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Ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington were set ablaze, allegedly by a pro-Palestinian protester. Another drop box in Arizona was set on fire. A machete-wielding young adult Trump supporter intimidated voters in Florida. In Washington, DC, some businesses in close proximity to the White House boarded up their storefronts to limit damage in the event of violent election-related protests.
Each of the aforementioned instances occurred in just the past week. Obviously, there have been two assassination attempts on the former president. A Democratic Party office in Tempe, Arizona, was shot at on at least three separate occasions. Law enforcement believes a mass casualty event was averted after an arrest was made against the perpetrator who fired into that office.
Political violence isn’t new. The 2017 shooting of the Republican practice of the Congressional Baseball Game, which nearly took the life of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), and the Trump-supporting mob that stormed the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, are other recent examples of political violence that had immeasurable implications for national political discourse.
The rhetoric in the 2024 election cycle has gotten more apocalyptic and incendiary than in 2020, which was worse than 2016. Are you sensing a trend? The United States certainly seems like a powder keg waiting to go off. In a nation where conspiracy theories and dehumanizing rhetoric are increasingly common, concerns that there could be a violent reaction to the results of the 2024 presidential election shouldn’t be dismissed.
In September, the Independent Center asked voters in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina if they were concerned about political violence related to the 2024 presidential election. 68 percent of likely voters from these three states said yes. Only 24 percent aren’t concerned, while 8 percent are unsure.
Only 18 percent believe that Trump will concede defeat if he loses the election, while 65 percent say that he’ll probably fire up his base of supporters. More than half of likely voters (57 percent) say that Vice President Kamala Harris will concede defeat if she loses. Only 29 percent believe she’ll fire up her base of supporters.
How have we gotten where we are? The United States is going through economic and cultural changes that many Americans have had a difficult time facing. Millennials and Generation Z are more racially and religiously diverse than any generation in American history, and they’re also more socially inclusive.
Facing those changes, many Americans—particularly older and/or more religious—have sought comfort in echo chambers, such as the so-called “alternative media.” When things happening in the real world don’t match the narratives presented in echo chambers, people spiral into conspiracy theories to find an explanation. This is how we got the emergence of the absurd conspiracy theory QAnon and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
With some already trying to plant doubt in Americans' minds about the results of the 2024 presidential election, the fear of violence is entirely understandable. Indeed, states are ramping up security for their Electoral College meetings this year.
This is the United States of America. That’s not supposed to happen here. We live in a republic and have a democratic process through which we elect the president and our representatives.
This beauty in our process is that at its heart lies the peaceful transfer of power. More important than the mechanics of the transfer in our founding documents, however, are the cultural norms associated with it. The words written on official documents only mean as much as the people believe them to mean.
In other words, the peaceful transfer of power is threatened not by the legislative or judicial pen but by the degradation of our norms that ensure the transfer remains peaceful. The level of political violence in America is troubling in and of itself. But to the extent the violence indicates the evolution of our politics from a peaceful democratic republic to warring tribes is catastrophic.
Our republic was built to evolve as times change, but some evolutions will kill this noble experiment in self-governance. Threatening the norms of peaceful power transfer is a deadly mutation we can’t return from.
