Nonpartisan Professor Coins "Violent Populism" — Says the Era Has Already Begun
A University of Chicago professor has spent four years measuring something most Americans don't want to look at directly. The numbers say we are running out of time.
Amendment Media | Randy Flagg
Picture a line of a hundred Americans. Any hundred. Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people in the parking lot at the grocery store, the regulars at your church or your gym or your local diner. People with jobs and kids and mortgages and opinions about the weather.
Now picture twenty-five of them believing that political violence is justified.
That is not a hypothetical. That is the current state of the United States of America, documented by one of the country’s leading researchers on political violence — and it is getting worse, not better.
Who Robert Pape Is and Why You Should Listen
Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He is not a pundit. He is not a partisan. He is a researcher who has spent decades studying the conditions that produce political violence — in other countries, and now in this one.
Since 2021, his center has conducted quarterly nationally representative surveys measuring American attitudes toward political violence, fielded by NORC, one of the most respected survey organizations in the country. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has published in Foreign Affairs. He has a new book — Our Own Worst Enemies: America and the Age of Violent Populism — that the nation’s leading scholars of democracy describe as essential reading.
He is not raising an alarm because it is fashionable or profitable to do so. He is raising an alarm because the data is raising it for him.
What the Data Shows
Political violence in the United States is now at its highest level since the 1970s. In the first half of 2025, there were roughly 150 recorded politically motivated attacks — almost double the number from the same period in 2024. The targets have crossed every line: an assassination attempt on a conservative Supreme Court Justice, two attempts on a Republican presidential candidate, the assassination of Democratic leaders in Minnesota, the killing of Charlie Kirk. Pape told Face the Nation in September 2025 that what we are seeing is not a continuation of long-standing trends. It is something new.
He calls it the era of violent populism.
The survey numbers are the part that should stop you cold. In May 2025, Pape’s center found that approximately 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove President Trump from the presidency. Approximately 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Trump’s agenda. Both numbers had more than doubled since Fall 2024.
Go back to that line of a hundred Americans. Walk down it. Every fourth person you pass — the neighbor, the coworker, the person in the parking lot — holds the belief that political violence is justified under some current political circumstance. Not a fringe militia member. Not a known extremist. An ordinary American with a job and a family and a lawn to mow.
That is where we are.
The Profile Has Changed
The most important finding in Pape’s research — and the one most likely to be misunderstood — is who these people are.
Our Own Worst Enemies documents that support for political violence against democratic institutions is now as likely to come from normal political activists with nice homes and 401(k)s as from the Proud Boys and the cast of characters who stormed the Capitol. The dangerous actor is no longer primarily the isolated, unemployed, socially marginal young man radicalized in a basement. The dangerous actor is your neighbor. The person at the school board meeting. The person who coached your kid’s Little League team and voted in every election and considers themselves a patriot.
This matters enormously for how we understand the threat. A fringe phenomenon can be monitored, contained, occasionally prosecuted. A mainstream phenomenon — one that has moved from the edges to the living rooms of ordinary Americans — cannot be policed away. It has to be addressed at the source.
Pape is careful and precise about what he is and is not saying. Seventy percent of Americans still abhor political violence in any of the situations presented in his surveys. The majority holds. But the fringes on both sides are growing, and the spiral dynamics — fear breeding retaliation breeding escalation — do not require a majority to produce catastrophic outcomes. They require only a determined and growing minority operating in an environment of political leaders who refuse to de-escalate.
The Fuel Underneath the Fire
Pape’s research identifies the conditions that produce violent populism. They are not mysterious. They are not primarily cultural. They are economic.
The populations most likely to support political violence are not the poorest Americans — they are the Americans who feel that a status they believed they had earned, or were promised, is being taken from them. The threatened middle. The people who followed the rules, worked the jobs, built the lives they were told to build — and then watched the institutions they trusted fail them, the politicians they elected serve other interests, and the economy they were promised deliver diminishing returns for everyone except the people at the top.
That is not a left-wing grievance or a right-wing grievance. It is an American grievance. And it is documented in the same polling data that shows 86 percent of Americans want to ban congressional stock trading, 82 percent want paid family leave, and a generation of college graduates cannot find entry-level work. The distance between what Americans were promised and what they are receiving is not abstract. It has a dollar amount. It has a zip code. It has a face.
Pape’s research does not make the policy argument explicitly — that is not his lane. But the connection between economic betrayal and political radicalization is not a new idea. It is one of the most documented relationships in the social science literature. People who believe the system is working do not blow it up. People who believe the system has been rigged against them — and who have evidence for that belief — are a different matter.
Amendment Media has been covering that evidence since the day we launched. This is why it matters.
The Political Class Is Making It Worse
Pape’s research consistently shows that when political leaders use rhetoric that threatens violence or characterizes opponents using dehumanizing language, public support for political violence rises. The causal relationship is documented. The leaders know it. Most of them do it anyway — because outrage is an effective fundraising mechanism, because dehumanizing the other side turns out voters, because the short-term incentives of political survival point directly toward the behaviors that produce long-term democratic collapse.
Pape has called for a bipartisan summit — Trump, Newsom, Pritzker, leaders from both parties — in which political leaders jointly and publicly condemn political violence as illegal, immoral, and un-American. He argues that calming statements from leaders can push back the tide the same way that inflammatory statements accelerate it.
The summit has not happened. The inflammatory statements have continued.
The unlike-the-1960s dimension of this moment is something Pape emphasizes. In previous eras of American political violence, the underlying grievances had specific, identifiable policy targets — civil rights, Vietnam. When those issues were addressed, or at least substantially changed, the violence subsided. The current environment is more nebulous, without a clear goal that both sides could work toward. The grievances are real but diffuse. The enemies are everywhere and nowhere. The promised land is undefined.
That is a more dangerous situation than a focused one. A movement with a specific demand can be satisfied or negotiated with. A movement animated by general rage at a system that has failed them — without a clear articulation of what success would look like — has no natural endpoint.
The 70 Percent and What They Need
The reason this is not a counsel of despair is the same reason Pape keeps doing the research: the majority still holds.
Seventy percent of Americans reject political violence. That is not a thin majority. That is a durable supermajority that has held through assassination attempts, January 6th, and everything that has happened since. It includes Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, people across every demographic category.
But that majority is passive. It does not organize. It does not march. It does not dominate the cable news cycle or fill the social media feeds. It goes to work and raises its kids and shakes its head at the news and hopes someone else is handling it.
Someone has to speak for them — not in the language of partisan warfare, but in the language of what actually unites them. The thing that unites the 70 percent is not an ideology. It is a shared stake in a country that functions, institutions that are trustworthy, and a political system that at least occasionally delivers what ordinary people actually want.
That is also, not coincidentally, what Amendment Media exists to cover.
Pape’s warning is not that the fire has already taken hold. It is that the conditions for it are in place, the kindling has been laid, and the people with the power to prevent it are choosing, day after day, not to.
The 70 percent who still reject this path are the only thing standing between the country that exists and the one Pape’s data is pointing toward.
They need to know what is at stake. They need someone to tell them clearly, without partisan spin, what the research actually shows and what it means.
That is what Amendment Media is here to do.