Who Supports Political Violence in America?
Every so often, I’ll bring you important research from the world of social science that hasn’t been reported much outside the halls of academia (I am a political scientist in my day job, after all). In this edition, I’ll explore a fascinating new study that examines the traits and demographic profiles of those who support political violence in the United States.
But before I get to that, a quick bit of good news!
Yesterday was a good day for democracy
Yesterday, Thai voters resoundingly rejected military rule and voted for change. Whether true democracy will now take root in Thailand is uncertain, but the message was unequivocal: Thais want to live, as most of us do, in a genuinely democratic country.
On Saturday, I wrote this piece for The Atlantic about the geopolitical stakes of the Thai election—and how it fits in with the showdown between China and the United States.
But it also includes a few interesting bits of trivia, including the macabre fact that Thailand used to have a specific protocol for killing members of the royal family, which involved stuffing them into a man-sized velvet sack and beating them to death with a sandalwood club. It also includes this nice bit of American historical trivia:
Thailand’s King Mongkut tried in 1861 to send elephants to help establish a breeding population in the United States for the purposes of transporting goods (Abraham Lincoln graciously declined the offer, stating that steam power was working well and that “our political jurisdiction … does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant”).
A few thousand miles away from Thailand, Turkish voters are on the cusp of rejecting authoritarian rule of their own, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan narrowly avoided an electoral loss yesterday. The vote now goes to a second round. My fingers are crossed that he loses—and that Turkey can restore some of its badly broken democratic institutions.
Now that the good news is out of the way…onto political violence!
The normalization of political violence
Two years on from January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump recently pledged to pardon many of the extremists who attacked the US Capitol based on his lies. Worse, few in his party have condemned similar comments in the past, with virtually every elected Republican saying they would support Trump if he ends up as the GOP nominee, which is likely.
At worst, it’s an open embrace of political violence by one of America’s two main parties; at best, it’s a toleration of political leaders who promote violence…
