Robert Pape on political violence in the US

The political scientist Robert Pape who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has been studying public attitudes in the US toward political violence and has a book on the topic coming out this year.

In this interview, he cites increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the US as a cause of rising political violence. And he says, “what that transition is doing is riling up politics on both eh right and the left.”

One of the challenges in measuring public support in the US for “political violence” is to apply some kind of consistent notion of what political violence actually is. That is especially important since the Trump regime describes a broad range of dissenters as protesters of being “terrorists.” A new article by Papa and Christopher Price argues:

Surveys have found varied levels of public support for political violence that range all the way from 2.9 percent to 20 percent, depending on methodological choices and snapshot in time of the survey ... However, critics argue that these surveys poorly represent the current level of support for violence, suggesting that these estimates are “biased upward because of respondent disengagement and survey questions that allow for multiple interpretations of political violence,” and that support for political violence in the United States is in the low single digits …). These are not minor differences, with estimates differing by an order of magnitude. (2)

But a response of 20% of Americans supporting political violence in the abstract is lower than the number of people in the US who saw in recent surveys that they support Donald Trump’s 2.0 regime. It’s also lower than the surprisingly low number of people who support his current Iran War. It would presumably be a better measure to ask Americans if they support the violent actions of ICE and the Customs and Border Control (CPB) in 2025-26, which have included murder, kidnapping, illegal home invasions, and beatings.

Their article focuses heavily on technical issues with the available public opinion studies, including both sampling methods and evaluations. They state at the end of their paper that available results of surveys they evaluated show that up to 10% of the US public support political violence.

However, they note pointedly that “our estimate is most likely an undercount.”

As we saw on January 6, 2021, there are organized far-right militias that Republicans can mobilize, and they did so dramatically that day at the Capitol. Whatever “self-defense” groups or lone wolves there are on the left in the US, they aren’t anywhere near the size of the far-right violent militias. Meanwhile, Trump himself and his minions not only declare anything they deem to be “antifa” (anti-fascists) to be terrorists. This is beyond bad parody. It’s complete cynicism. And when Trump sends out agents of literal state terror like the black-masked ICW Gestapo to practice violence and murder against law-abiding citizens and residents, the “libertarian” Trumpists who want to get the “jackboots of the gubmint” off their necks cheer for the acts of state terror.

Back in the first Obama Administration, as the rightwing militia movement was growing out of racist outrage at having an African-American President, a senior domestic terrorism analyst in the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a report warning of the rising number or rightwing militia groups and their particular threat to law enforcement officials, who Republicans usually like to idolize. Apparently terrified at the criticism he was receiving from Republicans, Obama shut down the unit for which Johnson was working. (3)

If the Obama team thought the problem would just go away if they ignored it, they were terribly wrong.

In 2017, I was attending the Netroots Nation convention in Atlantic and Darly Johnson was part of a panel chaired by the investigative journalist Dave Neiwert addressing domestic far-right extremism. Just as the panel was beginning, the news was reported about the murder of Heather Heyer, a counter-demonstrator against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. James Alex Fields, Jr., was later convicted of the murder, which he carried out by ramming a crowd with his car, which injured 35 others. He was sentenced to life in prison plus hundreds of years on top of it.

In the following seven-plus years, the violent far-right militias were numerous and well-organized enough that Trump could incite an organized mob of them to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2024 Presidential election. The Trump movement had built up its own political paramilitary capability. While Obama wanted to “look forward, not backward” and Biden kept reassuring us, “the fever will break.”

I hope the discussions around Pape’s upcoming book will help alert more people to the real nature of political violence in the US.

Notes:

(1) Robert Pape: “We are heading toward more violence”. Aljazeera English YouTube channel 05/07/2026. <https://youtu.be/4jy3aiZm6pE?si=FMu-rHUbgrP8n4bL> (Accessed 2026-04-05).

(2) Pape, Robert & Price, Christopher (2026): How to Estimate Public Support for Political Violence and Why It Matters ... Public Opinion Quarterly 90:2, 451–477.

(3) Statement of Daryl Johnson CEO, DT Analytics Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution 09/19/2012. <https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/9-19-12JohnsonTestimony.pdf> (Accessed : 2026-04-05.)