The Assignment with Audie Cornish

I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment. To my mind, no person has better captured the frustration that so many of us are feeling in this political moment than Patti Davis.

One of the things that I find not helpful is when elected officials go on air and say, well, this is not who we are. This is not what America is about. Really?

Davis's father, President Ronald Reagan, was the target of an assassination attempt in 1981 outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.

Cause from where I sit, this is exactly who we are right now. And I don't know how we change that or how we fixed that unless you look at it straight on and take ownership of that.

So today, we are gonna try to look at this moment with someone who has studied not just how we get into cycles of political violence, but how we have gotten out. How even in the age of being very online, it's what people say in real life that counts. Stay with us. Hey there, Rachel, welcome back.

Happy to be here.

I'm saying welcome back because the last time we talked it was on TV and we had about four minutes and I remember thinking, I feel like I have more questions than this.

Absolutely. In fact, I was just about to answer another question and I was like, oh okay.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and her entire career is dedicated to studying what drives cycles of conflict, like the one that we are living in now. But I didn't have enough time to ask her everything on TV last week, so I brought her back. Her theory is that there are certain moments in our history, she calls them political realignments, that are especially fertile for violence. It's when the battle for ideas becomes so fraught that people either directly or indirectly get the message that a violent act is the only way to be seen or heard.

America, unfortunately, has a long history of political violence, and it tends to happen when the parties each think that they can win a new group of people. In our history, that's called a political realignment. It's a fight for a new block of voters. And most of the time, people vote in the way that their parents voted. It's very sticky thing we say. People don't change allegiances very often. But when it happens in America, it tends be pretty violent. And that has something to do with our system. We have a majoritarian system. That means if you win one extra voter, you get the whole shebang, whether it's a mayor or a national race or what have you. A lot of systems aren't like that. If you get one extra vote, you get maybe 0.001% more in parliament or something like that, the stakes are lower. But you can imagine if you're in a fight where one extra person makes a huge difference, the fight over how that person votes really matters. But when we get into these realignments, the parties tend to compete and they're using violence in a couple of ways. They're first of all saying, this is who my party is and this other party is a different set of people and you shouldn't like them. So there's a lot of kind of emotion coming up, whether it's the civil rights era, there really was quite a lot murder in that era that I think we forget about, or fights over miners and strikers in the early 1920s when we had a great deal of violence around the classes. It was the end of the Gilded Age moving into an age of mass work and industrialization. We had just a great deal of violence in the 20s around that era and also with the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of the Ku Klan.

'Can we go back to that? So if I'm walking through your overall thesis, one of the things you talk about is number one, there is usually something at stake. You said pursuing new voters, but it could also be pursuing a new idea. And then the other thing is this idea, and I want to run this by you, when you look at the Gilded Age, or you look that period in particular, or even post-reconstruction is a great example. You had a whole bunch of. Black lawmakers who came to power. And after a while, people who didn't want those black lawmakers in power were like, we're not going to win this game. This is rigged against us. The best way to deal with these guys is to physically drag them out of office, right? And as we move on in that period of after reconstruction, violence becomes an option, because people are like, the we don't believe in the system. It's rigged. Does that thesis make any sense, because we're in another period where the language over the last decade has been, the system doesn't work. The system is rigged. If you want to make change, it's stacked against you for a variety of reasons. And I feel like if you're someone out in the world on the edge mentally, that again, it's high stakes. You should take action.

Absolutely, there's so much there to unpack, Audie.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I'm like, are you the expert here? But do you see what I'm wrestling with? The political nihilism.

'Yeah. So violence follows pretty predictable patterns. And one of them is that when it's being used against you, you tend to opt for self-defense as a person or as a group. So take the civil rights era. It's a perfect example. In the early 1950s, you start getting civil rights legislation, Brown v. Board, desegregating schools, and all sorts of things like that. And as that happens, people are threatened by that. The sort of old socially dominant order says, this is not what we want. And you start seeing mobilization. At the time, it was called white councils that you saw that were kind of elites in different communities, the doctors and lawyers and so on. But you also had the Ku Klux Klan at the bottom of that structure. And they were starting to use violence against people that they thought would vote for that system. That violence became quite pervasive. There was a lot of violence against the civil rights workers right up until the murder of three of them, which allowed Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act. But in the process of doing that, it also discredited people who use nonviolence because even though they got the Civil Rights act, of course, a lot of real life didn't change despite the laws changing. And so a lot people said, Oh you tried this nonviolent path of the civil rights movement. Didn't really work, Malcom X is offering a much better vision of how we make real change, not just legal change, but change in our lives. And so you started seeing the sense that violence just works. You can use it in society. Now I would say we are seeing the right has had a growth in violence since 2015. We've seen a kind of far right growth of violence.

Meaning number of malitia groups, like give me some definitions because people are being very critical of this. On your side it's been a lot, on your side, it's a lot. And as a journalist, I often think like, I don't know if I want to get mired into an argument about who has hurt more people, I'd like us to stop hurting people.

I am exactly where you are. I just want to explain the cycle because you're seeing it again, but I think you're right that the ultimate place we need to get to actually is for everyone to say, violence just doesn't actually solve anything.

Not an option. Doesn't work, not an option, yeah.

It just doesn't solve your problems. I mean, our democracy is much more like a bad marriage right now. You know, you can't get divorced. Where are you going to go? And so you just have to go into therapy and work it out. What we see is that once violence gets normalized as a way to solve problems, it spreads, it spreads not just in a political manner. It also spreads to just mass violence and school shootings, which we've also seen rise very precipitously since 2015. Because it makes people who are less stable think that this is a way I can solve problems, is through violence.

Or be heard. One of the reasons I even wrestled with talking with you more is that there's a way that sometimes I feel like this violence maybe is not necessarily right left. It's almost we're trying to jam certain things into various ideologies because it just helps us make sense of it. But I don't always think what we're seeing falls exactly in a red versus blue kind of categorization.

Certainly not with the people who are violent. When you look at the people who are violence, what you see tends to be people who are isolated, social isolation. You also tend to see instability, like life instability, people who have lost a job, lost a parent. You tend to as these people, all those are personal factors. None of those are political. And they're searching for meaning and they're search for some value in their lives. So you see that with a lot of the individuals who are politically violent, that they're recently, You know this one Whatever we find out eventually about his idea set, his family says he was recently politicized. This has sort of happened recently. That's very common. And maybe a little mentally disturbed. And they're searching for answers. And they are searching and searching. And then what does the society give them? What kind of answers are we feeding back to them? Right now as a society, we're not feeding great answers back to people who are searching for them.

After the break, I ask Rachel if politicians can actually turn down the heat in the internet era.

It feels like we are again trying to decide who we wanna be. Like, what do we wanna look like? How do we want to treat each other? And how lawmakers react in this moment, I am both cynical, but also aware that in a way it has outsized weight.

Absolutely. It really has outsized weight.

Is that still true in the Internet age, though?

Yes and no. There was this interesting study done by Liliana Mason where she had people who were to Trump and Biden, Democrat and Republican voters, reading statements against violence from Trump and from Biden. I think they were made up statements, but I'm not 100% sure whether they were real or not yet. What they found was that both statements worked because if it was your leader telling you don't use violence, people said, oh, this isn't acceptable in my group. But if you thought the other side's leader... Was saying violence was unacceptable, that also worked to bring violence down because it brought down that fear. It brought down the sense which Americans have now that both the other side is wanting to hurt them and both sides actually feel that about the other right now.

How does the internet play into this to your mind? And I'm asking you maybe something we don't know yet, right? Maybe this is something history will show us, but I'm thinking about the conversation that is starting to happen, or not starting to, that is happening around the effects of social media kind of compounding these trends. And there was this moment on CNN where this Tennessee representative, Tim Burchett, was asked a question that we've asked so many lawmakers. How can you turn down the temperature? How can you bring down your rhetoric? And the thing that he said is he goes, look, in reality, that's not gonna happen.

'Right now it looks like it's gonna be more of the same. It's clickbait, it's getting re-elected, it's red meat, and that's what politics is about today. And that's frankly what it's always been about. We can have these talks and we can have these professors come on of political science and sociologists and all this and talk about that. That's not what's gonna happen, ma'am. America is so tone deaf to all that. They want the heat and that what politicians bring.

And as a person who calls professors and sociologists and people like yourself to come on to give these kind of like prescriptive solution oriented ideas, that hit me really hard where he was basically like, there's a different incentive that's not the politics. And that incentive outweighs everything else.

So it is partially the politics, but he's right, things that get high amount of clicks, high amounts of engagement tend to get passed on a lot more and extreme views do do that right now. The other thing that we're seeing though is that young people are more black and white thinkers and black and White thinking is also very correlated with supporting violence. And not surprisingly, we see more support from violence by a long shot among young people. That young people are always more violent than other people in society.

Meaning they're more amenable to the idea that it's necessary in some imagined situation.

They're more amenable to it and they commit it a lot more. And I mentioned earlier that we've seen most violence from people whose ideologies lean right. We've seen since 2015, people who share more of those ideas committing more violence. What we are now seeing is on the young people's side, people who more ideas with the left. And I don't wanna say Democrat and Republican very clearly here because these people are to the left of the Democratic party. They're kind of far left. And on the right, they're somewhat to the right of the Republican party. So these far left ideas, that's where we're seeing this growth among young people. And part of it might have to do with anxiety. We know that people who are high anxiety have more of a need to get an answer. They need that closure. We also know that young people are facing a lot of mental health challenges right now. Anxiety is through the roof, and that's especially true on the left and especially true of young women on the Left. And so that is the group that we're saying this greater, not committing violence, they're not committing in bigger numbers now, but we are seeing support for it and it might have to do with this need for closure. There is an answer. We can have hope. The hope is in committing violence against the other side before they commit it against us. And that is a real dangerous place to be as a community and as a society.

'How do we get out? What are the historical off-ramps? What has happened in other countries? I know it exists.

Absolutely.

You could look at like Ireland, for example, and the Troubles. It does close somehow, but what would be involved in doing that? What have you seen?

'That's absolutely right. We can get out of this. We have a lot of ability to do this ourselves. Our leaders can start speaking differently. That is a clear path out. But even without that, people can do things differently. So one thing that actually makes a big difference, although it sounds a little Pollyanna-ish, is we can be less isolated. We can turn toward each other. Having more groups, being part of more things in your body, not just online, this actually can have a large knock-on effect. On societal violence. We can also have less need for this cognitive closure if we have less need for a clear answer. That can reduce violence among the people who are looking for it. Okay, you're telling the.

Okay, you're telling the wrong person this. My whole job is to find an answer, right? It's not that there's no answer. To bring people together and the power of conversation. And, you know, the reason why I'm asking this, because when we say leaders, I don't really look to lawmakers to help me with this for the reasons that we mentioned. But even like this last couple days, there was a pastor who went viral for a sermon he gave. It was a black pastor. And he was talking about. Not, quote unquote, kind of whitewashing the language and body of work from Charlie Kirk.

I am sorry, but there's nowhere in Bible where we are taught to honor evil. And how you die does not redeem how you lived.

But the reason why I'm asking that, that's the pulpit, right? This is not a scenario where, you know, as someone might say in marriage therapy, well, do you want to be right or do you wanna be married? We wanna be right.

Some of us would rather be married.

Not all of us. A lot of us would be like, I'd rather have this thing all and this power and everything of this to myself than seed ground in order to get to some kind of compromise, unity, all of these things that are considered silly and dirty words at this point.

I think you're right, and that's why it matters so much that we speak back to leaders who are doing that, and just reminding them how dangerous it is to do that in the most heavily armed nation on earth. It is not our first rodeo with violence and we have had a civil war in the past.

And so you've heard this, right? In your own life, people who say, why should I X when they Y?

'That's right, and it's this kind of sense of we need to up the ante actually, we need to, you know, one reason to think about this is that we're seeing people on the left buying guns the way that we used to see it mostly on the right. Now we're seen it quite a bit on the Left in the gun buying statistics. That's not good. If you have a lot of guns in private hands and you have each side feeling that they need to get the upper hand over the other before they're harmed by the other. You can imagine where that is going to lead. And it's not a great place to be as someone who's spent time in war torn countries. And so I think what, what this change is, is first we have to get out of isolation. We also have to help people see people as other human beings and complexify their thinking about other people. Now I'm not saying Charlie Kirk being a dad overcomes the things that he believed, I happen to disagree with a lot of things that Charlie Kirk believed, but I'm saying that murdering someone who has a lot of beliefs that I disagree with, if you kill everyone who disagrees with you who has some modicum of power, this is not a way that you move society forward. You move society forward by trying to get everyone to reduce the temperature before we get in that kind of a tit-for-tat violence out of fear.

But do you think that's, when you look at historically, is that what happens? How did we exit periods of what you call political realignment and the violence that may have been involved there?

So there's a couple of things that can happen. One is that one party just starts winning decisively and the other party really can't win to violence. They sort of give up on that. Another is that the fever breaks, but often the fever only breaks after a lot of violence. So in Northern Ireland, for instance, you saw the leaders actually wanting, quite famously there was a retreat that brought a lot leaders from all sides of that conflict away and they talked about it and they figured out some ways to work together. And they tried to bring that back to their people. And the people were much more extreme and basically accused the leaders who are bringing that back as being traitors. And so the leaders were discredited and the troubles went on for a number of years more. So the fever breaks when people say, actually, I'm tired of going shopping and having bombs go off and not knowing whether I'll make it home. And I can imagine America getting to that point. After quite a bit more violence because we absorb a lot of it as a country. The other way you can change this is the route that's taken. They did this in northern Kenya. In 2007, there was a very violent election. Thousands of people died and kind of mob violence that was spurred by their leaders telling them that the other side wanted to take their land or wanted to harm the other group. And communities in the north said, we're really tired of politicians trying to make us kill each other. We're going to start trying to bring it down in our communities. And in those communities, you started seeing religious leaders, business leaders, all sorts of different people who are considered local leaders, meeting and coming together and being able to talk across the line so that when something happened in the community, when there was an incident of violence from one side against another or when there was some political riling up. They were all able to calm their own groups. That had a very strong dampening effect in those communities. And the good news about that is that we do see that in the United States. There's groups like Common Ground USA, where they bring people together in Springfield, Ohio or Pennsylvania after the fire bombing of the governor's house, different places, Utah. And they say, how do we turn toward each other so that they can tamp down violence when the national politics is so ugly?

The last thing I wanna ask you is about what happens going forward. We have a White House which is now saying, more or less the argument is this, the violence we are witnessing more often than not is happening from the radical left, okay? This is the term they use. And in order to somehow defeat that scourge of violence, the White House wants to lean on the levers of government. What are you going to be listening for over the next couple of months? I'm sure you're talking with people who do this research from other countries. I don't know how they're looking at what's happening in the States.

'Yeah, I think one of the things I'm looking for is frankly, where do the police and army and national guard, what do they do? Because when you look at other countries, the real ability to keep a strong democracy that also has order because you need lowish crime and order for people to feel safe for them not to turn to a strong man. How do they keep order in a way that's inclusive? How do they keep order in a way that feels like order for everyone? When I used to do a lot of work on the rule of law, I wrote all these very complex things about definitions of the rule, of law. And finally, I boiled it down. I said, look, if you have a kid, do you tell the kid when they're lost to go to a policeman, or do you not tell them to go to a policemen if they're lost? That will tell you whether you trust this community to have the rule of law and how our police and ICE and National Guard and Army and military in general handle a moment when there's real attempts to politicize them, to pull them to one side, to use them against a domestic population will tell us a lot about how strong our democracy is and where our social bonds will lead us because no community can handle feeling that the state is against them without turning to self-defense.

That was Rachel Kleinfeld, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I want to thank you so much for listening this week. Please do share this episode with someone who you think would appreciate it. Hit subscribe and follow. It matters. And we'll catch you next week.