There's No Turning the Temperature Down

The Causes of Political Violence

Yeah look, I know I know. Nobody needs anyone to write anything else following the attempted assassination of former President Trump. However, I wanted to touch on something that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention after this attack.

Quite a lot of people have (rightfully) come out and rhetorically condemned the use of political violence in American domestic life. You don’t need to experience civil strife firsthand to understand that it shouldn’t be normalized, but I don’t think people are being serious about why we have political violence in the first place.

A lot of this tends to be wrapped up in a sort of idealist view that political violence doesn’t work. While domestic violence is bad, and not reflective of the sort of community that I want to live in, it doesn’t mean political violence is ineffective.

Take for instance the military. The armed forces exist for exactly one purpose, and that is to be the institution charged with carrying out political violence on behalf of the community. You would be hard-pressed to argue that wars, despite their devastation, cannot achieve their political ends.

We all very clearly accept the logic that through using force we can make an adversary accept terms that they wouldn’t otherwise agree to through a process of diplomatic bargaining. This acceptance of political violence as being legitimate (assuming it’s legal) fundamentally underpins almost all international relations.

In my opinion, the causes of political violence are no different in the domestic realm than in foreign policy. The United States hasn’t experienced almost a decade of political violence at this point because rhetoric has been too heated.

We have violence because the fundamental political beliefs of our parties are irreconcilable in core aspects. The Democrats and the GOP—and by extension their supporters—have divergent views of how the United States should be arranged politically. These disagreements of course are long-running, but have reached a point where there’s functionally no room for compromise on quite a few questions.

Look at an issue like abortion. There’s no bargaining to be had in terms of the core beliefs. Either you believe that life begins at conception, or you don’t. There’s effectively no space to trade from either side—you either win or you don’t. While there’s room for things like abortions in the case of the mother’s life—the core question of whether a fetus constitutes human life is unattainable.

More proximally, much of our political violence has been over the continued practice of American Democracy. The GOP attempted to extra-legally overturn the results of the 2020 elections, and there’s no room for Democrats to simply bargain on the continued future of liberal democracy. It’s not the sort of issue that you hash out through dealmaking.

What I’m trying to say here is that domestic violence emerges almost entirely from factional conflict over irreconcilable political differences. It doesn’t come from things like adjusting policies on urban planning but from existential questions about who you are as a political community.

To go back to what I said at the beginning, political violence also does work at resolving this. If you have two factions competing over a set of zero-sum political goals, actually using force to coerce the opposing side to accept your political claim is an effective solution to this problem.

There’s no slavery in the United States exactly because the Union was able to use political violence to force a conclusion to the issue. Similarly, there’s no longer segregation in the United States because the Federal Government used political violence to enforce the desegregation of the South. Nazi Germany no longer exists because of large-scale organized political violence by the Allied Powers.

You get the point.

Where I’m going with this is that the fiery rhetoric that surrounds political violence is a symptom of the systemic issues that drive political violence—not the other way around. Lincoln giving moving speeches wasn’t the systematic cause of the Civil War—it was slavery.

There would have been an endless cycle of Bleeding Kanases until the actual problem of slavery was resolved. Nobody needed to tell John Brown what to do in an explicit sense, it was just that John Brown was inevitable as soon as there was slavery in America.

If the underlying issue can’t be resolved, you can’t have domestic peace.

Which gets you to the cycle of incentivization for leaning into using violence. If issues are zero-sum (and more fundamental existential issues about who you are as a political community usually are), you want to be the side that definitively wins. If you can’t (or don’t want to) win through the effort of electoral politics, you have the alternative option of compelling the outcome you believe in.

This logic drives actions like attempted coups. The potential costs of the opposition gaining power are seen as existential, prompting extreme measures. For the opposition, the understanding is that if the other side gains power, they’ll come after you. This leads to further entrenchment and escalation.

You don’t have much of an incentive to back down but lean further into being the one that has power. To paraphrase Pynchon, it’s not paranoia if they really are after you.

While this doesn’t exactly mean that politicians will stand up on a podium and declare that their rivals need to be purged, the party rank-and-file membership will inevitably be driven to political violence when their issues aren’t resolved.

Now, to be clear here, I don’t think the United States is heading towards some sort of civil war or anything. We have more than enough state capacity to ever have that happen. But what I do see is a continuation of this sort of violence because there’s no reason people have to not do so.

Forgive me for citing Thomas Schelling here, but smaller groups and individuals will want to continue using this violence as a way of deterring and attempting to force acquiescence from their opponents. Violence—as Schelling loves to point out—is also a form of bargaining through the power to hurt.

If we assume (and we should) that the GOP and the Democrats will continue to have core disagreements over who we are as a country that cannot be solved through dialogue (and they largely can’t in the short term) then there’s only one other form of bargaining available.

To illustrate what I mean, assume that I have a neighbor who keeps yelling over his fence that he’s going to bulldoze my house as soon as he gets a seat on the local council. Now, I know I can’t win that election, and he can do that if he does win.

The options I have are to either let my house be destroyed (and suffer an unacceptable loss) or find a different way to bargain such that he’s no longer willing to implement that policy.

That’s effectively what political violence is in the context of Bleeding Kansas or what contemporary America consists of. It’s not the totalizing violence of a civil war, but rather a communicative game of last resort that establishes political red lines on acceptable policies.

So what I’m saying here is that none of this is going away.