This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Our Dakota Political Junkies bring listeners a roundup of political news from the weekend. They discuss protests, a parade and a shocking attack on state politicians.
Plus, what a public opinion poll tracking the rise in the number of people who say political violence can be "justified" adds to this conversation.
Lisa Hager, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at South Dakota State University. David Wiltse, Ph.D, is a professor of political science at SDSU.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
David Wiltse:
Initially, I was shocked, like most people were. This fortunately is a fairly rare event when it comes to actual elected officials being targeted by this kind of violence.
But then, the political scientist in me and the person who studied political history took a step back and realized that this isn't as aberrant as we might hope, and that in the United States, we do have a pretty steady past of politically-motivated violence.
Luckily, it's something that is fairly infrequent. Other types of violence are far more likely to occur, but it is there.
I also began to think about the public opinion research that we've done on this, and there is a pretty good chunk of Americans who don't rule out the use of violence when it comes to their political ends.
We've been tracking this as political scientists for a number of years, and since 2015, 2016 or so. We've seen a steady rise of the number of people who will say in a public opinion survey that, yes, violence is, at times, justified for a political end. And at the moment, that's about 20% of the American people.
So this is something that even though it is a minority view, that's a substantial amount of folks. And when we push people a little bit beyond that, up to 60% of people agree that violence is justified if the other side starts it. So we are, in many ways, primed for this kind of an outburst to take place from time to time, and that's just a sad fact of how politics has unfolded here in the United States, particularly in the last 10 years.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And everyone's watching for what is the information about this person's political motivations, how are people from both parties going to respond to it, what is the right thing to say, who didn't say the right thing, who made a phone call and who didn't make a phone call.
What used to a cry for unification, "Oh, we're all Americans and someone's been attacked," that's what you hope would happen is that everybody would pull together after a terrible event. In these cases, people seem to pull further apart.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, we're seeing it increasingly in a partisan lens and increasingly from a perspective of a very polarized electorate, and an electorate that is much more hostile towards its political opposition than we were 20, 30 years ago. So how we assimilate this information and the conclusions we draw are so often going to be tinged by the very things that are creating this environment in the first place, so we get into this terrible spiral of reinforcement.
Lori Walsh:
Lisa, as you watched the story unfold, what were some things that were standing out to you?
Lisa Hager:
So for me, it just went back to the fact that there were discussions about does this chill the type of speech that we're seeing from elected officials because they won't want to incite this type of violence unto themselves.
Similarly, is this something that just chills people's willingness to pursue public service, knowing that they can become targets? I think there's maybe some thought processes amongst Americans that this is something that tends to happen to our federal governmental officials, but not someone who's serving at these lower levels of government, at the state or local levels. And so, that's one thing that I think has been interesting watching this unfold.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Where do we go from here? What's next? Is it just that we move on?
Because on the weekend that this was happening, we also had No Kings protests across the country, which were largely peaceful. But then, when I was looking at some of the incidents that happened, I was like, well, there was a time when that incident would've been a really big deal. And it is down in two-thirds of the way through the article where it's like, yeah, and someone drove a car through this protest, and that's noteworthy as well.
And we had the US Army's 250th birthday parade on President Trump's actual birthday as well, so we had this show of military celebration in D.C. Meanwhile, switch the channel and you have No Kings protests, switch the channel, you have a manhunt in Minnesota.
That's a whiplash.
Lisa Hager:
I think that's just American political news as of late, to be completely honest. It just seems like something happens, and then very quickly, we have to pivot to something else. Think about the attempted assassination on Trump, we talked about that, and then I can't even remember what the next story was, but that didn't stay in the news cycle as the dominant story for very long.
Lori Walsh:
So where do we go from here? Are there ways that when you two are sitting down with students and your students are saying, "Well, is this just business as usual in America?" What are some of the things that you try to encourage them to be thinking about? Dave, we'll start with you there.
David Wiltse:
Well, honestly, this is not something that I talk too much about my students on any regular basis, and I think this speaks to what we're saying about a chilling effect.
In some ways, it does affect the way that I handle my job, the way that I handle my students and how I avoid some of these things, just because I don't want to get caught up in this in any real way. I have had some threats from time to time because of what I do, and that chilling effect is very real.
And just as you were saying with the chilling effect on office holders, there's going to be a chilling effect on participants as well, and that just has profound effects on the quality of our democracy.
And it is the objective of a lot of these people who are perpetrating this kind of violence, they want to change the rules of the game, they want to shift the policymaking process from an extended conversation and debate amongst elected office holders to a situation where the person who is able to predominate with the use of force or by chilling conversations and interactions, so these can be implemented in different ways.
In a lot of ways, they're trying to change the rules of the game of our political system, and that's where I get really fearful about the direction we're taking, and quite honestly, I don't have an answer to where we go from here.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Lisa, the quality of our democracy, are there ways that you think about that, measure it, fear for it?
Lisa Hager:
Yeah. So I was thinking even about your question relating to discussing this with students, and I would say for the most part, the nature of the topics that I teach from a more institutional perspective don't tend to get too much into this particular topic.
But of course, thinking about things in terms of your more recent question relating to democracy and how do we measure it, I think naturally, we think of highly democratic societies as ones that do not have these issues where there's political violence taking place. We typically associate that with countries that are less developed, countries that I think most Americans would say we are not like.
And so then, we need to start coming to terms with the fact that there are things that are happening in terms of political violence, in terms about confidence in elections and a variety of other things that are happening here that do cause the United States to not always rank very high in terms of respecting democratic values.
And then, I think it comes down to, as students, as really the next generation, what can you do about that? And to get back to what Dave said, it may be chilling them to want to do much or say much if there's this fear that if I get involved or if I say something that someone doesn't like, especially if I am someone who's prominently involved in politics, that might have some very severe consequences that are potentially fatal. So I think there needs to be a way to address these kinds of issues in a more— positive probably isn't the best way, but in a healthy way where they can be addressed without fear of retribution.
Lori Walsh:
Hundreds of police officers worked in collaboration, neighbors called in tips, and the man was brought into custody in a fairly short period of time and justice will be served. So that does still distinguish us from a country where it's just a hit and everybody moves on and there's nothing. We're not helpless, I don't feel helpless after this.
Lisa Hager:
No, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. It's just coming to terms with that, where I think a lot of young people, and even just Americans in general, we think of ourselves as the gold standard when it comes to democracy.
But we've had these stains on our reputation, and we do need to come to terms with that.
David Wiltse:
When it comes to what sustains democracies around the world is norms. It's not so much the institutions, it's not so much their constitutions, the way that they construct their legislatures or their executives, but it's these norms that really guide and shape our behavior.
And what's happening is we have a breakdown in a lot of these norms that for democracy, one of the most important norms is that this is the only game in town, that there isn't other legitimate ways to shape public policy outside of non-violent democratic means.
And where the political elite bear some responsibility here and where they might be able to have some good effect is by really trying to reinforce these norms in their day-to-day, being very careful about what they say, how they characterize their political adversaries.
If you get used to a dehumanizing and a demonizing characterization of your political adversaries, you're going to become more willing to use violence, you're going to be more willing to use some of these non-democratic means to shape policy. And this is where the parties really need to step up, this is where individuals in government really need to step up. And unfortunately, so many of them, so many of the people in our institutions, are incented to be as inflammatory as they possibly can, and this is a consequence of it.
