The Sept. 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was simultaneously shocking and unsurprising: shocking, because of the brazen nature of his killing (in front of a large outdoor crowd, captured in graphic detail on video and with the killer initially eluding authorities); unsurprising given Kirk's uncompromising personality, rhetoric and the rise of political violence in the United States. Since his death, much ink has been spilled over what seems like an unstoppable series of attacks across the ideological spectrum. For many people, the simple question is: how and when does this end?
The current wave of violence, though dispiriting, is hardly unique. Like many other Western countries, the United States has gone through similar periods. History can illuminate some of the pathways to de-escalation. Unfortunately, barring a sudden and unexpected shock, many of the factors that previously curbed prior periods of political violence are either nonexistent or carry equally high risks of fanning the flames. This period will eventually pass. But the interim will be turbulent, harming both the security landscape across the United States and the country's domestic politics and global engagement.
Waves of Violence, Past and Present
Since its founding, the United States has endured several periods of heightened political violence. The 19th century saw at least three distinct periods: antebellum violence, the Civil War itself and the subsequent Reconstruction era. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, labor and anarchist violence dominated the headlines. Finally, in the mid-20th century, the country experienced spates of violence linked, separately, to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War.
Future historians will have a better view of when and how the current period began. But several recent trends seem to be playing a part. The rise of social media has fueled misinformation and conspiracy theories, while in parallel, trust in government and the media has plummeted. Political polarization has worsened, democratic norms have weakened and zero-sum "us vs. them" attitudes have hardened. All have been exacerbated by the lingering psychological and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some surveys, a significant minority of Americans express ostensible support for political violence. Even if what people say does not necessarily indicate they are willing to act on such beliefs, their backing for others' actions creates an environment in which more militant people perceive at least some support for their individual acts of violence. And in a country of 340 million people, only a small number of individuals need to be willing to commit violence to have an outsize impact.
Kirk's assassination caps off a summer during which violence once again became a defining feature of American political life. Just a month before Kirk was killed, a gunman allegedly consumed by COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories sprayed hundreds of bullets at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing one police officer. Also in July, a spate of violent attacks by far-left extremists targeted federal immigration officers, causing multiple injuries and property damage to some federal facilities. In June, a gunman seemingly motivated by anti-abortion beliefs attacked two Minnesota state representatives and their spouses, killing one pair. The same month, a man attacked peaceful demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, marching in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, killing one person and injuring several more. In May, a gunman killed a couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. In April, a man seemingly motivated by antisemitism set fire to part of the residence of the Pennsylvania governor, who was sleeping inside with his family and narrowly escaped without injury.
These high-profile incidents in the past few months exclude myriad others in recent years — not least the two attempts on U.S. President Donald Trump's life when he was on the campaign trail in 2024 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. In fact, according to a Reuters investigation, more than 300 cases of political violence occurred between the Jan. 6 attack and the 2024 presidential election, which the outlet characterized as "marking the most significant and sustained surge in such violence since the 1970s."
From Flow to Ebb
As hard as it is to envision during a period of intense political violence, history shows that these surges eventually fade. Broadly, there have previously been four main pathways to de-escalation. While they illustrate distinct paths, they are not mutually exclusive. Often, some combination is responsible for the eventual decline in violence.
In some cases, a government crackdown ends the violence. In such a scenario, a combination of law enforcement, intelligence and military pressure suppresses violence by deterring would-be attackers, arresting others, forcing internal divisions within extremist movements, and leading to disillusionment among supporters. For instance, the Weather Underground, a far-left group responsible for a spate of bombings in the 1970s, effectively collapsed by the end of the decade under the weight of a government crackdown that stoked internal divisions.
In other cases, government concessions address grievances, making violence unnecessary and unappealing. In many respects, this scenario is the opposite of the previous one in that authorities respond with proverbial carrots and not sticks, effectively making changes that meet the expectations of those engaging in and promoting violence. The spate of organized labor violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely ended as authorities at the local, state and federal levels made reforms regarding working conditions, pay and other demands that largely eliminated the desire, let alone need, for violence when peaceful means could achieve the same ends.
In a third scenario, violence can decline, or at least morph, when participants are absorbed into a broader movement. Unlike the first two scenarios in which repression crushes a movement or reform addresses its grievances, in this case, violence is redirected elsewhere. For instance, during Reconstruction, significant pockets of pro-Confederate guerrilla violence targeted newly freed Black people. After the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, a system of state laws that enforced racial segregation, these insurgents were absorbed into the state structures of the Southern states. To be sure, political violence did not end. Rather, it took on a very different form, becoming more of a state-sanctioned campaign of repression, rather than the wave of insurgent violence that characterized the immediate post-Civil War period.
Finally, massive shocks can divert attention or spur sufficiently large societal outrage that violence decreases. These are the unexpected crises such as wars, high-profile assassinations and mass casualty events that spur a massive societal shift and, in some cases, explicitly repudiate the wave of violence. Today, historians largely see the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley as a turning point in the wave of anarchist violence that was plaguing the country. While attacks occurred following the assassination, the killing of a popular president spurred widespread societal blowback against the anarchist cause and prompted the government to get serious about curbing the movement, which began to die down in the subsequent years.
The Current (and Likely Future) Storm
Unfortunately, none of these four paths appears close at hand or even possible. Today's wave of violence is largely unstructured and underpinned by mass communication technologies with historical echoes but no clear parallels. High-profile and influential leaders on both political extremes claim to speak for their followers and routinely fan the flames of violence. With a few exceptions, such as the Jan. 6 riot, the people carrying out the violence are all lone actors and not part of anything resembling an organized group. In many cases, they are hardly even part of a larger movement in anything but the most amorphous of senses given how unique each attacker's grievances appear to be, in the cases that they are known at all. The de-escalation pathways are therefore less relevant, as neither repression, reform nor absorption are easily achievable. The possibility of a crisis that shocks the system remains. But one would think that there have already been events such as the Capitol riot that could have played this role, yet failed to do so.
Then there is the challenge of political leadership. The tone set from the top plays a crucially important role in either tamping down or further fueling the fire. So far, Trump's rhetoric and actions point toward the latter. In his statements since Kirk's killing, including an Oval Office address to the country, Trump blamed "the radical left" and promised a severe crackdown. Across the conservative, and especially far-right, media landscape, influential personalities are calling for vengeance, retribution and war. To be sure, this is still just rhetoric, but rhetoric matters when it condones, let alone encourages, violence. And even if the far-right has at times tended to use more inflammatory rhetoric, this is not an entirely partisan matter, as evidenced most recently by the suspected leftist motivations behind Kirk's assassination.
More broadly, all of the underlying drivers for violence, including political polarization and eroding trust in institutions, appear set to continue for the foreseeable future. They may even further deteriorate. Meanwhile, many of the factors that previously helped to curb violent periods, such as government concessions, do not appear likely to emerge. Others, like suppression or absorption, carry an equally high risk of making things worse before they get better, at least at first. After all, a massive state-led crackdown on left-wing groups blamed for the Kirk assassination, let alone the incorporation of far-right militancy into the state, would carry a very high risk of incentivizing even greater far-left radicalization. And so long as the country prioritizes gun rights, it will always be easy for a single individual to cause disproportionate violence.
Political Violence Harms America at Home and Abroad
The most immediate impact of a protracted period of political violence is simply that: more violence. Even if incidents remain comparatively few relative to the U.S. population and largely affect high-profile targets, their persistence, let alone an increase in the frequency or level of violence, would make it more likely that everyday Americans are harmed. This could be because they are unfortunate bystanders to targeted violence in which they are caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, or because radicals begin to carry out more indiscriminate violence. Such developments would run counter to what is otherwise a positive trend of declining violent crime rates across the country, elevating physical safety risks. Of course, knock-on impacts could extend beyond the tactical security environment. Potential consequences of persistent political violence could include a drop in tourism as foreign travelers think twice about planning visits, companies reconsidering investments and a spike in security costs and insurance premiums — the list goes on.
Domestically, a prolonged or intensified period of political violence would likely lead to further erosion of the proverbial moderate middle in favor of more radical politics. That would in turn likely lead to counterreactions that would increasingly weigh on the traditional two-party system, potentially spurring the creation of serious new upstart parties or pushing the established parties further to the extremes. Either way, national politics would likely entail more gridlock, stymying serious efforts to address broader policy issues. Politics would become even more of a winner-takes-all system in which whatever party has power exploits it to the maximum extent possible, all but ending hopes for bipartisanship between the executive and legislative branches. As for the judicial branch, its rulings would likely become even more contested, and potentially flouted, further eroding its status as a neutral arbitrator of the law. More broadly, the bureaucracy itself would come to be seen as more partisan, regardless of veracity, undermining good governance across the board. And, with the federal government paralyzed, states and localities would take an even greater role in making policy, further balkanizing the country's regulations and general societal cohesion.
Abroad, most obviously, the United States would suffer a further loss in soft power as its increasingly damaged claims to be the leading democracy would be even more severely undercut by political violence. But there could likely also be more tangible harms. Partners and allies could become less trusting of the United States and adversaries could find numerous ways to exploit (and potentially even cause) further internal U.S. chaos for their own ends. U.S. leaders more focused on domestic events would naturally find themselves with less bandwidth to give attention to foreign policy — all of which would hobble U.S. influence amid what is an already emerging multipolar order. And what happens in the United States may not necessarily stay there: judging by the way in which the United States has already exported a new brand of conservative populist-nationalist political ideology, other countries could experience upticks in political violence.
The Path Forward
If history is any guide, the wave of violence gripping the country will end. But the period between now and whenever that happens is likely to be volatile, punctuated by further attacks, domestic political instability and the erosion of U.S. global influence. And even when the period of violence ends, the country will not simply go back to the status quo ante. It will be changed forever. That could be a moment for a cathartic period of national unity in which society comes to the realization that the past cannot be repeated. But history indicates that the more likely outcome is simply a pause before the next wave of violence.
