How Americans Justify Political Violence

In August 2022, I attended a gathering of right-wing grassroots organizations at a horse-show complex in Bloomsburg, Pa., a few hours’ drive east of where Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last weekend. Everyone who went up to speak believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump, and now they were discussing what to do about it.

An evangelical pastor opened the meeting with the story of a pastor who fought alongside members of his congregation in the first days of the American Revolution. “Here’s a preacher training his people how to fight this ungodliness and wickedness, a real dictatorship,” he told the crowd. “Well, I talk to a lot of preachers today,” he went on, who were willing to “take up arms if they have to. And you know as well as I do, with what is coming, we may have to. Right? We don’t want to. But we may have to. And I believe the Second Amendment says we can.” Out in the crowd, a man had a sign depicting a rifle between a flag and a cross above the words “God, Guns, Guts! Keep AMERICA Free.”

Among the world’s historically stable democracies, America has a particularly complicated relationship with the idea of political violence. This is, after all, a country born out of violent struggle, as the T-shirts and bumper stickers and speeches at any Republican event endlessly attest. This is also a country where the major expansions of civil rights, from Emancipation to desegregation, happened under the fact or threat of state violence, and where few on the left are willing to categorically condemn violent protest in the name of social justice. It is a country where many still nod at Thomas Jefferson’s aphorism that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of