Since 2013, political violence in America has surged, making public service and activism increasingly dangerous. From assassination attempts to the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, attacks once unthinkable are becoming disturbingly routine, which political scientists say threatens the stability of U.S. democracy.

Assassins have targeted President Donald Trump, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, resulting in serious injury to her husband. In 2025, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro saw his elected home set on fire. In Minnesota, a man shot and killed two elected Democrats, along with their spouses and a golden retriever named Gilbert. When police caught him, he had a hit list of dozens of Democratic lawmakers.

Last week, Kirk was shot and killed at a political rally on a Utah campus while debating whether transgender people should be allowed gun rights. His shooter, in a text to his roommate, a transgender woman, wrote he’d had “enough of (Kirk)’s hatred.”

Kirk espoused conservative ideals such as the subservience of women to their husbands and called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 one of the nation’s greatest mistakes.

Data from institutes, organizations and scholars that study the state of democracy say the nation’s increased political violence is both a symptom of a weakening democracy and contributing to its decline.

But, these scholars and political scientists said, if the U.S. can restore faith in its institutions, if political leaders loudly denounce this violence without casting blame on the other party, political violence will fall away from mainstream norms, allowing democracy to flourish.

This violence, which data shows is coming from both the left and the right, isn’t just physical but also includes online harassment involving intimidation and threats. These, they say, can escalate into physical violence.

“It is a reinforcing cycle,” said Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative Co-Founder and Executive Director Shannon Hiller. But, she said, “we don’t have to accept that escalation is inevitable.”

“We are now at a watershed moment in the United States,” said University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape Jr., who has studied political violence for 30 years. “The assassination death of Charlie Kirk is tragic. It’s not, however, fully unpredictable.”

A ‘complex and lethal mix’

FBI and Department of Homeland Security statistics show domestic terrorism incidents increased by 357% between 2013 and 2021.

The data bears this out. A 2024 Reuters investigation found at least 300 cases of political violence across the U.S. between the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the 2024 presidential election. The report called this the most significant and sustained surge in such violence since the 1970s.

The Bridging Divides Initiative, led by Hiller’s group also, recorded over 250 incidents targeting local officials during the first half of 2025, marking a 9% increase compared to the same period last year.

Hiller said several complex factors have come together to create a culture of escalating political violence and harassment, including the rise of hate on social media, the false narrative that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, decreasing faith in institutions, lack of access to mental health resources and the availability of guns.

Combined, these factors have “amped up the volume and reach of some of the hostility in our civic spaces. It’s stayed at an elevated level,” Hiller said. “You have this complex and often lethal mix that’s feeding off itself.”

Fear of political violence can have a chilling effect on elected leaders, leading them to steer clear of controversial issues, avoid public appearances, or even consider stepping out of politics altogether, a Bridging Divides and CivicPulse survey revealed.

Women, people of color and younger elected officials are disproportionately affected by this targeted harassment, Hiller said.

Violence eroding democracy

Political violence in the U.S. is increasingly eroding democracy, according to the Violence and Democracy Impact Tracker.

The tracker, out of Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, measures the impact of political violence on eight pillars of democracy, such as freedom of expression and association, voting access and the independence of the judiciary and legislature.

Per its metrics, seven of the eight are under significant threat.

Scholars, voters and politicians agree with this assessment. A 2025 survey of 500 political scientists run by political scientists out of Dartmouth, the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago concurred that democracy is eroding.

A survey published in October 2024 by the Chicago Center on Global Affairs found that 67% of Americans surveyed said they felt a weakening democracy was a major threat to the nation, with 75% of Democrats and 62% Republicans calling it a “critical threat.”

The survey found Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for the state of democracy. While they agree its decline poses a critical threat, the two parties do not agree on a resolution.

Fearing that democracy was under attack, President Joe Biden in 2022 and 2024, convened groups of historians to discuss the issue. They warned him about “the slow crawl of authoritarianism around the globe” and that the nation was under threat.

‘Era of violent populism’

The U.S. is living through “an era of violent populism,” or near-unprecedented violence from both the right and the left, Pape said.

He noted that the 1960s saw a similar rise in political violence, then largely from the left, driven by social upheaval, including the Civil Rights movement and Congress’ use of the draft to furnish the U.S. military with soldiers for the Vietnam War.

Today, the U.S. is also in social upheaval, Pape said, undergoing “an historic demographic shift ... transitioning from a white-majority democracy to a white-minority democracy.”

Pape said this likely explained Trump’s “meteoric rise” while stumping against immigration, as well as why the Trump administration was focused on “deporting millions of people out of the country.”

This unrest and social change are eroding a key democratic norm, the restraint of force to settle debates, and giving rise to violence in the mainstream, he said.

Richard Vatz, a Towson, Maryland-based conservative professor who studied political persuasion and rhetoric said the rise in political violence can be, in part, attributed to the rise in antagonism in the media, as politicians and activists vie for attention.

“The last 10 years, the country has been so rhetorically polarized that an awful lot of people who cannot make noise through their articulation feel the only way that they can get attention is through violence,” Vatz said.

Vatz said he believed the political atmosphere was more a fault of the left, but said the right contributed as well, and that the media played a large role in exacerbating hatred and violence.

“People today, especially in media on the right and on the left, promote hatred of the other side,” Vatz said.

A way forward

But if political leaders step up and work together, political scientists and scholars said, they can reverse course.

“Blaming whole groups for the actions of individuals perpetuates violent cycles and we should reject it from our leaders,” Hiller said. “We need to hold our leaders accountable in terms of setting the standard of civic discourse.

“It’s OK to acknowledge that we’re still in the immediate aftermath of a pretty shocking, high-profile event,” she said. “(But) this doesn’t have to be the new normal.”

Trump on Monday blamed Democrats and other liberals for the spate of recent violence.

She called for elected leaders calling for broad-based retribution “to get out of this negative cycle of conflict, refrain from normalizing violence and refrain from scoring political points in this moment.”

Jonathan Katz, a fellow of governance studies at centrist public policy organization Brookings Institution, noted Brazil and Poland had moved away from democracy in recent years, but successfully reversed course through peaceful protest and elections.

“It is definitely not a one-way street,” he said. But, he cautioned, “the longer political leadership is in place, moving the country towards an anti-democratic system, the more difficult it will be to (reverse) the damage done.”

_____

©2025 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.