Rising political violence in the U.S. and the threat to U.S. democracy, with Rachel Kleinfeld

In the wake of the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's private residence in Florida, right-wing social media erupted with violent threats against law enforcement and political opponents. One enraged Trump supporter launched an armed attack against an FBI office in Ohio. A New York Times article on the rise of political threats and actual violence in the year and a half since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob quoted Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence in developing countries as well as in the United States, pointed to three critical ways that ordinary people can come to embrace violence:

• Setting political aggression in the context of war.
• Describing it as a defensive action against a belligerent enemy.
• Persistently framing an adversary as irredeemably evil or less than human.

"The right, at this point," she observed, "is doing all three things at once."

In this Vital Center discussion, recorded before the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Rachel Kleinfeld unpacks her scholarship on rising political violence in the United States and how she became one of the leading experts in this field. She touches on her research and experiences in violent societies like rural India and post-Soviet Russia, her role as co-founder of the Truman National Security Project to develop progressive alternatives to Republican national security policies, and her efforts to bolster democracy at home as well as in post-civil-conflict societies abroad. She also talks about how political polarization and factionalization open the door to authoritarianism and how to reverse the trend toward rising political violence.