Democracy and political violence

Yet the nation is not powerless to stop a slide toward deadly chaos. If institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life, organized violence in the service of political objectives can still be pushed to the fringes. When a faction of one of the country's two main political parties embraces extremism, that makes thwarting it both more difficult and more necessary. A well-functioning democracy demands it.

The legal tools to do so are already available and in many cases are written into state constitutions, in laws prohibiting private paramilitary activity. "I fear that the country is entering a phase of history with more organized domestic civil violence than we've seen in 100 years," said Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who pioneered legal strategies to go after violent extremists earlier in his career. "We have done it in the past and can do so again."

As the range of violence in recent years shows, the scourge of extremism in the United States is evident across the political spectrum. But the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.

Of the more than 440 extremism-related murders committed in the past decade, more than 75% were committed by right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists. The remaining quarter stemmed from a range of other motivations, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League. There were 29 extremist-related homicides last year: 26 committed by right-wing extremists, two by Black nationalists and one by an Islamic extremist. The Department of Homeland Security has warned again and again that domestic extremism motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing ideologies is the country's top terrorism threat ... the threat of violence has begun to have a corrosive effect on many aspects of public life: the hounding of election workers until they are forced into hiding, harassment of school board officials, threats to judges, armed demonstrations at multiple statehouses, attacks on abortion clinics and anti-abortion pregnancy centers, bomb threats against hospitals that offer care to transgender children, assaults on flight attendants who try to enforce COVID rules and the armed intimidation of librarians over the books and ideas they choose to share.

Meanwhile, threats against members of Congress are more than 10 times as numerous as they were just five years ago ... There are four interrelated trends that the country needs to address: the impunity of organized paramilitary groups, the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military, the global spread of extremist ideas and the growing number of G.O.P. politicians who are using the threat of political violence not just to intimidate their opponents on the left but also to wrest control of the party from those Republicans who are committed to democratic norms .... Preserving the health of our democracy is as much a matter of preventive care as it is the application of a tourniquet. A promising place to start combating political violence is with extremist paramilitary groups.

While the majority of such violence in the United States comes at the hands of people not strictly affiliated with these groups — the man who is accused of attacking Mr. Pelosi, for example, echoed their hatred of Nancy Pelosi, but it's not clear whether the man had links to any of them — they are nonetheless often the vanguard of violent episodes, such as the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and they are active in spreading their brands of ideological extremism online.

They go by many names: the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, the Three Percenters, the Wolverine Watchmen. Some fancy themselves militias, but they aren't, according to the law. These groups have been around in their modern incarnations since the end of the Vietnam War, and their popularity has waxed and waned. In fact, political violence is as old as the nation itself; right-wing frustrations with democratic outcomes have birthed militia movements throughout American history. Most notably, the Ku Klux Klan has spent over a century and a half, from Reconstruction to the present day, terrorizing Black Americans and others in service of political ends.

Today, levels of political violence are high and climbing. In 2020 the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that violence from all political ideologies reached its highest level since the group began collecting data in 1994. And extremist paramilitary groups have again become a common presence in American life, on college campuses, at public protests and at political rallies.