Categories
podcast

No, there isn’t high support for political violence in America | Sean Westwood

Many surveys and headlines recently claim there is a large percentage of Americans who support political violence. Some estimates have been around 25% – but some have gone as high as 40%! This is very scary. But researchers like my guest Sean Westwood have shown that many people are massively overstating the problem. This overstatement is leading to hysterical and unhelpful framings and debates. Worst of all, these exaggerated fears can even contribute to a self-reinforcing cycle… a self-fulfilling prophecy. Topics discussed include: what the faulty surveys and studies are missing; how bad survey design (ambiguous questions, or leading questions) can lead to faulty estimates; what more accurate survey results tell us; how exaggerated fears can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy; and why people embrace and promote overly pessimistic narratives. 

A transcript is below.

Episode links:

Resources related to or mentioned in our talk:

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcript may contain errors)

Zachary Elwood: Hi there. This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a show aimed at better understanding human behavior. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you want to support me in my endeavors, please subscribe to this show and please share it with others. 

This podcast also sometimes veers into the political realm, due to my interest in conflict and polarization dynamics. All the topics I cover for this podcast are connected by my interest in psychology and why people do the things they do. You can learn more about my polarization-related work at american-anger.com. 

If you’re an American, there’s a good chance you have a good amount of fear about political violence. You may have heard in the news some really scary things; for example, that a large percentage of Americans support political violence. 

But what if I told you that this problem has been massively overstated by the media and many political leaders and pundits? What if I told you that there are people who research support for political violence and are, like I am, very frustrated with this overstatement. One concern is that the large overstatement of these things can ramp up fear and animosity, and, in various ways, contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

To be clear, in this episode neither me or my guest are saying there’s no reason to be concerned about political violence. Obviously we’ve seen politically motivated violence in this country, and we’ve seen it on the rise. Also, even a small number of people who support political violence can have a big effect. And there are all sorts of ways these dynamics can spiral in unknown ways. I myself have concerns about political violence and how it might escalate in some scenarios. But it’s very important, as my guest and I will talk about in this video, to talk realistically about the problem; to not overstate the problem. There are real costs to overstating the problem. 

I think this is a very important topic — and one that is, rather strangely, hardly discussed — which I think is related to how polarization leads many of us to overly focus on the negative — which in turn can drive us deeper into conflict and toxicity. I hope you give this episode a watch, and I hope you share it with people who you think are overstating the problem. 

In this video, we’ll also discuss the reasons why this problem is so often overstated; for example, one reason is simply bad survey design: ambiguous, unclear questions — and even leading questions. We also get on the topic of how support for political violence changed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump. 

But first, let’s look at some of the ways this problem has been talked about in the media and from political leaders. And if you want the resources I and my guest mention in this episode, go to the entry for this episode on my site behavior-podcast.com. 

Here’s a headline from Politico in 2020: “Americans Increasingly Believe Violence is Justified if the Other Side Wins” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157 One snippet from that piece: “Among Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican, 1 in 3 now believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ political goals”

Here’s a headline from NPR in 2022: “1 in 4 Americans say violence against the government is sometimes OK” https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1076873172/one-in-four-americans-say-violence-against-the-government-is-sometimes-okay. In that article, it reads “Nearly a quarter of Americans say it’s sometimes OK to use violence against the government — and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified “right now.””

Here’s a piece from Washington Post in 2022: “1 in 3 Americans say violence against government can be justified, citing fears of political schism, pandemic”.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/01/1-3-americans-say-violence-against-government-can-be-justified-citing-fears-political-schism-pandemic/ They went on to say: “the new poll identified a sharper rise on the right — with 40 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents saying it can be acceptable.”

Here’s a Guardian piece from 2022: “One in five US adults condone ‘justified’ political violence, mega-survey finds” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/one-in-five-us-adults-condone-political-violence-survey . One snippet from that reads, “Most alarmingly, 7.1% said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal. The UC Davis team points out that, extrapolated to US society at large, that is the equivalent of 18 million Americans.”

Here’s a headline from 2021: “Support for Political Violence Among Americans Is on the Rise. It’s a Grim Warning About America’s Political Future.” https://www.aei.org/op-eds/support-for-political-violence-among-americans-is-on-the-rise-its-a-grim-warning-about-americas-political-future/ 

Here’s a USA Today headline from 2024 that reads “1 in 4 Republicans supports political violence if election is ‘compromised,’ study says.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/10/1-in-4-republicans-pro-political-violence/75142467007/  It goes on to say that quote “while only 1 in 6 Americans supports political violence, the numbers are much higher among Republicans than Democrats.”

Related to these views are views that there’ll be a civil war soon. Here’s a headline from 2018 saying that 30% of people think a civil war is likely soon. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/june_2018/31_think_u_s_civil_war_likely_soon

It all sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? Combine these various survey results with real-world political violence in America and it can paint an even darker picture. It can seem the logical decision to be very worried. 

My guest is Sean Westwood, who has researched many aspects of our toxic polarization, including people’s support for political violence. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab (which you can learn more about at polarizationresearchlab.org). Sean’s primary area of research is political behavior and public opinion. 

Okay here’s the talk with Sean Westwood…

Hi, Sean. Thanks for coming on.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk with you.

Zach: Yeah. It goes without saying that I think your work is very important and your time is valuable, so I very much appreciate you joining me.

Sean: I think it’s such an important topic for us to take seriously, that any time we can dedicate to it is well worth the effort.

Zach: Awesome. Thank you. Let’s start with a simple question and then we can get into more nuance and detail. Do you think in America there’s an overstated fear of political violence?

Sean: I think that there is a dramatic overstatement in the threat that political violence poses to our country and the extent to which Americans actually support political violence. There are two things that I would say. The first is that the definition of political violence has become very fuzzy. It’s not just violence committed because of partisanship or because of partisan affiliation, it’s much looser. It’s violence related to race or gender or other forms of identity. And surely, those are inherently political. There’s certainly a political component to all of those kinds of violence, but it’s very different from an assassination attempt on a political leader. So if we’re trying to cure political violence in the more narrow sense, we want to target those who are willing to attack members of the other party or those who are willing to support those who might attack members of the other party. But if we’re to take a larger view of political violence, it might be that we’re misdirecting resources.

So if we want to stop hate crimes against Asians, or if we want to stop hate crimes against African-Americans, calling those incidents political violence kind of lumps those acts in with assassination attempts and maybe misdirects us to focus on the partisan component,  and not the institutional racism or not the other factors that are driving race-based crime. So I fear not only that we’re overstating the problem, but that we’re expanding the label to a point where we’re kind of absorbing and perhaps co-opting other really important divides in society.

Zach: Yeah, that’s something I hadn’t even tried to focus on for this episode. That’s an interesting point. The main thing I was going to focus on for this was going to be the many surveys and survey interpretations that have been shared pretty prominently in the mainstream media and by leaders and activists that state there’s high support amongst Americans for political violence. For example, we often see in the 20% to 30% framing, but also even 40% sometimes in some framings of Americans who have support for political violence. But considering the work that you’ve done and some other work by, for example, I think it’s a Democracy Fund and then another survey study that I just saw come out recently, those show that it’s more like 3%. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the discrepancy there and how you see that discrepancy.

Sean: Yeah. I think we have to just be very careful when interacting with any kind of polling result that doesn’t seem to match reality. Day to day, we don’t see much political violence. But if we’re to believe that nearly half of the country or a quarter of the country supports partisan violence, it’s really hard to reconcile that with what we’re observing. So I think that that’s the first real source of concern that I have with these results. But the second is if you actually look at the questions, they’re almost designed in a way to inflate the proportion of Americans who say that they might support partisan violence. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When we try to measure partisan violence, we try to use very concrete examples. So we’re describing an individual who has committed a crime, we describe what that crime is, and then we ask individuals do they support or oppose what that individual did. So, it’s very clear in the respondent’s mind what they’re being asked to evaluate. But some of the more alarmist work leaves that information out of the question. Instead of describing a specific event, a specific scenario, or a specific act of violence, they ask more general questions: Would you be okay with your party committing violence if your party lost in 2024, for example? Well, if you think about that question, what does that mean?

“What does it mean for your party to commit violence?”

For some individuals, that might mean going and storming the Capitol. For others, it might mean saying nasty things on Twitter, it might mean going to protests and really vocally attacking the other side. So by not defining violence, you’re allowing individuals to use their own imagination when they’re answering that question. And it turns out that if you use that very vague question and you ask a very simple follow-up: You said that you supported violence—if someone says they supported violence—what kind of violence do you support? It’s the case that almost 80% will say that they support something that isn’t actually violence. Right? They’ll say that they support the examples I just gave. So, saying something nasty on Twitter or even more importantly, they’ll say, “Well, now that I think about it, I don’t think I support partisan violence.”

Zach: [chuckles] Right. They’re venting like the… They call that expressive response or something like that.

Sean: Yeah, it’s expressive responding. They’re mad and they want to show that they’re mad, and one way to do that is to signal and answering a question that they’re upset with one side and they’re loyal to the other. But the other thing that’s going on with these questions is that a lot of them are not structured in a way that gets around people who aren’t paying attention on surveys. So if you ask a question and the response scale or the way that you would answer that question ranges from ‘never’ to ‘always’ and if someone’s just randomly clicking through the questionnaire, if only one option indicates you don’t support violence and three options indicate that you do support violence, just randomly clicking is going to inflate the amount of violence that we researchers are going to measure. Because three of the four options indicate violence, so you have a 75% chance of indicating support for violence if you’re randomly clicking. So it’s partially due to the lack of detail and it’s partially due to just really bad methodological choices by some of these researchers. But to be fair, some of those researchers have corrected that last problem and that does lead to much smaller estimates of support for partisan violence. Though, I still think the lack of specificity is in inflating their estimates.

So, that takes us from a world where someone’s saying 40% or 20% down to a world where they’re saying that the actual support level is around 10%. Which I still think is too high, but it’s much more reasonable and potentially more credible.

Zach: And I think you found— specifically your work— what was the percentage range you found? And do you think that’s pretty accurate when you factor in expressive responding and all that?

Sean: Yeah, so we’ve been doing this now for almost two years, actually just slightly longer than two years with a thousand survey interviews per week. And we’re able to very precisely estimate support for political violence at around two percentage points. 

Now when I say that, it seems small, right? Two percent, that’s not something that we should be hugely concerned about. But I think it’s really important to contextualize that. So I’m not saying that nobody supports partisan violence. I’m not saying that partisan violence is impossible or that there aren’t individuals who are out there willing to destabilize or who are willing to destabilize our country. What I’m saying is that it’s not the kind of problem where we want to run massive PSAs during the Super Bowl trying to reach everyone. Right? It’s the kind of problem where we need to identify who these people are and introduce very narrowly tailored and specific interventions aimed at those groups. So it’s not a problem the country is facing, it’s a problem that a small but reasonably large proportion of the country is facing.

Zach: Yeah. I think it’s important, too, because some people listening to this might think we’re downplaying fears of political violence, which I myself am concerned about those things, especially as they can escalate in unforeseen ways, too. But I think the important thing to me is trying to get a realistic and not overstated sense of the problem because having an overstated sense of the problem can lead to its own forms of escalation and escalate fears and animosity and all these kinds of things.

Sean: I think something else that’s really important to point out is that the kinds of people who are going to commit acts of political violence are probably not the kind of people who are going to be completing these surveys in the first place. Right? If you’re someone who’s suffering a mental health crisis and you’re going to go out and attempt to assassinate the president, you’re in all likelihood probably not the kind of person that’s going to be completing surveys. So when we’re looking at these measures, we’re probably not capturing data from those who intend to actually commit violence themselves, we’re capturing data on those who would approve of someone else engaged in an act of partisan violence. Which, also, I think really helps to contextualize how bad the problem is. So we don’t have 2% of the country that would be willing to go out themselves and shoot a politician or attack someone from the other side, we have 2% of the country that would say, “You know what? I get it. That was okay.” Right? That they went out or that someone else went out and did that on behalf of their party. We certainly don’t want to be in a world where that is a common attitude, but it is important to note that this doesn’t mean that we have eight million Americans who are willing to go out and incite violence in the streets, which is really important in suggesting that this isn’t a group that’s going to begin the next civil war. This is a group that’s going to sit to the side and say, “Well, maybe I would understand if some people did something terrible.”

Zach: Right. And as people like Thomas Zeitzoff have pointed out—I interviewed him for my podcast—it’s like we focus too much on these unlikely things and not enough on more legal and other ways that democracy can be eroded or whatever the concerns are.

Sean: I think that’s exactly right. I think his work is some of the most credible in the space of partisan violence. I think what he does is very important. He tries to contextualize the threat in the US versus the threat in other countries, and the extent to which we as Americans should be alarmed, which I think he and I would both agree is the case where we should be alarmed. But the threat of political violence in this country relative to other less stable democracies, it’s just not comparable.

Zach: I’m curious, as someone who works so closely on this, are you often frustrated with the mainstream media framings of this? Because I just so often see framings of this kind of thing, even from people I expect a lot more from, where they just take these 30% or 40% percent numbers and repeat them, which I think is so unhelpful and shows an unwillingness to kind of dig into the nuance. Are you often frustrated by this?

Sean: Yeah, I’m quite frustrated by it. I think the problem is that if you’re a journalist and you are telling a story, more alarmist numbers make a more compelling story. And to no fault of their own, journalists aren’t trained to adjudicate the scholarly debates and the methodological concerns that I think plague measures of partisan violence. So if they see a credible institution providing what they think is a credible estimate, I think there’s every incentive to go with the more alarmist statistic over the less alarmist statistic. Especially if you’re in a universe where there was a January 6th or an assassination attempt of Donald Trump. There does seem to, I think, be some internal validation of these more alarmist scores coming from really newsworthy events. I don’t think that there’s any malice, I don’t think that there’s any ill intent, I just think that we’re in a world where negative stories get more attention. And the best way to tell a negative story is to provide an alarming statistic. If you don’t have the training to adjudicate those alarming statistics, I don’t think there’s much that could change.

Zach: On top of that, it might go without saying, but aside from the incentives, people can be biased to believe these things more. Their fears and concerns make them more likely to say, “Oh, that sounds credible to me, this framing of the problem,” which I think is fundamental to how conflict and polarization works. We’re filtering for things we find credible or more likely to believe.

Sean: Absolutely. I think a big problem is that those in the media who study or who report on partisanship and polarization are deeply embedded in our political landscape. And I think that they forget that the average American isn’t. So to them, it seems credible that partisan discord is deteriorated and partisan tensions are inflamed, and partisanship has really become the center of conflict in this country. But to an average American who’s not really paying attention to what’s happening in D.C. or who’s not following Donald Trump on Twitter or Truth Social, their experience with violence in this country is just very, very different. So when a reporter who’s deeply embedded in a political context is trying to understand a news article, they’re doing it from a very different perspective from the kind of people who would actually go out and commit an act of violence.

Zach: I wanted to dig a little bit more into the survey design and language choices because I find that pretty interesting. One of the recent surveys that was used to show high support for political violence, especially amongst Republicans, when I looked at that more closely, I found that the question was basically asking—and I’ll quote from it—it says, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” So, they were using the patriots’ language in there, which felt very biasing to me in the sense that, of course, Conservative people who respond more to patriot language would be more likely to agree with that statement, just as if you use some Left-leaning language, you might get Left-leaning people more likely to agree with it. I’m curious, do you think is that an example of how language can bias these things?

Sean: So, that question seems to be designed to get people to indicate that they support violence. And it may serve a purpose in identifying how easy it is to prompt someone to admit that they support violence, but it could also measure just how willing people are to comply with what the researcher has in mind. If you see that question, I think it’s clear that the researcher is signaling that they want someone to say that they support violence, and there’s a real risk that a respondent will try to comply. Well, they’re saying that true patriots should support violence. I myself consider myself to be a true patriot, therefore, I’m going to say that I support violence.

Zach: Right, it’s a bit leading. Yeah.

Sean: It’s a bit leading. You can’t extrapolate from that exactly how individuals are responding, but I just don’t think that that’s going to get you a meaningful, unbiased estimate of support for partisan violence. It’s going to give you a biased estimate and it’s going to give you an estimate that is going to be, I think, larger than reality would support.

Zach: Kind of related to that, another question I saw in an earlier survey from a few years ago, which I think that survey was used to get the 30% number that I saw repeated a lot, one of the questions in there was, “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?” And the answers were justified, never justified, or no opinion. And the thing that stuck to me was I think the correct answer is actually it is it could be justified. Right? You can imagine scenarios where it could be justified, which I think shows the ambiguity there, but also the fact that as we become more polarized, more people are thinking about worst-case scenarios which would make people more likely to say it was justified because they’re thinking about worst case scenarios more. And so just to say it seems like taking the worst-case interpretation of that that we have more and more people supporting political violence is missing that nuance of other interpretations for that data. Right?

Sean: Yeah, I think that’s exactly why you have to be very specific in asking a question on a survey. So in answering that question, I think you could reasonably say, “Well, slavery was awful. We engaged in political violence to end slavery. So sure, yes, I think violence could be justified.” There are also going to be individuals, though, who are going to put in their own vision of what could or could not motivate violence. And we’ll just never know. We’ll never understand what people had in their minds when they were answering that question. Which makes it really hard to try to compare across individuals. So is it okay to say that partisan violence is sometimes justified? Yeah. I mean, we fought a civil war, we fought a revolutionary war. There was a lot of violence during the civil rights movement which was probably righteous. So it’s not clear that that question is going to give you the kind of answer that you want. What would be more helpful, perhaps, is to say ‘if your party loses an election’ or if your party is less able to vote because of decisions made by the State. Or if your party is facing specific threats. Because then you’re asking a question that everyone is processing in exactly the same way.

Zach: One thing I see, too, with regards to one-off events, let’s say the assassination attempt of Trump, I think that people also can use those events in service of these really pessimistic narratives, too. For example, I think a lot of people use that event as framing that as a manifestation or culmination of our divides. But it’s also true that you can just have mentally unwell people who, even in a very undivided country or very unified country, still try to assassinate people. So it’s just to say clearly our divides make those things more likely. But to draw the most pessimistic conclusions about one-off events seems to me kind of similar like taking worst-case interpretations. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.

Sean: I think that’s exactly right. It’s also really important to remember that in the US, when political violence happens, we all hear about it. Right? It’s something that enters the public consciousness because it’s so rare. If we’re to look at a less stable country—I’m picking India or Pakistan, for example, where political kidnappings, assassination attempts, assaults are occurring on such a frequent basis that a singular event doesn’t redefine how the country thinks about partisan violence—if we’re to compare that world of just ever-present violence with what’s happening in the US, it seems like we’re over learning from specific events. We’re over-learning from things that occur very, very rarely. So it’d be one thing if there was an assassination attempt each week where we’re actually observing clear and consistent threats to the system from violence, but it’s another if we see an assassination attempt once a year or every couple of years. It doesn’t mean that those assassination attempts are any better, it just means that we perhaps might see a major event that’s getting a massive amount of news coverage and think that things are worse than perhaps they are.

Zach: Mm-hmm. One second, let me look at my notes here. One thing some people might be curious about is finding differences between the political groups and their support for political violence. Do you have anything to say about those findings?

Sean: It’s also the case that most Democrats and most Republicans reject partisan violence. The difference between the two parties is trivial. The average American, regardless of partisan affiliation, rejects partisan violence. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t meaningful differences in our country. Young people are much more likely to support partisan violence than older people. Those who are MAGA Republicans are much more likely to support violence than traditional or non-MAGA Republicans. And it is the case that there are meaningful differences on income and level of education. So the biggest difference between those who support violence and those who do not support violence is not partisanship—which is important—but it does suggest that there are other social factors that we need to consider when trying to identify ways to reduce the threat that partisan violence presents.

Zach: And I realize this might be getting into pure opinion and not things you’ve researched, but would you be willing to share any thoughts you have on are there methods or approaches we can use to reduce political violence that people across the board might agree with no matter their political party?

Sean: Yeah. I think the fundamental problem is that the techniques that we currently have are very fleeting in their effects. So, we can reduce support for partisan violence over the short term with massively expensive interventions. But we haven’t identified a single mechanism or a single technique that can lower the risk or lower the tolerance that Americans might have for violence over a long time horizon. Which is frustrating on the one hand because it says that there isn’t a ready cure, but perhaps it’s comforting on the other hand because it shows that there are things that we can do. It’s not a hopeless endeavor. I think the bigger problem, though, with these designs is that they’re meant to be administered to the entirety of the country. There’s not the kind of triage that I think is necessary. You wouldn’t try to— when you’re dealing with a pandemic, for example— you wouldn’t want to provide interventions to those who are not sick. Right? You wouldn’t want to give a hospital bed to someone who isn’t sick. And I think the same idea applies here. If someone has already rejected violence, perhaps they’re not the kind of person that you want to target with interventions, you need to be more narrowly focused. Now, that then also gets to a problem of reach. If the people who are most likely to commit partisan violence are extremists who are outside of the mainstream media or are mentally ill who may not necessarily be reachable through traditional approaches, how do we identify those groups and how do we reach those groups? And I don’t have a satisfying answer to that. But I think that’s something that we need to keep in mind when we are not only designing these interventions, but describing how effective they might be.

Zach: And this is another probably just pure opinion kind of thing but something I’ve been curious about. Personally, I think that COVID and the COVID responses of being locked down, the existential psychological stresses resulting from COVID played a role in people being more likely to take violent or militant actions, both in the case of January 6th and also George Floyd-related protests. But I’m curious, do you have any thoughts you want to share on that area?

Sean: Yeah, I don’t think I have any data that would either support or refute that claim.

Zach: Yeah, I haven’t seen many people talk about it, which to me is kind of surprising because to me, it seems like people sitting at home a lot and being more online and having more free time and also feeling like the future is uncertain would make them more likely to engage in risky behaviors. But yeah, I’ve barely seen anybody talk about that.

Sean: I mean, I think it’s a thought exercise and there’s a lot of credibility or potential credibility there. I just don’t know if we have the data that we would want or need in order to really determine if that was or was not a contributing factor.

Zach: Yeah, it’s a tough one. I mean, the more ambiguous the theory is, it’s harder to study. Yeah. I’m curious, do you have anything that we haven’t touched on that you think is really relevant that you want to throw in here?

Sean: I think the most important thing I would say is that political violence doesn’t necessarily prompt more political violence. The data that we have on the Trump assassination suggests exactly the opposite. After the attempt was made in the immediate aftermath, Republicans did not become more tolerant of violence. They became less tolerant of violence. And there was no indication that there was going to be an increase in support for retaliatory action. Democrats also reported no increase in support for partisan violence. So, Republicans became significantly less supportive of partisan violence and Democrats remained about the same. So we should certainly be worried that partisan violence could lead to a vicious cycle of escalation, but it doesn’t appear that that’s inherently the case. It doesn’t appear as if a major event is inherently going to raise the stakes or raise tensions to the point that further events will occur or follow along.

Zach: Yeah. To share my personal worries, I can imagine scenarios where it’s like no matter which person gets elected, I can imagine scenarios where protesters come out, and then counter-protesters come out and there’s kind of this escalating street violence which could lead to martial law declarations or who knows what. That’s like my worst-case scenario and I don’t know how those things would play out. And I know it’s really speculative, so feel free not to share. But if you have anything you want to share about your thoughts, feel free.

Sean: What’s really terrifying to me is that individuals who are at the extremes and individuals who might be willing to commit political violence are seeing news reports saying that 40% of the country is with them or 20% of the country is with them. And that might motivate them to think that they have much greater support than they actually do, and go out and actually do something terribly destructive. And if we’re in a period of upheaval after the election and these kind of panic narratives continue to emerge and these overestimates of partisan violence continue to permeate through the media, I do worry that there’s a potential that they could almost become self-fulfilling prophecies. Right?

Zach: Right. Yeah, that’s scary. There’s so many people on the Left and on the Right I see using this fear of civil war kind of framing, and I just find that so irresponsible with the more certain ones. I mean, not to say that they can’t be concerned about such things, but there’s a lot of overly certain framings, which I just find that like you said, it can it can help contribute to the very things that people are concerned about to overstate those narratives.

Sean: There is a very prominent book that suggests that America is on the brink of a civil war by Barbara Walters.

Zach: Was it by Stephen Marche? Oh, Barbara Walter. Okay.

Sean: If you read the book, it’s more or less opinion. Right? It’s her opinion on where the country is headed.

Zach: There was one by Stephen Marche, too, that Canadian writer, which I found kind of funny because he doesn’t even live here. But, yeah.

Sean: I think it’s valuable to have these perspectives, but I think the danger is when you present your interpretation or your opinion of the state of American democracy as a fact where we end up perhaps being unhelpful to the state of democracy and the state of political tension. So I think that if we’re to truly think about the risk of a civil war from a rational perspective, there’s very little evidence to suggest that’s going to happen. There have been a number of incidents where people have tried to militarize against the government in Michigan and on January 6th, but those didn’t lead to coordinated uprisings across the countries. Those were isolated events. So we don’t have any evidence to suggest that there is a coordination system in place that could facilitate the kind of guerrilla warfare that would occur in a civil war. The kinds of people who support partisan violence are just too isolated. They’re not networked, they’re not connected, they’re not in the kinds of paramilitary circles that would be necessary for a full-scale national conflict. It could certainly happen in isolated locations. You can imagine militant groups in Montana, for example, Idaho, Nevada, or Oregon being able to do something locally, but the notion that we’re going to have a national civil war really needs a lot of data. There really needs to be a lot of data to support that claim and I think it just isn’t there.

Zach: Well, this has been great. Thanks a lot, Sean. Your work is very important and thanks for coming on and sharing your perspectives

Sean: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks, Zach.