Radical American Partisanship

Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy

Nathan P. Kalmoe, Lilliana Mason

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226820279
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Radical partisanship among ordinary Americans is rising, and it poses grave risks for the prospects of American democracy. Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation's history.The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?For over four years, through a series of surveys and experiments, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason have been studying radicalism among ordinary American partisans. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on new evidence—as well as insights from history, psychology, and political science—to put ourpresent partisan fractiousness in context and to explain broad patterns of political and social change. Early chapters reveal the scope of the problem, who radical partisans are, and trends over time, while later chaptersidentify the conditions that partisans say justify violence and test how elections, political violence, and messages from leaders enflame or pacify radical views.Kalmoe and Mason find thatordinary partisanship is far more dangerous than pundits and scholars have recognized. However, these findings are nota forecast of inevitable doom; the current climate also brings opportunities to confront democratic threats head-on and to create a more inclusive politics.Timely and thought-provoking, Radical American Partisanship is vital reading for understanding our current political landscape.

CHAPTER ONE

Recognizing Partisan Extremes

The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like. — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), January 19, 2021

Hate just hides. It doesn’t go away, and when you have somebody in power who breathes oxygen into the hate under the rocks, it comes out from under the rocks. — Presidential candidate Joe Biden, June 1, 20201

Racism is real in America and it has always been. . . . Xenophobia is real in America and always has been. Sexism too. — Vice President Kamala Harris, March 19, 20212

Democracy ultimately prevailed on January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States. That result was not a forgone conclusion.

Biden had won the national vote eleven weeks earlier, and the result was constitutionally affirmed by the Electoral College in December. But from election night onward, defeated president Donald Trump claimed fraud without evidence and fielded dozens of baseless lawsuits. His challenges were denied or dismissed by dozens of judges—some appointed by Trump himself. The results were verified, reverified, and reverified again by state and federal officials.

Trump never did concede to Biden. Instead, on January 6, 2021, the sitting president, with fourteen days left in office, encouraged a mob of his supporters to violently attack the US Capitol building while Congress met inside. The intent was to disrupt the formal tally of Electoral College votes that would constitutionally certify Joe Biden as the next president.

The mob injured 138 Capitol and DC police officers, and two officers died. Members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence narrowly escaped rioters who intended to “capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government,” according to federal prosecutors.3 A makeshift gallows was erected on the west side of the US Capitol grounds with a noose hung from the top. Some insurrectionists could be heard chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” Trump was publicly furious with his own vice president for refusing to use his ceremonial role to interfere with the Electoral College certification. As rioters broke through Capitol windows and doors, the president tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.”4 Clearly, his followers were ready to mete out violence on Democrats and any Republicans who dared disobey their undisputed party leader. Congress finally certified the election results late that night as Republican congressmen continued to make seditious objections.

Why was it so easy to stoke an insurrection by thousands of Americans—many of whom carried their nation’s flag as they desecrated its Capitol and hunted its elected leaders? How are self-professed patriots driven to violent sedition? Trump’s incitement is the obvious, immediate answer, but that raises more questions. Part of the deeper answer is that the bases of each party are divided into nearly warring factions with radically opposed visions for America. After decades of realignment and consolidation, core groups in each party now pull forcefully in opposite directions.

Republicans increasingly pursue outsized power and benefits for dominant social groups while working to undercut government by the people. The party has been overtaken by those who long for the stricter racial hierarchies of the old white South, who envision a Christian theocracy, and who steer government benefits to the rich, all of which have had national constituencies since the founding. Not coincidentally, many of the Capitol insurrectionists displayed Confederate symbols and Christian iconography, and a surprising number were business owners or white-collar workers.

By contrast, Democrats today are a pluralistic multiracial party increasingly committed to advancing democracy through electoral representation and equal rights and liberties. They are reckoning with and attempting to overcome America’s legacy of oppression by race, sex, religion, and class, among other categories. This is a battle over the future—and the past—of the United States. No wonder, then, that many Americans (though not most) engage in politics with a spirit of violence and not comity or compromise—today’s parties pursue fundamentally incompatible visions for America’s future.

Conflict between democratic movements and dominant groups is inherent and perpetual in American politics, but it rarely cleaves the parties so neatly. When it has, it has produced mass violence. The last time the parties were so divided, their positions were reversed. The Civil War–era Democratic Party was pulling backward to enshrine Black enslavement, white supremacy, and ever-diminishing democracy. The Republican Party pushed toward a more democratic future by opposing the expansion of Black enslavement, by violently suppressing an armed rebellion against the 1860 election, and by unabashedly ramming through constitutional amendments that nationalized Black Emancipation, voting rights, and equality—in law, but not fully in practice.5

Three years before the war, Republican senator William Seward described an “irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces” dividing the parties over Black enslavement. That environment radicalized millions of ordinary Americans who came to see their partisan opponents as existential threats to their place in the nation—often correctly—and then killed each other on an enormous scale. Three-quarters of a million Americans died in the Civil War—a per capita equivalent of eight million dead today. In making this comparison, we certainly do not envision violence on the same scale, but it shows what is possible given the same basic divisions. Those are the stakes—for our politics, our lives, and our hopes for a full democracy.

How radical are American partisans today? In this book, we show for the first time how many ordinary partisans endorse violence, who they are, and how that radicalization happens. In contrast with most prior research on political violence, we focus on the public rather than profiling small extremist groups or individual attackers. Our studies track shifts in violent hostility in recent years, trace how violent views translate into aggressive political behaviors, and uncover the roles of political leaders and political contexts in enflaming and pacifying partisans. While we generally find similar levels of violent hostility in both parties, our results show it is driven by opposite forces in each party, consistent with macro-partisan trends. Those views among Republicans are found most among those who want to maintain the old social hierarchies, while among Democrats, radicals are most prevalent among the egalitarians who want to dismantle those biased systems.

We think of “radical partisanship” in a few ways. Our immediate attention is on support for partisan violence and vilification that enables violent acts—the empirical core of our book. But to tell that story, we also discuss radicalism involving election rejection and systemic change toward and away from democracy, defined by representative elections and equal rights. The radical forms are closely linked, but we set aside public attitudes on democracy for now. Others ably address those views in the meantime (e.g., Bartels 2020; Clayton et al. 2021; Bright Line Watch 2021; Davis, Goidel, and Gaddie, forthcoming).

The approach here is rigorous social science—our objective measures and tests are our main contribution—but our normative commitments are also clear. The promise of American democracy is at stake in today’s partisan conflicts, and achieving that ideal is where we stand—a government in which every citizen has equal say in choosing our leaders, with rights upheld equally for all. Expressing value commitments in public-facing work is unusual for political scientists, especially when those values now indict one party more than the other. But there is no truthful way to write a book on partisan violence today that pretends both parties are equally culpable, that their actions are morally equivalent, or that they pose equal dangers to the democratic project.

We continue the chapter with a review of recent violence and an outline of the book to come.

What Is Happening?

The Capitol insurrection was not the first partisan violence observed in the 2020 election cycle, let alone during Trump’s 2015–16 presidential campaign.6

In October 2020, the FBI foiled a domestic terrorist plot by eight men to kidnap and kill the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. Trump supporters had been publicly protesting Whitmer’s decision to enforce social distancing requirements meant to slow the spread of the global pandemic known as COVID-19—a move that protesters claimed was a threat to their rights. The plotters were part of a group that staged a series of armed protests at the state capitol building months earlier, carrying signs with violent threats as they took over the building.7 Trump encouraged them. As the men were plotting, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” in reaction to Whitmer’s pandemic safety measures. The same group discussed retaking the state capitol building and executing state legislators on live television.8 Governor Jay Inslee of Washington wrote, “The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies.”9

Four days before the election, a caravan of vehicles driven by Trump supporters surrounded a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway in a clear attempt at intimidation.10 While the FBI investigated the incident, Trump tweeted “I LOVE TEXAS” and called the group patriots.11 Days later, Trump mused about knocking Biden down: “A slight slap. You don’t even have to close your fist.”12

In the first presidential debate of 2020, the moderator asked if Trump would condemn the violent white supremacist groups that had been publicly supporting him.13 Trump initially demurred, falsely suggesting that all the political violence was coming from left-wing, not right-wing, organizations. When Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, urged him to “Say it. Do it. Say it,” Trump again feigned ignorance, asking, “Who would you like me to condemn?” Biden responded, “Proud Boys”—a white supremacist and misogynist armed militia backing Trump. Trump’s reply, asking the Proud Boys to “Stand back and stand by,” was not exactly a condemnation, and the group took it as a rallying cry.14 At subsequent events, the Proud Boys could be seen wearing custom T-shirts emblazoned with “Stand Back. Stand By,”15 and many members participated in the Capitol attack.16

These stories are the most prominent examples of political violence in just the last six months of Trump’s presidency. Other partisan attacks include the 2018 pipe bombs sent by a Trump supporter to more than a dozen national journalists and top Democratic leaders, and a Democrat’s 2017 attack on the Republican congressional baseball practice. Meanwhile, federal and state lawmakers in both parties receive thousands of threats from citizens every year.

Other recent violence fused partisanship with hate crimes. During an August 25, 2020, protest against police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a seventeen-year-old Trump supporter shot and killed two racial-justice protesters and wounded a third. Republicans publicly defended him. An internal memo from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security encouraged federal law enforcement officials to make sympathetic public comments about the killer, implicitly endorsing his murder of political opponents.17 Similar attacks include the 2019 El Paso shooting targeting Latinos that killed twenty-three people and the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that killed eleven people, both motivated by bigoted conspiracy theories touted by Republican leaders and their news outlets. These examples are in addition to racially biased violence by police who hold Republicans as their staunchest defenders.

Our Project

As American partisan conflict deepens by the day, how far have ordinary partisans gone? And how far will they go? Our book helps make sense of the contentious present with a groundbreaking study of radicalism among ordinary American partisans. Our results show that mass partisanship is far more volatile than we realized; it may even be dangerous.

We start with a history of American political violence, cross-national comparisons, and partisan psychology. Each puts America’s fractiousness in context, clarifies broad patterns of political and social change, and isolates the processes that lead individuals into group conflict. Those precedents help us judge where we stand today, and where we might be headed. These are not exact road maps to our future, but they force us to confront a broader range of possibilities than most political observers have been comfortable doing before.

To answer our main research questions, we fielded more than a dozen new nationally representative surveys that we collected between November 2017 and February 2021, with dozens of questions tapping different aspects of radical American partisanship. YouGov conducted our nationally representative surveys, including two election studies and panels interviewing the same people repeatedly to track individual and aggregate stability and change. We also take care to measure and consider a wide range of correlates and tests for whether partisans are being hyperbolic or serious in their responses.

Each of our surveys included embedded experiments to test the causal effects (not just correlations) of interventions that might shift radical partisan views, including messages from party leaders. By randomly assigning participants to one treatment or another, we use the power of large numbers to equalize all attributes across groups. Any differences we observe must then be due to the treatments we assign or occur by chance (the likelihood of which we can calculate).

Our main contributions show the breadth and nature of violent mass partisanship through opinion surveys, far beyond the bounds of standard public-opinion research. But in characterizing how large numbers of Americans think and act in relation to partisan violence, we cannot speak directly to the causes of extreme violence carried out by individuals or small groups—illegal threats, murders, assassinations, militia attacks, displays of force. Even so, we think of the substantial levels of violent partisanship in the public as a risk factor for violent acts by each citizen, both as part of a broader context that encourages other people to act and as plausible insight into the Americans who would be most likely mobilized into violence if conflict worsens.18

Plan of the Book

We begin with a deeper dive into the history and psychology of partisanship to understand why contemporary American partisanship goes to greater extremes than previously recognized. Chapter 2 briefly reviews the long history of partisan violence in the United States and party-organized violence in other c...