends in politics and in our society these days? I guess I wanted to start with that.

Archon, do you mind giving me your thoughts first?

Archon Fung: I think in, in one sense, it was definitely a shock. I was shocked when my son’s friend showed me the first news report on his social media feed. So I was shocked, but I think in the broader context, the recent context, it’s not so much of a surprise. 

I don’t know if you remember in the wake of the 2020 election and some of the stuff with Secretary Brad Raffensperger’s office in Georgia in the wake of all of these accusations about election fraud. He stood up on a microphone in a very emotional way and said, “Hey, you guys got to stop this, somebody is going to get killed.” And so we have people in public office very much afraid and receiving threats of all kinds. We have survey results that tell us that—especially since 2016—Americans’ willingness, both Democrats and Republicans, to achieve their ends through political violence, depending on how you word the survey question, that’s gone up quite a bit, and the surveys of actual receipt of threats is pretty terrifying. About one in three election officials and election workers say that they’ve feared for their safety at some point in the recent past, and about one in six report receiving threats. And then, I think every member of Congress has received numerous threats, and then you see actual violence, on high profile figures like Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband; Steve Scalise, a Republican member of Congress; Gabby Giffords, of course; and now this assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Ralph Ranalli: Erica, what was your initial reaction, and then maybe your thoughts after you started to process that and started to put it into the larger context?

Erica Chenoweth: In terms of whether it was a surprise, I would say yes. Like Archon said, it was a shock to hear the news, but no in terms of some of the broader trends. So I think actually it was surprising, mostly because it was such a catastrophic security failure by the Secret Service and law enforcement. And it’s because it’s been several generations since a near fatal attack has come this close to assassinating a presidential candidate, and in this case a former president. So it’s been a while since we’ve seen this kind of high profile attack almost succeed in killing a presidential political candidate. 

But as Archon says, there are two other trends to pay attention to. One is, you know, the rising incidence of actual attacks, successful attacks—in some cases fatal ones—on people running for office or people currently serving in elected office and those protecting them, from the Gabby Giffords shooting in Tucson in 2011, in which actually she nearly died, as we know, but 18 people did die, and other people were injured in that assault. And then we had the 2018 congressional baseball players who were playing a game for charity and were in their practice and someone came and began to shoot at the players and at those protecting them. And Steve Scalise was critically injured. And then we have the assault on Paul Pelosi in Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home in 2022. And we had a violent mob run out the members of Congress while they were sitting trying to certify the results of the 2020 election on January 6th of 2021, and several people died in that episode. So, I think it’s clear that we've seen rising in actual incidents, which raises some concerns about the potential normalization of this behavior. 

The second thing I’ll say is that it’s still very rare that we see actual attacks, in part because security is so good. But we have seen rising threats increasing over time too. And, as Archon said, now there's a very high proportion of them against people who are everyday folks who are serving as poll workers or election administrators. These are our friends and neighbors who do this work and who, as a function of trying to help us carry out free and fair elections, get death threats now and on a regular basis, some of them many death threats. And this is not something that used to be so routine in American politics. And so I think that that obviously creates an atmosphere of intimidation for those who want to participate in our elections, either as servants of the public or as voters, and that's a pretty negative outcome for the health of our democracy.

Ralph Ranalli: Erica, I had the pleasure of watching a very interesting webinar that you moderated yesterday on political violence. I recommend that all our listeners take a listen to it and we’ll post the link on the home page for this episode. And one of the points that one of the speakers was making was about the relationship between incidents and threats—that even though maybe we’ve gotten better at heading off some of these actual incidents, the ones that do occur, even though they’re maybe few and far between, can make the threats more credible.

So can you talk a little bit about the actual violence and the threats more broadly in terms of their corrosive effect on democracy, and Archon I’d love for you to follow this up as well. What is the corrosive effect on democracy when you have this atmosphere of threats that are backed up by actual periodic incidents of shocking violence?

Erica Chenoweth: The logic of violence itself in this type of situation is to basically have a bigger impact on a situation that you otherwise could by using other means. And so it’s deliberately meant to effectively chill or control or dominate or shut down discourse, right? So, all of that is part of the logic itself. And I think that’s part of why it’s so important, both that everybody overwhelmingly rejects the use of political violence when it happens and also reinforces the affirmative case for democracy and people participating in it, and really reinforcing the idea that in general, in our country, elections are very safe. And by the way, they’re also, relatively speaking, extremely fair and we don’t have very high incidences of fraud, especially incidents of fraud that would cause the change of an outcome in an election in any state, like all of these things are quite easily debunked with data and just need to be reinforced that like people should feel very free and very safe participating in our political process. 

And if they don’t, then it’s up to politicians and legislators to make it easier for people to participate safely, and we showed we could do that during the pandemic. We showed that we could move to safe modes of voting. Unfortunately, not everybody was reinforcing the message that that was fair voting, but we can do that, right. That is an option for us. The other thing I would say is that the rhetoric itself without acts of violence can just make life unpleasant enough that people don’t want to really participate, especially in the sort of institutional elements of our political system, which really require a lot of help, right? They require a lot of people to step up and take part, and they require a lot of people to vote in order for it to be a representative election. 

So, I think that one of the things that’s really important to note is that we shouldn’t just be having these conversations when an assassination attempt takes place, we should be having these conversations when the rhetoric is escalated to the point where people are feeling totally dehumanized by people in the other political party and that dehumanization is creating an even worse kind of affective polarization, which is this type of social polarization—really not even political polarization, but social polarization where people carry very high levels of animus for people in the other party. And high levels of animus are not good for a democracy. We want to have a sense that we are in it together, even though we have deep disagreements about policy, about values. That’s all fine. One of the main norms of democratic culture is that you accept that you have to live at peace with people who are different from you and have different views from you. And sometimes you have to share power with them.

Ralph Ranalli: Archon, I definitely wanted to get your thoughts on this, because I know you’ve had personal conversations with a number of people who have been on the receiving end of these threats, and who are these wonderful and vital cogs in this great democratic system that we have. Can you talk a little bit about those conversations, what people have said to you, and then expand a little bit on this question of the corrosive effects?

Archon Fung: I encourage everybody listening to ask some questions to people that they know who have any sort of public role, no matter how modest. And I think you won’t have to ask too many questions before you find that you have friends and acquaintances and neighbors who’ve suffered this phenomenon. It’s easy to kind of look at the survey data or look at CNN and this horrible assassination attempt and think that it's out there. But I don’t think that it’s out there, I think that it’s everywhere and it’s different that it’s everywhere, at least in recent U. S. political culture. And so, one experience that I had that I remember very clearly was—I was giving a talk in Madison, Wisconsin, and I have a lot of friends in Madison, and some of them know I'm interested in elections and how they’re run. And a friend of mine said, ‘Hey, why don’t you meet with our town clerk’s office?” Because in Wisconsin, all of the elections are run at a very local level. My friend said: “They’ll have lots of interesting insights and things, to tell you about, but do not ask about violence and intimidation because these people, to a one, are in a kind of PTSD because of all of the threats on social and in mail and in voice that they’ve received to them and their families.” And this really kind of took me a step back and these are people who sign up for a job in the town to collect the sewer bill and maybe line up the trash collection contract and every few years they administer an election, and it’s not like a Secretary of State where it’s a prominent public office. These people did not sign up for that. I mean, no one does, but especially these people, that kind of public facing friction and threat. So that’s one. 

And then another one is really close to home and Erica knows this. I’ve been working at the Kennedy School since 1999. I’m an old-timer now. And just this year as a result of threats that faculty received, we hardened the Ash Center. So now we have security cameras, we have panic buttons. We had all of the staff and the faculty who are available go through an active shooter and threat training. And in the, you know, 24 years that I’ve been working as a faculty member at a university and, you know, a bunch of years before that as a student, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we would have to take those kinds of measures. But here we are. That's the world that we’re in. And I just second everything Erica said about the chilling effect and the political intent of violence and then threats of violence. Part of that, along that chain, just it makes it a lot harder to do business. So we know from the Madison story and then surveys of election workers, that the resignation rates and quit rates are extremely high because who needs that, right, in their day job right now? At a rarefied level of  the Kennedy School, it makes business harder because all of our doors are locked all the time. And that’s not really what I wanted when I signed up to be a university professor. And the events that we have now, you have to have a Harvard ID. So, you know, five years ago, there are lots of people coming from the community and all walks of life to come to our events andhear our things. But now you have to have a Harvard ID because of all of these security precautions. So, it makes it harder to do business. And if your business is discussion of public affairs and education, there’s just less of it occurring because of this friction that’s out there in the ether.

Ralph Ranalli: There have been some calls from various people on various places on the political spectrum to tone down the discourse. But I think we need to talk about qualitative differences between certain types of discourse. I mean, you had one Senate candidate famously suggesting that quote-unquote Second Amendment remedies might be necessary in order to save America or whatever it was. But then there are real substantive discussions about the future of democracy in America, which is a hard thing to talk about, but it is a real issue. So who is it that needs to tone down their rhetoric and language and how do you change the tone without chilling important discourse on difficult but vital topics? 

Archon Fung: I think one common line of thought that you hear among pundits and in the public debate, especially in the wake of the assassination attempt, but before that, is something like that people need to tone down the rhetoric and change what they’re saying. And in the immediate wake of the assassination attempt, I think many Republican public officials were saying: “See, this is a very predictable consequence of demonizing President Trump and saying that President Trump is a threat to America and democracy and will bring authoritarianism. And if you say stuff like that, you can expect. an assassination attempt, or at least it creates an environment that fosters that.” So I do take that charge seriously. And I think that there are two values that are trading off here. 

One is the reality that, in our polarized environment, lots of rhetoric and political discussion and debate will crank up the temperature and will point out that the other side is threatening to your side in all of these ways. And whether that’s rhetorical or very reasoned and fact-based, I think it has that effect because people do feel like there are existential political stakes on the table. So, on one side is the idea that a robust political discourse will foster, at least probabilistically, political threats, intimidation, and violence, right? And you want to worry about that, but on the other hand is the core First Amendment value of political speech, right? So people who think about the First Amendment say, okay, it protects all of us and our freedom to speak. But the very core of that is political speech. And political speech has all kinds of dimensions. Some of it is a slide about how the economy is going. But some of it is Donald Trump saying D. A. Alvin Bragg is engaged in a witch hunt. Or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and many other people saying Donald Trump and the Republican program and Project 2025 is a threat to American democracy. And I regard that as part of the rough and tumble of political debate, especially in a context, which is also new, right? 

I think up in between 1976, just to put an arbitrary date on it, and, sometime in the Obama administration, the candidates, major political candidates and leaders, they agreed, I think, on more than they disagreed about. And now, that’s not true, right? In that era, there really weren’t prominent differences of the kind that you see from AOC and Rashida Talib on one side to Margie Taylor Greene on the other, right? It was just much more compressed. And when the political debate gets stretched out in that way, people do really feel existential stakes. And I hear students all the time saying, “Well, you know, I’ll talk with anyone so long as they don't threaten my existence.” But everybody feels like their existence is threatened right now, or a lot of people. And so if that’s your rule, you’re not talking to very many other people. And so part of what we’re seeing is the very challenging effort to be able to have a conversation with one another without threatening and committing violence against one another in this cauldron of very wide disagreement. And that is a hard problem to solve. 

Erica Chenoweth: I would add exactly to what Archon said with this kind of distancing that’s taken place over the last 50 years, or so, what’s really important to know about it is that there’s actually not a ton of like political polarization in the sense that people agree on a lot of policy positions. Actually, there’s like pretty wide consensus about health care and even climate and things like that. But they disagree about basically culture and identity issues. And that’s why you get that social polarization or the affective polarization, that distance has become much greater. And political scientists who study this argue that it’s mostly because, Democrats have moved slightly left, on especially race issues and, gender issues. But Republicans have moved quite a bit farther right than they used to be on those same issues. And so it’s basically social and cultural polarization, and that’s what can make it so pernicious when it comes to political leaders saying certain things about other characters, you know, in a different party or groups of people, it feels like it’s an existential threat to one’s way of life, identity, well-being, ability to live. And that then really makes people feel like the stakes are raised enormously. So affective polarization is not good for democracy, and it needs to be reversed. That’s just true in general.

In terms of political violence, and how you tone down the rhetoric about it, I think Archon’s right. I think substantive issues are substantive issues and it’s part of democracy that they have to be surfaced and discussed rigorously. If they’re not rigorous, they should be critiqued for not being rigorous. But that has to happen out in the open. What can’t happen, and what everyone needs to categorically and uniformly say, is that we are going to do this peacefully. This is a democracy and there’s no room at all for the use of violence or dehumanizing others in the context of these conversations. This is one country, we’re all going to live together after this, peacefully, and, in the meantime, we’re going to have an election to determine which party is going to be in the White House for the next few years or whatever. But if we could get back to a point or get to a point where every major candidate and every already elected official was singing the same song on that, it would make a huge impact on the life of our country. 

The one thing that we know for sure from research about quote-unquote, bringing the temperature down, and what makes people stop threatening others and using vile rhetoric about other people, is that if leaders that they look up to, the major kind of political and public authorities in our society get together and say, this isn’t okay, stop it, they will, right? So, research shows that over and over again, not just in the United States, but in other countries. And so that’s what’s required. To your question, Ralph, of who needs to do it: Everyone needs to do it, basically.

Ralph Ranalli: So I guess a question to follow up on that is how possible is that? When, if you’re honest about it, there is an asymmetry here that can’t just be papered over. Yes, Trump was the victim of an assassination attempt, but objectively, going back to his rallies, even during his first presidential run, there was an undercurrent of menace about them, where he would encourage his followers, if there was a protester, to rough them up, or I forget what the language he uses. When there is not agreement from both sides on toning down the rhetoric, how do you get past that?

Archon Fung: I guess I kind of want to go back a little bit. I do think it’s more difficult to say where you should tone down the rhetoric. I think that’s one thing we’re trying to figure out as a society. So say you were a super clever political scientist, and you showed to a certainty that a line in the Democratic campaign that Donald Trump and his allies are a threat to the American way of life and will bring authoritarianism, that people saying that increase the probability of violence against prominent Republicans and other Republicans. So say you showed that to a certainty, right? 100%. You were sure of that causal line. Is it the case that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and other Democrats should not say that if that is what they believe to be true in American politics? No, I think not. 

So I think that it’s of course wrong to threaten and intimidate and cause violence. But it is also necessary for people, political leaders and citizens, to express what they think is going on. And it is just a horrible consequence that saying those things earnestly and in the rough and tumble of a political debate may have these horrible, horrible consequences, and we should do whatever we can to mitigate those consequences for sure. So, I think maybe one thing, I think this is Erica’s suggestion, is in the very same breath that you say, Donald J. Trump is a fundamental threat to democracy and the American way of life, you also say, political violence and intimidation by anyone is wrong. And we need to settle this at the ballot box and through debates on CNN or Fox News or in the town square. 

Erica Chenoweth: I would also say that the claim that this rhetoric was propelling violence was made before anybody knew anything about the motives of the shooter in this instance. And in fact as it turns out both the Democratic Party leadership and virtually every elected official in the party did come out and say exactly what you just said, Archon, even before anybody knew what his motive was. And in the end it doesn’t appear that he was motivated by that kind of rhetoric or even a sense that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, right? We’re not sure he had any kind of genuine political motive other than to engage in a violent act that would get himself some notoriety or sense of self-satisfaction for a minute. That appears to be what the deal was. So I just think that it’s also important to call out bad faith critiques that are meant to remove an important potential conversation from the table that has a dubious connection to actual incidents of violence or threats and look to ones that actually have much less dubious connections to violence or threat, for example, standing a few blocks away from the Capitol and saying you’re gonna go and fight for this country and you’ll meet your followers there to interrupt the proceedings of a constitutionally mandated process to certify the next president of the United States. Even that right is being debated as whether that was actual incitement or not, but seems to be much closer to the type of rhetoric that is dangerous for the polity than simply pointing out that someone has dictatorial ambitions because they say so themselves.

Ralph Ranalli: You know, it's interesting about the shooter because it’s turned out that even after investigations by the FBI and the press his motivations are still so opaque that, in a way, it’s almost prompted more and deeper discussions because we don't have a pat answer to why he did it. And I think that the notion of what political violence is, like seemingly everything else these says is polarized and also a bit of a Rorschach test. You sort of see in it what you see in it, and what you view as political violence is influenced by where you’re coming from. So can we talk a bit about what political violence is and what it isn’t? And the ways in which people can sometimes conflate actual political violence of the type we’re really talking about with other forms of political contention and resistance that are nonviolent and legitimate. Erica, I think I’d love for you to start us out on that.

Erica Chenoweth: Sure. Political violence as a category refers to a very broad range of behaviors. But in general, it’s just the use of physical violence against other people in order to achieve or affect a political outcome. But this can be like huge, large-scale violence, like a state’s mass killing of a group within its borders, to war between countries, war within countries. And then it can also be what in the American political imagination, when people say political violence, they usually mean kind of bottom-up violence, violence against the state. And everything in between. But I think what’s really interesting is it is sometimes unclear what people mean when they say that something has been violent versus peaceful, and in this country at least there’s some interesting both identity and kind of partisan impacts on how people perceive contentious activity by people in the other party or in other identity groups than their own. 

So for example, there have been studies that show that there are very clear ethnic identity differences in how people perceive nonviolent protest. In Israel and Palestine, for example, Devorah Manikin and Tamar Mitz did a study that was published a few years ago, where they showed that Jewish Israelis were more likely to view a protest by Palestinians as violent even if it wasn't, if they mentioned in their sort of survey experiment that the protest was by Palestinians. And in the United States, there’s a very similar impact with regard to white respondents looking at protests by black Americans.

Now, in further studies, it’s sort of interesting to see, though, that when you provide more information about the particular tactics used, people will look at whatever the tactic is, and that's how they’ll determine whether something was violent or not. So for example, in a working paper that I’ve got with a few different colleagues, we did survey experiments in the United States, in South Africa, in Nigeria, and India. And one of the things we found is that if you don’t give people full information about a protest, so you just say that people were protesting and the police arrested a number of people. You don't say that it was peaceful protest, for example. The people assume that the protest was violent, right? If the police arrested people, they say it was a violent protest. Well that has a lot of implications because a lot of reporting doesn’t say that it was peaceful. A lot of people are arrested at peaceful protests. Part of civil disobedience is being willing to be arrested because you’re under trespassing charges or something like that and suffer the penalty for that in order to make a political statement.

So a lot of people make a lot of inferences based on both identity and just incomplete reporting and I think that this really affects how people see different major episodes of contentious politics in our country in important ways. For example my, group at The Nonviolent Action Lab, the Crowd Counting Consortium, did a very thorough collection of data about the 2020 uprising in the United States after the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Taylor. And these are tens of thousands of individual protest events. It was the largest and broadest mass mobilization in the history of our country. And what we found is that well over 98% of those events were completely peaceful. No people were injured. No one was injured among police, bystanders, or protesters. No property damage, nothing, right? Nevertheless, there is a narrative among those who would see themselves as opponents of Black Lives Matter, that that was like a violent riot, a set of riots that were summers long, a whole summer long, right? And that’s just not held up by the data at all. But the way that certain media projected it, or the particular images that people recall that they saw on their TVs or in the newspaper are what condition in their minds, how they would classify that event.

And so that brings me to the last point, which is, sometimes you do have violent and nonviolent stuff happening at the same time. And when that happens, most people just remember violent stuff, right? So for example, I’ll say on January 6th of 2021 there were a lot of protests, nonviolent protests to “stop the steal.” A lot of them all around the country. The Crowd Counting Consortium collected data on that, too. We collect data on every protest in the country for any reason. And there were also armed assaults on not just the U. S. Capitol, but other state capitals as, as well at the same time on January 6th of 2021. And so there were a lot of people using nonviolent methods to protest what they saw as a stolen election. And, then there were people who used violence. And so, of course, what most Americans remember is the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D. C., and the threats on people’s lives and the killings of several people. And so this is, again, back to that main point of the impacts of political violence. It overshadows everything else and sometimes can be falsely equated with other forms of protected political activity, right, peaceful assembly, that needs to be content neutral in the way that it is protected by the law.

Ralph Ranalli: Archon, can you weigh in the difference between political violence and other forms of protest?

Archon Fung: I just want to add a couple of points. One is to elaborate a little bit on Erica’s discussion of the perception of actual protests and whether they’re violent or not, or how disruptive or how peaceful. One thing I was quite stunned by this spring, the student protests against the war in Gaza, is that you could have two people with their own eyes walk by the very same protest, the very same quarter acre and have radically different views about what was happening there. So there was a relatively modest, in my judgment, encampment in Harvard Yard and a couple of very prominent Harvard faculty members wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe saying this is disruptive, there’s bullhorns everywhere, these people have to go because it’s disrupting the essential functions of a university. Of course, they have to go. And then the Crimson did interviews with about 40 students who actually have dorm rooms around the encampment. And almost to a one, they said, it’s super quiet. Like tourists getting tours through the yard is louder. And the music festival in the Science Center last weekend was louder. Right? And so you have radically—there’s no media story coverage interpreting as a layer here, this is people’s direct observation. Of course, what’s going on is confirmation bias. If you like the protests and their cause or sympathetic, you think, “Oh, it's teach-ins, and yoga,” and if you think, “Oh, this smacks of anti-Semitism, and, these students are up to no good,” then that’s a reinforcement bias that’s going to go the other way, this is highly disruptive, and at the limit, violent. 

And it wasn’t just Harvard, right? So, police shut down, pretty violently, a protest at Emory [University] and the president, of course, justified it because it was disruptive and there was damage and then he got overwhelmingly vote of no confidence and part of the statement of no confidence on the faculty was there was zero disruption or damage here. Right? So you have two observers looking directly at the very same incident on their campus, the president and his administration on one hand and a bunch of faculty on the other. And they are seeing. vastly different realities, right? So it is kind of hard to sort this out if you can’t believe your lying eyes.

So that’s one point. And then I mean, Erica knows of course, far, far more about this than I do, but it, it seems that we need to maybe revisit or expand our conceptions of political violence because the definition that Erica gave, which is an excellent one, which is using these violent means to achieve political objectives. That seems right to me and there you have in the back of your head, I think the model is there are groups out there who have political ends who are organizing and then, whether they're from the state or from the grassroots or civil society or whatever it is, engaging in violent methods to achieve those ends. But on that definition, the attempted assassination, as we just talked about, attempted assassination on Donald Trump wouldn't satisfy that definition, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, I think, would not satisfy that definition, and yet, in the ordinary usage, I think most people would consider those two acts political violence, and so what's going on there, and I think other people have said this, is one feature of American political violence right now, some of it is highly organized, like Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. That was very organized, that’s like old school political violence. But a bunch of what we’re seeing now is stochastic terrorism as there's this atmosphere of rhetoric and polarization effective and substantive. And that atmosphere on the tail end of usually men, usually young men with poor impulse control and access to means to do harm do that harm kind of in this fuzzy relationship. It’s not like they’re a member of a militia although, you know, some are obviously, but in these cases, no. It’s more probabilistic and stochastic and it’s hard to trace out even if they had any political objectives. But there are political consequences to be sure.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I think we've reached the time, as we usually do, in PolicyCast where, because we're solutions oriented, we need to talk about to make things better. So what can we do about this rise of political violence and threats of political violence to interrupt, de-escalate, and sideline some of those impacts? 

What are some concrete steps that can be taken by governments, political parties, people in positions of responsibility? I’d like to talk about that group first, and then secondarily, talk about what ordinary, just, folks, just citizens can do. So what are some substantive things that people in power can do? 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I think there are sort of short-term things and then long-term things. First, short-term messaging very clearly two major points. The first is that, in spite of the polls that Archon mentioned earlier, Americans overwhelmingly categorically reject the use of political violence for domestic politics in this country. So you know, the same polls that report that there’ve been modest increases in the numbers of people who would tolerate this also show that it's like in the upper eighties for Democrats, Republicans, and independents of people who respond that under no circumstances should this be part of how we deal with each other politically. So I think that’s a takeaway from polls and it’s very consistent. Right. So this is consistent over time and is a more stable finding than the finding that we see kind of bumps here and there. And so that needs to be reinforced a lot because we need to have some counterbalancing to this alarmist kind of notion that, Oh my gosh, more Americans support political violence. Well, it’s a modest increase of a very tiny proportion of the population, and they need to be made even tinier in terms of both the willingness to use violence and the attention that those types of findings get.

The second thing that they can telegraph consistently is Americans know this and we all know this, that there’s no place for political violence in our country that we settle our differences at the ballot box and through the courts and through all of the different institutions that have been keeping a country as huge as ours a consolidated democracy now for many decades, and will continue to do so if we all show up and participate, and that’s what we need to do now to make the big decisions about where we’re headed together. And so the more that that’s reinforced and the more consistently it is, the less partisan violence will interfere with our electoral process. 

And, in terms of long-term issues. I would definitely direct people back to the helpful webinar that we had yesterday because we had a couple of world leading experts talk about this, and they gave some really good information. But Sarah Birch was mentioning research by our colleague, Pippa Norris, who was talking about people’s confidence in both the competence and fairness of election administration. And Professor Norris has noted that the United States generally has somewhat lower confidence than most established democracies because we actually have partisan election administration in most places. And that’s rare among established democracies. Usually it’s like non-partisan election administration. And so that's kind of a long-term reform that would increase and enhance people’s confidence in elections and make them feel like less of a all or nothing contest that people need to resort to brute force to influence.

Ralph Ranalli: Something sort of like a civil service maybe for elections. Archon, what should political leaders and policymakers do?

Archon Fung: So a couple of things. On the civil service point. I guess I’m a little bit more reluctant there. I think that, you know, there’s lots of jobs at the state level where people wear R and D hats like sheriff and judge and sometimes election official. Many of them are nonpartisan. Some of them obviously are elected and in those jobs, people have dual responsibilities, right? One is as a partisan and a member of a party. But the other is as a professional, a professional law enforcement official, a professional jurist, and a professional election administrator. And so I think we’re definitely working, leaning hard on this in some of the work that I do is trying to, in that very same person who’s an elected official and an election administrator at the same time, really increase the identity, their identity and strengthen their identity in all sorts of ways as an election professional. And, if you look back at the 2020 election and the stop the steal movement, I think some of the most courageous people by a lot were capital R Republican election administrators who say, “No, we ran this election and we’re counting the votes and we’ve properly counted them.” And so, to listeners out there who may not follow this as closely, look, sometimes people’s professional hat can dominate their partisan hat, and that's often what the republic requires. So that is on the professional role part. 

In addition to strengthening the norms through leadership statements of election officials or political leaders or civic leaders of, of all kinds, maybe celebrities, I think that's very important, I wouldn't underestimate the power of the law. Colorado very recently has passed a law articulating more clearly that it is a crime to threaten or intimidate or do violence to election officials and increasing the penalties there. In the Wisconsin story, with my conversation with the clerks in Madison, after that meeting, I was having a conversation with a lawyer for the city of Madison. And I said, hey, you know, what kind of laws are there on the books to protect folks? Is there a possibility of creating a state law? And he said, no, you know, the legislature is such that the state would never go for that. And he said, that's an interesting idea. And then we kind of left it at that. And then about a month later, he writes, I didn’t know him before this meeting, he drops me an email and he said “Hey, you know, we checked it out and we are going to create a city ordinance that’s attached to the nuisance laws that we have to make it a crime to harass or intimidate or do violence to election officials.” So that says to me that this is, in a way, a new problem that people haven’t had to grapple with either in city councils or legislators or AG’s offices or police departments. And so there’s a good amount of room for creativity in creating laws and statutes as well as enforcing laws and statutes that are already on the books to act against political violence and threat and intimidation.

And part of that is law enforcement, but we shouldn't forget that law has an expressive effect too, it’s saying what we believe in. So, if a city council or town committee wrestles with whether or not to have that ordinance, then people in the town wrestle with that. And they have that debate out and they come to understand the texture of the problem and what they’re trying to grapple with in a little bit more detail. So, I’d like to see a lot more of that in 50 states and tens of thousands of communities all across America.

Ralph Ranalli: So lastly, there are a goodly portion of our listeners who are not policymakers, who are not elected officials. They’re just people who care about making things better. What would you say to them? What can they do? Even small things.

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I think everybody has a role to play. That’s what makes democracy work, is that people take responsibility for their communities and each other. And, there are a lot of communities that have organized different types of collective responses to violence that’s emerged within their own communities. They’ve gotten their business community together with faith leaders and come out with uniform statements that violence has no place here, to try to tone down or tamp down hateful rhetoric and or speech emanating from within their communities. And there’s examples of this all over the country. And there’s also the ability to really support politicians and reward politicians who are rejecting it, right? And try to change the incentive system so that it’s actually costly to use or endorse violence or to refuse to renounce it.

And the third piece is calling it out. So, public condemnations of people who aren’t playing the important role of being a public official is taking responsibility for making sure that our elections stay peaceful. 

So, I think there are lots of different ways that people can individually have an impact here. I think voting, just carrying on and voting and participating fully in our democratic process, is one of the most important things people can do. You know, political violence, it’s true what Archon said, that you have to infer a lot about the motivations. But you can also sometimes look at the impacts of political violence. And like I said, you could classify something as political violence if it has the effect of suppressing or intimidating political opponents, or just chilling the atmosphere, creating a more intimidating atmosphere overall. And so the best way to avoid it is simply to not allow that to happen. Right. So just to carry on and move forward with optimism that we're lucky we live in a place we get to vote and we should all take responsibility for doing so and participating in the future of our country.

Ralph Ranalli: Archon, you have the last word on what ordinary folks can do.

Archon Fung: Well, thanks. I think that those are great suggestions. I just add to that, maybe just a couple. One is, I think many of us as just citizens, not just secretaries of state, we also as individuals wear partisan hats and civic hats. And so I think one internal exercise individually is to check yourself when your partisan part is taking over. So let me give an example that might make some listeners mad, right? There is a big discussion now, prompted by the FBI testimony about whether or not the injury to Donald J. Trump’s ear was caused by a bullet or shrapnel, right? And my interpretation when I hear friends of mine say, “Oh, it probably wasn’t a bullet,” is they’re trying to minimize that event, right? And so, say, let’s talk about that. Who cares whether it was the actual bullet or shrapnel? We know a bullet came pretty close and somebody tried. Right? And so let’s have that discussion is why do you care so much and maybe what you should care much more about is the violent event that occurred and universally condemning that, right? And there’s lots of examples like that, right? 

So you could be at a city council meeting where there’s some, or a school board meeting where there’s some totally heated issue that you care deeply about, like the curriculum. And so play the part of peacemaker and de-escalator, be part of the solution rather than the problem in that regard. And I think that’s an internal challenge. I know for me it is. And many people I know. That’s one very intimate, inside you, exercise, right? 

And then another is kind of similarly at the local level, like in your community if there are these hot spots try to be there if you can and be a force for peace and de-escalation. So, there’s a great effort that I read about. I don’t know the people who organized it in the midterms and elections called Vet the Vote. And it was to get a bunch of veterans to be election workers. And that struck me as very, very nice for a couple of reasons. One, it’s people who’ve served the country in this different way. And they're standing up for the electoral process. And then second, a lot of them probably are pretty big and know how to handle themselves and so create a greater sense of security in election and polling sites. Now, not everybody could join Vet the Vote, but maybe you could go to places where people are, maybe in your community, more likely to have a heated argument and try to be a force for cooling that down and it's not wrong that people are disagreeing, but maybe they can work out their disagreements in a calmer way that is on the opposite side from violence and intimidation and threat.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, I want to thank you both very much for being here, for talking about this subject and thank you for that sage advice, I know I feel empowered by it, so I hope our listeners do too. So, thank you both for being here, I really appreciate it.

Archon Fung: Thanks so much.

Erica Chenoweth: Thank you so much, Ralph. Thanks Archon.

Archon Fung: Thank you, Erica. Great to talk as always.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you’d like more information about recent trends in political violence and ways to reduce it, we encourage you to watch the Ash Center’s webinar on political violence and the 2024 election moderated by Erica Chenoweth. Just visit us at policycast/hks.harvard.edu and click on the page for this episode—the link will be in the notes. We’ll be back later this month with a full slate of PolicyCast episodes where we’ll discuss research-based policy solutions to big problems in society and our world. Until then, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.