Rise of the Blood Populist
There are three major problems when it comes to understanding political violence in America. First, Americans cannot seem to agree on a definition of political violence. Second, people are too busy blaming their perceived political foes to see the larger problem for what it is. And, third, the big one, nobody knows how to make it stop.
I’ve reported on political violence for going on two decades (including in a cover story for this magazine in 2023), and I think some of what I’ve learned over the years can help—or at the very least might help sharpen people’s understanding of the problem.
What even is political violence? Especially in a nation where every last corner of public life has been so thoroughly politicized, I favor the simplest definition: Political violence refers to violent acts intended to provoke or prevent political change.
[From the April 2023 issue: The new anarchy]
The question of who is to blame is fraught. It is quite obviously true that the left has a political-violence problem. Anyone telling you otherwise is blinded by reflexive partisanship. It is also quite obviously true that the right has a political-violence problem. And anyone who would deny this is similarly blinkered. But looking at this problem solely through a partisan lens is generally unhelpful, particularly when people in positions of power rush to score points in the aftermath of violent attacks, as President Trump and his loyalists so frequently do—more on that in a minute.
Instead, we should see people who believe that violence is the path to resolving political disputes as part of an emerging (and by many measures growing) political party of its own—Americans who are united not by shared policy goals, but by a shared belief that violence is justified in achieving political outcomes. This belief system supersedes any other party affiliation or ideological marker, and we should treat it that way. If you believe in political violence as a necessary or tolerable means to an end, you are not a Democrat or a Republican or an independent; you are—first and foremost—an extremist whose views are in direct conflict with the American system of self-governance as it is currently designed.
This loose coalition of violent Americans deserves a name that captures its belief system. Although it borrows tactics from extremist movements across the political spectrum—the anarchists of the early 20th century and the anti-government militia movement of the late 20th century both come to mind—I think of it simply as Blood Populism.
Most Americans are not Blood Populists. Those who study political violence have found repeatedly that the majority of Americans fully reject political violence. But they have also found in recent years “a concerning level of agreement” that civil war is likely in the United States, and, among those in this category, a widespread belief that civil war is actually needed, according to a 2024 survey by the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. The same survey found that as many as a quarter of Americans view violence as “usually or always justified to advance at least one political objective,” and up to 3 percent expressed a willingness to engage in political violence themselves. (Note that this survey took place a month before the first assassination attempt against Trump, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.) This is a small percentage, relatively speaking, but it is alarming. As the American Enterprise Institute put it after its 2021 survey found that 9 percent of Americans “completely agree” with the necessity of violence in response to political failures, the fact that “nearly one in 10 Americans enthusiastically back a politics based on brute force is not terribly encouraging.”
Blood Populism draws adherents from across the ideological spectrum. Some recent polls have found that MAGA Republicans are more likely than Never Trumpers, Democrats, and independents to endorse political violence as justified—but are not more likely to carry it out. Meanwhile, left-wing terrorism (or attempts at it) is growing. Last year marked a dark turning point for the left: 2025 was the first year in more than three decades in which left-wing terror plots outnumbered right-wing ones. This isn’t because the right is never violent, or even less violent generally—for decades, right-wing violence was by far the deadlier force in the United States. It’s just that last year represented a major decline in right-wing incidents, at just the moment when left-wing violence was ramping up.
Anyone who studies violence could have predicted this turning point—and many of them did. Conspiracy theorizing and political violence often go hand in hand, and perceived victimhood is one of the greatest predictors of those who are prone to either. (A recent Manhattan Institute survey found that nearly half of all Democrats polled believe that Trump’s supporters staged the Butler attack to “increase sympathy for him” so that he would win in 2024.) What that means in practice is that the group of citizens that opposes whichever party is in power is more likely to be drawn to conspiracism or violence during that time. It also means that any forces that exacerbate the existing conditions—think economic uncertainty and the rise of AI—are likely to be pulled into the swirl of existing violence. And that is already happening: OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, survived two separate attacks in recent weeks—one involving a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house in the middle of the night, the other a drive-by shooting. As I wrote in 2023, American extremism is a messy stew of ideas and motivations. That’s why federal law-enforcement officials sometimes use the term salad-bar extremism to describe 21st-century political violence. Violence doesn’t need a clear or consistent ideology and often borrows from several. Again, in Blood Populism, violence is the ideology.
[Read: Left-wing terrorism is on the rise]
Most concerning, in some ways, is the extent to which young Americans tolerate—and even cheer on—violence. As Gallup found in a poll late last year, being between the ages of 18 and 29 is the strongest predictor of support for political violence. This age group is more likely than any other to say that it is sometimes okay to use violence to achieve a political goal.
Over the years, many experts have warned me that periods of entrenched political violence are difficult to escape. We know exactly what conditions make a society ever more vulnerable to political violence, and we’re swimming in them now: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in civic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it.
Many point out, rightly, that the situation is not nearly as bad as it could be—America has survived many darker periods, including the terror of the Redemption era; the dynamite attacks, assassinations, and mass poisoning of the 1910s and 1920s; and the assassinations of the 1960s. But we should never wish to revisit the violence of those periods, nor should we hold them as the bar for what “unacceptable” looks like.
[Read: How much worse is this going to get?]
Americans ought to reject any fellow citizen and certainly any leader that stokes violence, and they ought to do so loudly and peacefully. The president of the United States should set the tone for the American people in defending American unity and peace, rather than constantly attack his perceived political foes as subhuman or “enemies of the people.” His attempts to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021—and his pardoning of those who violently attacked the Capitol, and the law enforcement called upon to protect it—amount to a reprehensible and unmistakable endorsement of political violence. If only Trump would take a cue from Ronald Reagan, or from Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom were shot in the chest, survived, and made it their mission to lead all Americans and promote unity and social cohesion. They projected strength and resilience while also proving skilled at de-escalation.
Most Americans still want only to resolve their political differences peacefully. This peace should not be mistaken for acquiescence, nor is it something we should take for granted: With every election, across every generation, Americans must choose self-governance, and that choice rests on whether we can disagree with one another peacefully. Thomas Paine—not exactly famous for preaching nonviolence himself—once wrote that American independence could reassert itself in one of three ways: “by the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob.” Blood Populists have chosen the mob. The rest of us should insist that we the people are the ones who must collectively choose our representative government, and make that choice peacefully again and again and again.