“This Will Be The Most Violent Election Of Our Lifetime” - Robert Pape #1154

Chris Williamson opens by saying the topic deserves a full treatment rather than the debate format it previously got, and asks Robert Pape for the single greatest threat to America. Pape's answer is a categorical redirect: not a foreign government, not even Iran, and not a fringe militia.

It's from tens of millions of Americans who support political violence.

The claim is quantitative before it is moral. Pape's argument is that the location of the support matters more than its intensity: "Once you have support for political violence lodged in the mainstream of society, this changes everything." He names the period "violent populism" and insists it is not a continuation of the sporadic militia activity and lone assassination attempts that have punctuated American history. "This is a new paradigm."

Williamson presses the obvious counterexample: Vietnam-era protest, and before that a civil war. Pape's reply is chronological and blunt. 1860 is a long time ago — he notes the perspective gap between a 250-year-old country and one a thousand years old — and the 1960s were more than sixty-five years ago, which puts them outside the lived memory of nearly everyone listening, including him at the tail end of the baby boom.

He concedes the historical precedent rather than denying it: there have been earlier eras of violent populism with waves of assassination attempts and violent protest, alongside millions of Americans supporting political violence. But that concession is what makes the current period legible as a break rather than a repetition — "it is actually a historical anomaly in our country" — and he explicitly rejects the claim that this is simply what ten or fifteen years ago looked like.

The evidence he marshals is a list. Three assassination attempts against Donald Trump — two while campaigning, one while president — which he frames as a small subset of a wider five-year cluster: the attempt on Nancy Pelosi that missed her and nearly killed her husband; the plot involving Brett Kavanaugh; the arson at Josh Shapiro's house while his family, including him, slept inside.

The most recent case anchors the timeline. Speaking on September 12th, Pape notes that two days earlier, on September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while debating on a college campus — "a podcast host beloved by tens of millions of Americans." And he is careful to say this list covers only assassinations, not collective violence: the summer of 2020, when roughly 28 million Americans took part in George Floyd protests, of which he estimates five to seven per cent were not peaceful.

Pape draws the distinction carefully, because the whole argument depends on it. Ordinary populism is compatible with peace: tens of millions of people who believe the establishment has locked them out of benefits they are owed, an anger that can produce wholesale party change and bring new people into politics without a single act of violence.

Violent populism takes that same mainstream anger and converts it into political-violent anger — "mass support for political violence in the body politic" — which then encourages actual violence. The mechanism is not that populist grievance is inherently dangerous; it is that a specific transformation of grievance into permission has occurred.

The empirical core of the episode is a survey Pape says has not been published anywhere else. Over five and a half years his center at the University of Chicago has run twenty national surveys of support for political violence; the book covers all of them, but not the twenty-first, fielded ten days before the recording, with data received six days before. He is disclosing it on air first.

His framing of the finding is that this is not a normal election approaching but a cycle he calls America's domestic escalation trap: whoever loses the midterms, the likely response is not passive acceptance or even peaceful protest but violent protest, potentially larger than January 6th. He is explicit that this is not atmospherics — "the data is literally screaming at us."

The trend line he reports on anti-Trump political violence: roughly 6% of the public several years ago, perhaps 9%; 14% in September 2025, just before Kirk was killed — over 30 million people; and in the newest survey, 25% of American adults supporting the use of force to prevent Trump from being president, which he converts to 65 million adults and 44% of self-identified Democrats.

He pre-empts the objection that survey noise explains the jump. The data do not bounce around, and his team has spent years establishing what the answers mean through hours-long focus groups — seventy participants, a European moderator to reduce bias — and through survey experiments rather than checkbox questions alone.

The survey experiment is the part that changes the interpretation. When respondents say force is justified to prevent Trump from being president, Pape's team pushed them on what they meant. Fifty-five per cent meant assassinating him with rifles, in the manner of the attempt that failed at Butler. Beyond that fifty-five per cent, others meant a January 6-style riot — but conducted by Democrats.

He then supplies the symmetric measure rather than leaving the finding one-sided. Asked whether they support Trump using the U.S. military to suppress Democratic protesters — something he notes Trump has not yet done — 16% of Americans say yes, almost all of them Republicans, approximately 40 million people.

Combining the two produces the headline figure he is willing to defend: around a hundred million Americans supporting political violence of one kind or another as the midterms approach. His conclusion is that this portends "the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes."

Pape is precise about where the risk sits, and it is not election day. He does not dismiss problems at the ballot box, but he argues the danger is "first and foremost about the counting of the vote and then seating the winner in January." The precedent is 2020: the violence associated with that election did not occur in November, or in December, but on the day Congress met to certify the winner.

He expects the same date to recur — the transcript garbles the year, but his point is that the certification day falls on a Wednesday again — which converts an abstract warning into a specific calendar entry. Williamson then summarises the pattern as anti-Trump violence followed by anti-anti-Trump violence, and Pape agrees emphatically.

Williamson raises the standard framing — FBI and CIA assessments that the greatest domestic threat comes from the right — and asks about right-leaning threats that are initiatory rather than reactive. Pape's answer is that the studies were correct until about ten years ago, and that headlines are being used as clickbait.

His method is to insist on the time window. Once you "lift the hood" and go through the annual data point by point, the studies claiming a right-wing majority and the counter-studies claiming a left-wing majority arrive at almost identical conclusions; they differ on where the clock starts. From 1990 to 2025, a thirty-five-year window, a majority of lone-wolf violence is from the right. From 2015, the balance is close to even.

That is the pivot of his argument rather than a defence of either side: if the answer depends on the start date, then something changed. His critical observation is that these studies exclude collective violence altogether — "They're not counting the violent crowds at all in these studies" — so January 6th and the summer of 2020 sit outside the data that gets cited about which side is more violent.

Which is why he dates the new era to the beginning of Trump's first term, and why he insists the label matters: "the nature of political violence in our country has changed over the last 10 years." The 1990s and the post-9/11 years were different regimes, and the current violence, while not exclusively, is largely organised around Trump — for him or against those who are against him.

Pape's point is that Trump's coalition is not built on a personality cult alone. It is built on a specific set of social changes that a large share of the country experiences as loss. Trump gave that angst a voice. But the moment he did, a second constituency formed: people who felt an equally intense angst at the prospect that Trump would reverse those changes and send them back. Chris names the structure precisely — there is the anti-Trump and there is the anti-anti-Trump — and Pape agrees, adding the sharper formulation: it feels reactionary and re-reactionary.

The important move in the argument is a hierarchy of causes. Political rhetoric matters, and Pape says he has spent years studying it. But rhetoric is the second level. The first level is the question of timing: why this decade and not twenty years ago, why now and not twenty years from now. His answer is that the country is sitting at the tipping point of certain social changes, and the temperature of the moment is set by that position on the curve rather than by any single speech or slogan.

From there he draws the conclusion that reframes the whole conversation about Trump: Trump is a symptom of those changes as much as he is a cause of them. Once the deeper social transformation is on the table — the one producing this tipping-point generation — two otherwise puzzling facts become legible. First, why the present era is an era of violent populism at all. Second, why the next five to ten years are likely to get worse rather than better. The driver is structural, which is exactly why removing one figure from the stage would not reset the temperature.