Every time political violence erupts in America, we fall back on the same comforting phrase: “This isn’t who we are.” But what if we have it exactly backwards? 

What if political violence isn’t some shocking departure from American values, but one of our defining characteristics — a thread running from the Boston Tea Party through Bleeding Kansas, from Civil War draft riots to deadly labor strife, from Reconstruction terror to the bullets that felled the Kennedys and King? 

What if resorting to violence to settle political disagreements is exactly who we are?

Our guest on this WhoWhatWhy podcast is professor Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. The author of numerous books and papers on political violence, including the definitive history of the John Birch Society, Dallek argues we’re living through an “era of violent populism” — driven by institutional distrust, dehumanizing rhetoric, and social media acceleration. 

With over 9,000 threats against members of Congress in a single year and Americans becoming increasingly desensitized to political bloodshed, Dallek explores why the United States stands alone among developed democracies in its level of political violence.

He examines how social media operates as both an isolating cocoon for lone wolves and a mobilizing tool for organized groups, creating what the FBI calls “salad bar extremism” — individuals stitching together violent ideologies from online fragments.

Dallek details how outbreaks of political violence have historically been curbed by the rise of reform movements, the clear victory of one side in an ideological power struggle, or sheer fatigue on the part of long-time adversaries.

As for the future, Dallek warns that — absent the kind of unifying leadership that appears increasingly unlikely in our polarized moment — we may have to wait an unconscionably long time for this cycle to exhaust itself. 

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[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There is a seductive comfort in the phrase, this isn’t who we are. Those five words we reach for every time political violence erupts in America, as if saying them often enough might make them true. But what if we have it backwards? What if political violence isn’t an aberration in the American story, but one of its defining characteristics? A thread running from the Boston Tea Party, through bleeding Kansas, from the Civil War draft knots, to the assassination of presidents, from Reconstruction terror, to the bullets that felled the Kennedys and King. What if this is exactly who we are, and always has been? It’s an uncomfortable possibility. One that challenges our most cherished myths about American exceptionalism and democratic progress. But it’s also the lens through which we might better understand our current moment, when over 9,000 threats against members of Congress represent not some shocking departure from our values, but a return to form after an unusually quiet few decades. My guest, Professor Matthew Dallek of George Washington University, has been studying this landscape of American political violence with the methodical care of someone who knows that understanding where we’ve been might be the only way to figure out where we’re headed. The author of numerous books and papers, including the definitive history of the John Birch Society, Dallek sees our current era as something distinct, what he calls a period of violent populism, driven by a toxic mix of institutional distrust, dehumanizing rhetoric, and social media acceleration. The question isn’t whether Dallek’s analysis or the historical record is correct. Perhaps they both are. Perhaps we’re witnessing both the return of something ancient in the American character, and the emergence of something genuinely new and dangerous in the digital age. Perhaps we might better understand which interpretation offers the better roadmap for navigating what comes next. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Matthew Dallek here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Matt, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Well, it is a delight to have you here, even in these troubled and violent times. Yes, I’m happy to be with you. I want to start off with this general premise that the period that we’re in now certainly seems violent. There’s a lot of talk about violence. And yet, we’ve gone through periods in American history before that were certainly as if not more violent. Talk about that general idea first.

[00:02:47] Matthew Dallek: Yeah. Well, I think your last phrase is spot on. The period we’re living through today, I think arguably is less violent than the violence of the 1960s and early 70s. Certainly less violent than the actual Civil War. And less violent than the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, just to cite three periods in the American past. That’s not to minimize the turmoil that the country is experiencing, but it is to try to put it into a bit of context. In the, for example, the 1960s, early 70s, we saw the assassination of multiple high profile political leaders, JFK, RFK, MLK, also Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. After Martin Luther King was assassinated, more than a hundred cities burned in the United States. There were bombings, there were police riots outside the Democratic National Convention. It was really a bloody era, bloodier than our own. Yet our own has its own distinct features, which are perhaps uniquely troubling. So I think, you know, we think about the violent history of the country and I think about it in terms of continuities, but also departures. And I think one, a couple of the distinguishing features of our own era is that we are living in an extremely partisan time where the parties have sorted themselves out. And while there has always been tribalism, unlike in the 60s and 70s, the parties are now increasingly themselves a source of division and partisan identity is driving a lot of the toxic rhetoric. You mentioned social media, that is obviously an accelerant and empowers individuals to call for a civil war and spreads hate and conspiracy theories with ease. And then another distinction is that we now, the United States now has a president who lives in a space of fanning the flames. You know, President Trump has operated pretty much his entire political career in a single key, a key of division. And whatever you think of presidents like Ford, Reagan, Carter, the Bushes, Clinton, they at times, sure, they divided, but at times they did view their role as one of healing and unity, national unity. And so I think that that we have our own challenges that are distinct from past eras.

[00:06:02] Jeff Schechtman: I guess one of the other questions is when we look at this history of violence, in many cases, the violence was precipitated by group ideology versus individual violence. And we’re seeing a fair amount of both right now. Talk about that.

[00:06:19] Matthew Dallek: Yeah. So first of all, I think it’s important to step back and, you know, define even what we mean by political violence, because of course, people have very different definitions of what constitutes political violence. But I do think that it is common historically, to see cases of organized political violence, oftentimes, targeting for, you know, think about the KKK, targeting black Americans, seeking civil rights and equality. And there are also a variety of attacks against the state, right against the government, there is government suppression of violent suppression of rights, there’s labor, violent labor uprisings, and then violent suppression of labor rights. And so we see a variety of forms. But individuals, lone wolves, as they’re known today, have also typically been part of this fabric. You know, if we think about individuals who stand out, like, I don’t know, Sirhan Sirhan, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the white supremacist who murdered MLK. Oftentimes, you know, individuals are they’re mentally unwell. But they are absorbing ideas that are swimming in the culture. They may not be part of a formal organized movement, radical movement, but they have been radicalized. For example, the anarchist who shot and killed William McKinley, during his trial, either he admitted or someone acknowledged that he had been radicalized by hearing speeches by anarchists and about anarchism. And so these kind of lone wolves almost never really are separate from the culture at large. That’s not to blame, you know, other people or movements for their acts. But it is to say that they do not, you know, they come from somewhere. And so I think that that organization and individuals are connected in that way. And violence, political violence has been assumed both forms.

[00:09:08] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent is it sui generis that American democracy is so violent, when we look at it, in comparison to other democratic nations, the fact that we’ve had six assassinated presidents, plus all this, this other violence that we’ve been talking about, to what extent is that unique to American democracy?

[00:09:30] Matthew Dallek: I think America does stand alone. And in terms of its level of political violence, at least a quarter of American presidents have either been assassinated, or arguably almost killed in office, the target of serious efforts at assassination. America, you know, there are a lot of, I think, reasons for this, obviously, other countries, and I think it’s helpful just to think about, let’s say, the 20th and 21st century. But if we think about the 20th and 21st century, or even the post World War Two era, most other industrialized democracies, South Korea, Japan, Great Britain, you know, we can go on down the list. They, for starters, restrict firearms, quite dramatically compared to the United States, right, we have more guns than people, and the weaponry has become more high powered. We have a, I think, a raucous political culture, a kind of freewheeling style where everyone, you know, included in the First Amendment, right, everyone can basically say what they want short of yelling fire in a crowded theater. And that’s, I think, both a great, that kind of openness is a great strength of American democracy. But at times, it can also empower extremists. And, and because we don’t have, let’s say, the law that Germany has, which prohibits expressions of support for Hitler and Nazism, we, you know, ideas circulate a little bit more freely here, violent rhetoric circulates a little more freely. And then, you know, the United States is, I think, one of the most diverse countries on earth, that through much of the 20th century, suppressed, especially the rights of African Americans, civil rights and voting rights, and has vast amounts of economic inequality. It is, it creates a, a fairly combustible mix. And so, you know, we see not always, but we have seen historically, and today, violence, partly erupting, at least along of class and racial lines are fueled by, let’s say, white supremacy, for example. And then the last point I’d make, at least about this kind of post 45 era, is that, you know, America’s ideals, its sort of stated ideals, its claims to defend human rights, and be a force, a beacon for democracy, and self determination around the world. There are times when, of course, the country has not come close, has violated those ideals. And that has, as with the Vietnam War, let’s say, or, you know, a number of other wars that the country has fought, war in Iraq, that has created, I think, conditions that have wrecked the country, split the country. And it’s, it’s, it’s had a fracturing effect. And, you know, were it not for, let’s say, the Vietnam War, we likely would not have seen the same level of the same kind of violence that we saw in the 60s and early 70s. So I think the gulf between our, our constitutional ideals, the ideals in the Declaration, and the live reality that Americans experience, I think that has also contributed at times to, you know, what I described as an alternative political tradition of violence in the United States.

[00:13:52] Jeff Schechtman: And you talk about it in the present as this era of violent populism. Explain that.

[00:13:59] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, so look, it depends on what kind of violence we’re talking about. I think today, the current era, let’s say the past decade, we have seen violence coming increasingly from different quarters, ideological quarters. But I do think that the far right has this kind of populist movement, this attempt to really drive out the establishment, right, this sort of sustained verbal assault on elites, and on the system. That has a kind of populist suspicion and character of concentrations of power, of wealth, and a real deep set hostility to the federal government, to Washington. Now, I’m not saying that those ideas directly lead to violence. But there has been a kind of populist uprising here and in Britain with Brexit and Poland and many other places around the world, where some of the more extremist elements have turned to violence and have have done so on the theory, essentially, that there is an enemy within, that the greatest threat to the United States, for example, is internal. It is the, you know, it’s your fellow American, basically. And that, I think, is a radicalizing idea that has contributed to the violence. And then on the left as well, and again, it’s hard to kind of directly link some of these ideas to actual acts of political violence. But I do think that the left as well has had a, you know, a long running deep set disaffection, especially since the Great Recession, with the economic structure of the United States. And it has gotten more acute, I think, over the last, let’s say, 15 years since the financial collapse. So, you know, we are living in a time of distrust in institutions, distrust in elites, and where, you know, and in that way, maybe similar to the 60s and 70s, a kind of suspicion of authority figures. And that, I think, has, you know, it’s created conditions that have led to what we’ve seen is a serious uptick in populist violence.

[00:17:01] Jeff Schechtman: More than distrust, what we see in many cases, it seems, on the left and the right, is almost a hatred towards government. That in the past, even in violent periods, there was the desire to fix government, to overturn, perhaps, leadership in government, as opposed to what we see on the right and the extremes of the right and left today, which is not to fix it, but to burn it all down.

[00:17:28] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, I think that is a very good point. And, you know, Reagan said in his first inaugural that government is not the answer to our problems, government is the problem. Well, that’s different from Trump’s idea of a deep state, right, that the government itself is so corrupt, that it has to be dismantled and destroyed. The reform impulses that have helped to contain some of these more radical ideas and violent impulses, historically, I think that those reform impulses are on the run. You know, I don’t see many effective political leaders who are, you know, have have wide followings and are charting a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, reformist centrist center left center right path. And so, I think in that sense, you know, extremist ideas and individuals who believe that government is evil and really the source of American’s oppression That, I think, has has taken root in our contemporary culture and the right and the left. Yeah. I mean, well, yes. In different in different ways. Absolutely. So now. So on the right, I think it’s a clear the lineage is a little clearer. And and, you know, you can just follow Trump’s rhetoric or much of the rhetoric about the deep state and how it’s been conspiring to destroy him and how he said, as he as he once did, that he would be people’s retribution, their vengeance on the left. I think what we’re seeing again in some quarters, you don’t want to I don’t want to paint a too broad a brush, but in some quarters is this idea that the Trump government and that the far right represents a fascist threat to the United States. And I think that that has become a more prominent argument and idea as Trump man in his comeback campaign and then, you know, has taken office over the last nine months. And and, you know, with that telling right that the government itself is now turning being turned to destroy the liberties. And the rights of many Americans, well, that also creates a I think a, you know, a very concerning situation where, you know, the stakes are existential. And because the rhetoric around government, around politics has become so apocalyptic, I think it it it cedes, especially in those who are mentally ill and have access to guns. It cedes some of these acts of violence or creates conditions that make violent political violence more likely.

[00:21:03] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also an antisocial streak that runs through so much of this, particularly on the right. But but a lot of antisocial attitudes, isolation, particularly with regard to young men. These are all issues that are feeding into this as well.

[00:21:18] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, I think that’s that’s right. And, you know, I’m not an expert on social media, but for especially young men, social media can make people feel less connected to others in real life. It can feed depression, suicidal thoughts, and it can expose people to a pretty dark radical ideas that are are only confirmed by whoever else they’re interacting with. And so that I think the the absence of a kind of counterweight when, again, especially young men go, you know, spend hours a day online and in chat rooms that can have its own kind of, you know, it can be a destructive force and especially for those, again, who are. By preliminary accounts, some dynamic of this sort occurred with Charlie Kirk’s assassin. At the same time, social media can, you know, not just isolate people, but as we saw with January 6, it can serve as a mobilizing tool. So social media was used to organize and bring people to Washington to, as the rally put it, to stop the steal. So in a way, it kind of created a community and bound people together in this idea that they were coming to Washington to save their country. From this alleged horrific plot to steal the election from Donald Trump and deprive them of their rightful president. So, you know, it can work, I think, in in in different ways. Those are obviously two examples in which social media is a real destructive force. It can obviously be used for great good as well, but but both as an organizing tool and as a tool that isolates individuals and radicalizes them, it is a it really is, I think, a force multiplier when it comes to political violence.

[00:23:50] Jeff Schechtman: It’s an accelerant to all the worst instincts that exist out there in American society with respect to violence, whether it’s group violence that we talked about earlier or individual isolated lone wolf kind of violence.

[00:24:06] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, and the, you know, the algorithms feed, you know, it feeds the toxicity, right? The whole and the whole desire to go viral, the more outrageous you are, the more followers you can get the, you know, whether it’s X or a tick tock or Instagram, YouTube. Sure, you know, they have some, you know, some rules, but, you know, it’s kind of like a Wild West out there, right, especially on X. But anything goes. And and so individuals are encouraged financially in terms of fame, attention, and and they get elevated by calling for war or demonizing the other side. And so I do think that a voice like a Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, that kind of voice, you know, voice of calm, of sanity, of really urging, you know, cooler heads to prevail. And and, you know, as his as his program says, disagree better, though that kind of call, I think gets is competing with and gets drowned out by this the cesspool. And so it makes it harder for traditional leaders, elected officials who, you know, as we’ve discussed, are have lost a lot of authority to begin with. But it makes it harder for them to break through to it’s hard for their words to resonate with Americans. And the last thing I just want to point out is that, of course, you know, this is a pretty it’s a it’s a dark conversation in many ways. But the majority and maybe even vast majority of Americans do not support political violence. And even though the poll numbers have shown there is more support, the threat level is has risen against the lawmakers and judges. Most Americans do not support the use of political violence to advance their cause. So we’re talking about unempowered, dangerous minority and or subset of the population here.

[00:26:37] Jeff Schechtman: The other side of that, though, is that certainly while the vast majority of Americans don’t condone the violence or participate in it in any way, there is a sense of the population becoming more and more desensitized to it, which has its own dangers.

[00:26:53] Matthew Dallek: Yeah. So that is an interesting question. So Politico ran a story after the Charlie Kirk murder showing that Americans, at least based on their their Google searching and some other metrics, seem to be moving on more quickly from these horrific acts of violence. And suggesting, to your point, that they are becoming desensitized, one could argue maybe something similar with regard to school shootings.

[00:27:27] Speaker 3: Right.

[00:27:27] Matthew Dallek: They happen now every year. They’re fairly routine. And yet the the fact that their commonplace has, in a way, quieted calls for serious reforms that might that might put a stop to those shootings. So, you know, on one level, these images like the horrific video of Charlie Kirk being killed, unlike the 1960s, these images spread, you know, like a virus in real time. I mean, everyone can see them and see them over and over and over again. So they’re much speedier. But pretty quickly, you know, Americans or many Americans at least seem to be moving on. And, you know, the other challenge is that, look, I mean, I don’t think most Americans I think most Americans are probably more concerned about the cost of living, you know, and and, you know, in their jobs and, you know, child care, getting their kids to school. I mean, the kind of daily stuff of of everyone’s life or most people’s lives. And and so, you know, I don’t know that we have seen a kind of popular will or uprising to try to contain and attack the sources of political violence that we’re seeing playing out in the United States. And so, you know, maybe there is a movement that will that will emerge and maybe there are leaders who will step to the fore. But it does seem as if the forces of division are more a powerful, you know, a powerful in the saddle than are the forces of unity and a kind of a rebuilding of sort of common civic culture.

[00:29:39] Jeff Schechtman: What seems to be the most profoundly missing from that attempt to build that civic culture is not necessarily popular will, which certainly may be there lurking below the surface. But arguably, and maybe history gives us some lessons about this, that without appropriate leadership, it’s just not going to ever come forth.

[00:30:04] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, look, there’s got to be leadership, obviously, but people have also got to want to follow that leadership. And one of the challenges now, I think, in 2025 America, is that because the country is so polarized along partisan lines, it makes it harder for the kind of leadership that I think you’re referencing to emerge, to sort of cross those partisan divisions. And the kind of leadership I think that we’re seeing, I mean, there are different kinds, but some of the leadership, I think, is focused on one side or the other as blaming one side or the other for most of the violence. And so very quickly, you know, the adage of violence breeds violence, which I think is true. The way in which at least the killing of Charlie Kirk was met was at least in part by people like, you know, Donald Trump blaming the left, right, omitting any reference to violence coming from the far right. And and then the elevation of a handful, a relative handful, I guess, of voices on social media who are celebrating Kirk’s murder in really, really ugly, kind of sick ways. And so we’re seeing, you know, these extremist calls for more violence, more attacks, you know, defining the threat as a fundamentally partisan threat. It doesn’t make it harder for leadership to emerge. And, you know, it’s interesting to think about Lyndon Johnson, who by 1968 was deeply unpopular, obviously decided not to run for president again, was a source of much of the country’s divisions because of his leadership of the Vietnam War. And yet, you know, in 1968, he did establish as president a commission to investigate the causes and prevention of violence. And it was a bipartisan commission. It undertook a series of reports. And it is really impossible to imagine anything like that happening today where, you know, we have a sort of bipartisan group that can come together and even if they don’t agree on everything, they can put out a national report analyzing and trying to combat this proliferation of political violence. And, you know, again, whatever we think of presidents who followed Richard Nixon, you know, those presidents did aspire to and at times, I think, achieved a leadership that helped at least at the margins to calm some of the tensions. You know, think about Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing and his speech to Oklahomans when he went to Oklahoma, George W. Bush after 9-11, where he went to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., and said Islam is peace. Again, I’m not saying any of these presidents were uniters per se or perfect, but there was that aspiration at times. And and I don’t I think that we lack that kind of leadership and also lack that sort of public will.

[00:34:10] Jeff Schechtman: When we look at history, do these periods just burn themselves out after a while or is there any kind of a single thread that we can find in the history of American violence that that might lead us to understand better where this might be going?

[00:34:29] Matthew Dallek: Yeah. So that’s a really interesting question, partly because I don’t think there’s a single pattern or formula. I do think I agree that there is something to the idea that political violence historically has tended to burn itself out. And part of it is that people become exhausted with it. Part of it is that one side wins. So think about the Civil War, right, the Union prevailed or the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, where the South essentially prevailed in establishing white supremacy in the South, overthrowing Reconstruction. In the 20th century, the government, the federal government and also at the state and local level, has also at times reformed, adopted reforms that helped to constrain or contain some of the sources of violence. So let’s think about labor rights, collective bargaining, the eight hour work day, bans on child labor, workplace safety. Some of these reforms, I think, and union organizing, right, to some extent in the mid 20th century, helped to alleviate some of the injustices that people were experiencing that could lead to cycles of violence. And then finally, I would say historically is that if we think about, let’s say, the 60s and early 70s, one reason why the country eventually came out of that period of violence, let’s say from 1963, JFK’s assassination to, I don’t know, the two assassination attempts against Gerald Ford in September 75. Well, the Vietnam War ended eventually and the civil rights movement became adopted as it was imperfect, right? It was unfinished. But the system in a way, society reformed itself, the adoption of civil rights and voting rights, and those reforms, I think, enabled and most Americans came to accept civil rights. So we saw a drop off in the kind of violent, massive resistance that characterized so much of the 1950s and 60s and even early 70s. Today, I think it is a different animal. We can talk about that, but we have seen ways in which the issues dissipate, you know, issues behind the violence dissipate. Americans become exhausted. One side maybe prevails over the other. And and the system is able to reform itself to some extent because, you know, also Americans, you know, one of the maybe strengths of the country is that, you know, Americans like to earn money, right? They were about business in large part. And, you know, too much violence in actual civil war is typically very bad for business, right? Especially our role as an international economic leader. So so there are forces, I think, that push back on political violence and have at times there’s always some level of political violence, but have at times helped to curb some of these cycles that we have seen.

[00:38:21] Jeff Schechtman: It’s interesting that we talk of social media as an accelerant to all of this, which certainly it is, as we’ve talked about, but it also arguably amps up the level of exhaustion sooner.

[00:38:34] Matthew Dallek: Yeah. So that’s a that’s a really interesting question. There’s certainly some Americans who are exhausted by social media, but they, you know, have probably largely tuned out. But then there, of course, is a, you know, substantial subset of Americans who are not exhausted by it, who are actually active participants in it. And so, you know, it’s hard to to know. And remember, in a political violence, it’s not as if it takes that many people relative to a a population of three hundred and thirty or forty million to have a rise in political violence. Right. We’re we’re still talking about a relatively small minority of of individuals and groups. So and the challenge with social media is that because, of course, it’s not going away, it’s not like a Vietnam War that will one day end. Now, everything was not, you know, hunky dory as soon as the war ended. But again, and the war still is extremely divisive. But some of the most, you know, active sources fueling the division from the war, those started to dissipate. So it’s hard to see short of, I guess, serious government regulation, which has become very controversial, social media dissipating as a for as a as a source of division as well.

[00:40:13] Jeff Schechtman: So I guess we just have to wait till it burns itself out. Sad, but true, I’m afraid.

[00:40:18] Matthew Dallek: Yeah, you know, obviously I have a hard enough time looking at the past, let alone predicting the future. But, you know, politics is constantly evolving and, you know, we will not always be in this current moment. It is partly going to depend on what happens next. Who knows? Maybe immediately there will be an uptick in violence after the Kirk assassination, but maybe that will eventually lead to a pulling back. Right. You know, it’s very hard to know, but it does seem extremely unlikely that we’re just going to be stuck in political violence or in this moment. Right. It is likely to change. It could absolutely get worse. But, you know, over time, things could get better. So I’m not entirely pessimistic.

[00:41:13] Jeff Schechtman: Professor Matthew Dallek, I thank you so much for joining us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:41:18] Matthew Dallek: Thanks for having me on. Thank you.

[00:41:20] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.