Instances of political violence around the 2024 election and vote certification on January 6, 2025 did not come to fruition the way some experts feared they would throughout last year. But that doesn’t mean that we can forget about threats of political violence until it’s time for the next election. In fact, political violence continues to rise in the United States and throughout western Europe.
Our guests this week, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca of Freedom House and the George W. Bush Institute, are two of the leading voices on how to prevent political violence and create a healthier democracy. They join us to discuss what causes political violence and what democracies around the world can do to prevent it by addressing both cultural and structural issues in politics.
After the interview, Chris Beem and Cyanne Loyle discuss whether non-violent protest movements can successfully combat political violence amid growing polarization and support for political violence from some elected officials and political leaders.
Kleinfeld and Bibbins Sedaca are the authors of the article “How to Prevent Political Violence,” which appeared in the fall 2024 issue of The Journal of Democracy.
Journal of Democracy article: How to Prevent Political Violence
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I’m Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
I’m Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle
I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Welcome back everybody. Happy New Year, Chris and Cyanne, good to be with you in 2025 and we have a big episode some real heavy hitter guests to start off the year and the season. We are joined by Nicole Bibbbins Sedaca from Freedom House and Rachel Kleinfeld from the Carnegie Endowment. These are two leading scholars and professionals in the democracy space, and they teamed up at the end of last year to write a piece in the Journal of Democracy on how to prevent political violence. And you know, I think that in the fall when this piece came out, people, at least in the US, were maybe more concerned about violence around the election and January 6, the sort of transition period, but as we sit here now on the other side of those things, we largely did not see the violence that some had expected and feared. But I think Nicole and Rachel would argue that that does not mean that it’s something that we can just put back on the shelf until the next election comes around.
Cyanne Loyle
I just want to jump in as we’re kind of kicking things off to make sure that we have a good kind of operational definition of political violence. So our speakers will certainly get to this. And in their piece, they really highlight three main issues that we need to keep in mind, and I bring this up in large part because a lot of what I study is on the upper ends of the spectrum of violence. So we can think about things like civil wars, large scale terrorist attacks or genocidal violence. And political violence can certainly encompass those things, but it can also be lower level forms of violence, but but kind of by definition, when we think about political violence, it’s physical violence or threats that destabilizes institutions right that have public functions. It’s aimed usually at elected officials or politicians, or it’s led by elected officials or politicians. And so here we can think about things like death threats against politicians or media or judges, and then it’s usually aimed at marginalizing certain types of groups. So in the United States, we can think about think about attacks on immigrants, trans people, in other contexts, religious minorities, and in almost all of the nations that you kind of mentioned above, India, Brazil, France and Germany, there are these marginalized or minority groups that then end up being the target of much of this violence. So these are the types of things we’re talking about. And I think Jenna think Jenna is right. I mean, we have seen, and this is a positive thing, right? We’ve seen little political violence compared to what people were expecting around around the election and around January 6. I should mention that the inauguration hasn’t taken place yet. And so I think we want to be cautiously optimistic, but, but not foolishly So, but, yeah, I think we’ve seen less violence than we thought. But I think that that the the Klinefelter piece really gets us to think about both what we can what are the worst case scenarios, but then also, what are some of the ways that we can mitigate it, right? What are some of the things that we should be doing? It’s one of the things I love about our podcast is that we always try to end Jenna on a hopeful note, right? So, so things that we can be doing as citizens in a democracy to help shore us up against some of these threats,
Chris Beem
Yeah, I mean, otherwise, what are we doing, right? You know? I mean, the only thing that I would want to add to that is that violence against individuals is in you know, is also a very good way of undermining political institutions, right? Because they’re all made of individuals. And so if you go after election, electoral officials, right, the county clerk or the Secretary of State, you don’t, you’re doing a very good job of undermining electoral integrity and and really, you know, I mean, when we’re talking about retired people who are not getting paid and they’re getting death threats, well, of course they’re gonna quit, you know, of course they’re not gonna do it anymore. And so it’s a very effective way of, of also, you know, undermining institutions. And so I, you know, there’s a there’s a degree to which these, there’s these, this is all of a piece and and you know the idea of coming up with a them who is not a true American or a true German or true Brazilian, and who is has a set of of values and beliefs that are undermining the nation that is like, you know, find me a populist who doesn’t do that. And, and so, yeah, you do see that all over the. Place, I think they’re going to mention that, that in Modi’s India, violence has gone down all across the board, except with respect to Muslims, because Muslims are the them that has been identified and used very effectively by Modi to secure power anyway,
Cyanne Loyle
And while we haven’t seen large scale acts of violence in the United States since the election of President Trump, we have seen increased marginalization, right? And targeting through through threats and other ways of a lot of these political officials that you were talking about, Chris, so, so I guess I’m tainting Jenna’s optimistic take in the beginning, right? It may, may not be looking quite as good as we think it does.
Jenna Spinelle
And I think one of the things that I really enjoyed and appreciated about this interview was how Rachel and Nicole, you’ll definitely kind of tell it like it is. I don’t think that they sugar coat anything. Listeners can certainly be the judge when they hear the interview, but I think they do keep in mind also the organizations that are working to combat political violence and the lessons that the US and Western Europe can learn from Africa and from other places that have been dealing with this, this kind of thing, over the past couple of decades. So without further ado, let’s go to the interview with Rachel and Nicole.
Jenna Spinelle
Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today. So the two of you are co authors of a recently published article in the Journal of Democracy on how to prevent a political violence. And before we dive into the meat of the article, you your names may be familiar to some of our listeners, but for those who might not know you, I wonder if you could just talk a bit about how you came to work on this article together, and maybe what each of you brings to the conversation around political violence and its prevention. Nicole, we’ll start with you.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Excellent. Thank you so much for having us. It’s a delight to be here. I’m the interim president of an organization called Freedom House, and we’ve been around for about eight decades, for 80 plus years, working both domestically, in the US and then internationally, to strengthen democracy. And what we’ve seen around the world, not just the United States, but in many countries, is rising political violence, and we really thought it was important right now, in light of the fact that the United States was when we published this, moving into an election, how important it was to speak out on this issue, which is something which really is at the heart of destabilizing democracies. And I was delighted to do it with friend and colleague, Rachel Kleinfeld, and I’ll let her introduce herself.
Rachel Kleinfeld
Thanks so much, Nicole, it’s such a pleasure to do this with you. And I’m a Senior Fellow in Carnegie’s democracy, conflict and Governance Program. And I work on troubled democracies. My career has really been focused for the last 12 years or so on democracies that are facing polarized populations, violence and other governance issues and how to get them better. And I look at the United States as well as other countries comparatively. And in addition to the research and the analysis, I try to be proactive in seeking solutions. So to that end, I sit on the Freedom House board. I’m on the National Endowment for Democracy board within the United States, I sit on the States United for democracy board and the advisory board protect democracy. And I advise a lot of philanthropists and others in this space. So I’m always looking for why are we having these problems and what can be done about them?
Jenna Spinelle
So that’s quite the collective expertise that the two of you bring to this question. One more sort of background question here. What can you just define political violence? I think in the American context, we think a lot about January 6 and perhaps the assassination attempts on President elect Trump that happens this past summer. But how, how do you think about it in the context of this work? Or is there a accepted definition or parameters that you were working from in this project,
Rachel Kleinfeld
There are lots of different definitions of political violence. The one I tend to use comes from a Brazilian Think Tank, actually, that I think just kind of covers all the bases. And it’s violence, physical violence, threats or intimidation, that does one of three things, or sometimes more, the first that are intended to destabilize public institutions or democratic functions. So the January 6 kind of violence that’s directed by or targeted at election officials, elected officials, candidates on. And other kind of appointed officials, so they might be the ones sending in the violence, or they might be the victims of it. And then third is violence or intimidation that’s aimed at marginalizing people or groups so that their full political, economic or social participation is not equal in the democracy. So this is, you know, civil rights era sort of violence the United States and lynchings in the south and so on.
Jenna Spinelle
And so with with that in mind, you you write that there are three causes of increased political violence, at least in the context of Western democracies. You look specifically at the US, France and Germany, but the I thought we could just take each of these three kind of one by one, starting with polarization. There’s been lots of talk about polarization, certainly since, since 2016 and perhaps before as well. But you note that polarization alone does not cause or increase political violence. I wonder if you could say more about why that is.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
I’d be happy to jump in on that. You know, we’re facing in the United States, as many countries, are a serious problem with polarization, which is really people stretching to the ends of the political spectrum. And also not just, not just having significant political difference, but also really finding an inability to find common ground on regular policy debates, which is a normal part of what a democracy has to do is have people compromising in the middle, sometimes giving and taking but we’re really in this moment of really stretched polarization, and polarization itself doesn’t cause violence, but what it does is it’s almost a fertile ground for leaders to come in who would like to stoke that violence and to use violence for their own political gain. And so you have a polarized citizenry, you are able then to encourage violence. You’re able to talk about violence. You’re able to introduce violence as an option for them to work out their political their political concerns. And if you’re so far away from somebody and you don’t see them as someone that you could compromise with a little bit on something, then you’re almost seeing that person as almost not even worthy of debating, or not even worthy of sharing a political stage with. And you’re almost, in some cases, seeing them as almost the evil themselves that it’s a part of your problem, of your country, and so you’re not going to be interested in. So that also lends itself even more to the idea, well, if I use violence, and it’s very justified, because I’m not just doing it against someone I’m somewhat different from. It’s someone who’s really, really the problem in my country, and that’s how this polarized moment is, can and can be used by leaders who would like to stoke that.
Jenna Spinelle
And that leads right into the second cause of of increased political violence, and that’s the amplification of polarization by political leaders. I think Nicole, you were just speaking to some of this, but you know what? Yeah, what is it? Is it this is, I guess, sort of like a chicken and the egg thing, but it’s like the, is it the leader that really sort of picks up the mantle here, or are they just responding to what they’re seeing among their constituents, that there’s an appetite for the embrace of this type of language and this type of behavior?
Rachel Kleinfeld
You know, I think the evidence points to a bad leader. These conflict entrepreneurs, as they’re called. They can be political leaders. They can also be media leaders or sort of leaders of groups, the damage that those individuals can do if they’re not checked in some way is really gargantuan. There’s another article in the Journal of democracy by Tom Carruthers and Brendan Hartnett on backsliding democracies and how people blame them for not being able to deliver but really it’s these leaders stoking these problems. So as Nicole was saying, you can have very polarized countries fertile ground, and no violence happens, and then you have conflict entrepreneurs stepping in and saying, Oh, I think I can win votes this way, or I can build a base this way, and the political structures incentivize me in such a way that I can use fear of the other to deepen my my political chances, and that’s when you get the violence.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
If I could just add to that full agreement was with Rachel’s really important point, there’s also this failure to denounce violence within your own side, which is really then, if you think about it, calling out someone’s undemocratic behavior should be something we’re able to do. Regardless, we should all share a democratic, democratic culture, and democratic, not the party, but rather commitment to democracy, and share that culture. And therefore we should be able to. Uh, oppose undemocratic behavior, regardless of who we’re standing with. But what we increasingly see in many places is an unwillingness to go against your own side, even if the behavior on your own side is something that you know or is widely accepted as undemocratic, because there is this, this particular polarized time, this connection of our political survival and our political position is far more important than going against some of this undemocratic behavior. And then what it is is you see each side then justifying undemocratic actions, including violence, that as long as it furthers the right side the correct position, then it’s justified, and that’s a very, very damaging thing in a democracy.
Jenna Spinelle
So in this this article, you also offer several very straightforward, I don’t want to say simple. I mean simple in terms of the way you present them, but not simple in terms of undertaking them, things that both leaders and citizens and governments and organizations can do, or should do to curtail political violence and to that that you place in the bucket of what leaders have to do is insist on non violence and support the rule of law. And Nicole, I know that you issued a statement through Freedom House a few days after the recent election, talking about the responsibilities that President elect Trump has to do those two things, to uphold the rule of law and condemn political violence. I wonder if you could say more about how you see that responsibility that the administration has.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Absolutely, absolutely, I always mention those two things, which is, we elect leaders, we give them power over our daily lives and over the levers of power, and we expect them to then hold up full democratic principles, and one of them is to insist on non violence and to create, through their rhetoric and through their action and through their incentivizing of their colleague, a deterrence against people using violence to address Any political grievance or any political difference in the society. And the second is we elect leaders, or we choose leaders to uphold the very constitution that is the bedrock of our society. And for those leaders, it’s almost a much greater responsibility than it is on the average citizen, because they are not only just an average citizen, but they are also leading us through and holding office and and acting on behalf of the American people. So we felt after, after President elect Trump was elected just to remind the nation of where we are. Elections are hard fought in this nation, and they are far too long fought, in my view, but they have long campaign season, where we we go at each other, party against party, candidate against candidate, and then one person is elected through our system. We accept that election, and we allow for the peaceful transition of power, and then that person governs an entire nation. They don’t govern their party, they don’t govern their favorite people. They don’t govern the people they like on a Tuesday only they govern the entire nation. And we wanted to take that moment to remind what a sacred opportunity that is for every elected leaders, presidential, congressional, mayoral, Governor, down the line, just this important piece that they now hold the opportunity and the responsibility of governing according to the laws of the nation and their respective states, and to govern the entire people, and that is a challenge for a polarized nation, and to ensure that even as our our system respects that majority wins, that we also have the protection of minorities. And that’s not just racial or ethnic minorities. That is a protection of anyone who’s who may be a political minority, or to be any other minority, to say we are a nation that recognizes the winner as the as the leader, but really as the person who then is responsible for everybody having all of their rights protected under a democratic system.
Jenna Spinelle
So I mean, as, as you know, President Trump does not have the best track record, perhaps to put it mildly, of of condemning violence, or, you know, always showing respect for the rule of law. So I guess I wonder, given that, what are some of the things that you’re you’re watching for in your you will be watching for in his second term, or where, where are you finding hope for when within the incoming administration, given what we know about how things went the first time.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Yeah, we’re watching, and we hold every president to the same account, which is, we have standards, we have rules, we have constitution, we have laws on the books, and we expect that President Trump, everyone in his administration, and everyone who was elected is. Uh, earlier this month, will hold themselves to it, and we are an organization that is committed to raising awareness when that isn’t done, regardless of which party and which person, we believe that the principles and processes of the nation have to be upheld for the sake of our democracy. We’re also watching for rhetoric around political violence. We’re watching also the use of democratic tools for undemocratic game, and that’s something we see increasingly in a lot of places, which is there’s a process that is set out, but it the process is there in order to advance our democracy, not really to advance the gains of any individual. So there’s a whole host of things which we are watching just to ensure that this administration, as we would with any administration, follows all of the rules that that undergird democratic infrastructure in our nation.
Rachel Kleinfeld
And let me just add as a board member of Freedom House, but also just as a researcher, these are really not particular to any one president we’ve seen in India. For instance, violence of almost every sort has gone down under Modi, The one exception is political violence against minority groups, against Muslims. In that case, all the other kinds have gone down. And so we see that there we see in Brazil under Bolsonaro, violence rose. So one of the things that Freedom House has done since its founding in 1941 is really just set a level, level playing field and say, How does this administration compare to that administration? How does this country compare to that country? What are the variables that you need in a democracy? And one of the key variables is that political contestation is done at the ballot box and not through guns and violence and so on. And they rate them, and they rate all countries based on the same criteria. And I think that’s really important in the present moment, just to set a baseline for any any president, prime minister, leader in any country, because we are seeing a lot of variability in political violence. We’re seeing countries led by far right and far left parties that have quite a bit of violence. Venezuela comes to mind, Nicaragua. And we’re seeing countries led by far left and far right that don’t have a whole lot of political violence, like Italy and so this is very variable, and by just drawing a line under the goal of non violent democracies, among many other variables that Freedom House looks at, they’re able to compare countries and kind of call balls and strikes in a fair way.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, I want to stick with you here, Rachel, I know that another recommendation or or another principle for curtailing political violence is the idea of communities organizing for peace. You’ve done some writing recently about the the closing of civic spaces and and civil society, so I guess I wonder how you’re feeling about the capacity of civil society in these three countries to to do just that, to organize for peace. And maybe some of the things you’re watching from from a civil society perspective,
Rachel Kleinfeld
Sure. So one thing that we know is that there are many countries where politicians try to inflame their supporters in order to get greater electoral support. And while that is the number one variable that leads to political violence, communities aren’t helpless in the face of that. What they can do is band together across difference, and that’s very important, that it’s the groups that are most likely to be polarized against one another that have to be in community talking to each other, and that if they come into community and talk to each other, they can actually work to tamp down the ugliness that can be created by politicians. So politicians in Kenya, for instance, might say, you know, this tribe is good and that tribe is bad and what have you. But if the tribes are talking to one another, they they they can say, well, whatever the politicians said, this young man who did this violent thing is not speaking for our community. And that’s usually what happens, is some hot head goes off and does something. And does that escalate? Does that become a tit for tat? Does that inspire other people on the same side? Communities can do a lot to tamp that down. And luckily, in America and in France and Germany, there are very strong civic traditions that are working across difference to try to tamp that down. Now I would say it’s probably a little stronger in Germany and America, United States, America, than France. France has a weaker civic tradition because of the role of the government there. But what we’re seeing, and I’ll speak to the United States, since I know that one best is businesses and churches and and other religious institutions and faith leaders and leaders of rural communities and leaders of urban minority groups are all in conversation now. You. Major sports leagues. The amount of speaking across difference right now is very, very high, largely to say we’re all going to stand against violence. We’re all going to try to calm things down when the moment comes now, they won’t be perfect in the United States, we’re 330, 3 million people, and there’s a lot of people who might become hot headed, but it’s a lot less than people think. When you look at the good statistics, it’s like three or 4% of each political party support political violence. The vast majority do not when you ask them good questions, and so having this whole community infrastructure can really help say, look, whatever the politicians say, this is not the norm of our community, the geographic community, or the professional community, or what have you, and our community is going to stand against this kind of behavior.
Jenna Spinelle
And there’s also, at least in America, I’m not as familiar with Germany or other countries, if there’s this tradition or this movement of bridge building, which is bringing people together explicitly across lines of a political division, as opposed to, you know, a business league or sports or a church or some other way that that people come together. I wonder how, if at all, you see that work of, you know, bringing people together for the purpose of talking across political divisions fitting into this picture.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
And what we see in a lot of places is there are different reasons why people come together. Some people are coming together to solve joint problems within their community, and so they’re coming across different faith lines or political lines because they need to build a park in their town, or they need to deal with an education problem in their town. And I think for many people who are most focused on those local areas, that is where you see those bridges being built across lines when they actually just have to get stuff done. And that’s where there is sometimes a very big disconnect between what’s happening at the national level, where it’s a lot of rhetoric and the local level where things are being done, I think we’re also seeing a lot of places where people are coming together just to talk about being in conversation with difference. And what that is, it’s an opportunity to also talk about what binds us together, which most often is the democratic experiment that we’re all part of, of just saying, okay, part of what we are doing is committing to be in conversation about our differences and not necessarily end the differences, but it is a way that people are practicing a muscle that, in some places, has either never been developed or never been used, which is that muscle to say, I can come together with someone have radical different disagreements on one or a million things and Then just engage them peaceably and then go on with the rest of my with the rest of my life. And I think that’s the thing which we’re seeing now, and when we have a real opportunity in the United States, where that has been the practice in many places, but we have to utilize that and recognize what’s at risk if we are not building or practicing that muscle. The alternative, really is that we can move quickly into political violence or increase polarization that makes us vulnerable to those toxic readers.
Jenna Spinelle
So the last thing I want to ask about is this idea of of incentives and political structures. We touched on this a little bit earlier. But you know, the other headline in the democracy space, at least from this, this most recent US election, was that voters, by and large, rejected some of the things that would have changed political structures, things like open primaries and ranked choice voting, and the things that are often pointed to as ways to fix the system or decrease the influence that that the two parties have, at least here, here in the US. So I wonder what, what the two of you make of of that, and if there are other, perhaps prospects for structural reform that that you’re looking at moving forward.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
I can make a quick comment on that and then pass it to Rachel. I think that we’re seeing, we’re seeing places where that structural reform has really worked, particularly ranked choice voting, and we’ve seen it work well in Alaska and a number of other places where having a having a system in which it is not winner take all, and some of the current primary processes which push people into Much more polarized situation, you have far fewer people coming to the ballot box in primaries. I think we’re seeing success in that. I also think we’re seeing in some places. In the debate here in Washington has been it’s sort of a confusing system. We’re just going to stick with what we’ve got. We know it better, and we don’t need to have reforms. And so I think we do have a challenge, really, to explain to the American people, at a very grassroots level of why some of these changes are needed, and they will actually reinforce, make us less polarized, and reinforce choice among people, as opposed to, I think, some of the perceptions which they which are that they are not allowing people to get the candidates that they want.
Rachel Kleinfeld
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I would say the United States has kind of a triple whammy in terms of our institutional design. We know that winner take all systems are particularly given to to political violence if there are strong ethnic divisions or racial divisions or what have you. Larry diamond has written about that on a whole general study of democracy, that that’s the one kind of generalizable thing you can say about institutional design is if you have a country with deep fissures, don’t have a winner take all system. We also know that two party systems are given to polarization for obvious reasons. It’s easier to create an Asana to them when you only got two choices. And then we know presidential design systems. Juan Linz, you know, the great democracy scholar that I got to study under, writes about how few presidential systems survive more than a few decades. Really, America stands in a very small group that has survived, and that’s because of the sort of inherent structural tension between a president and a legislature that are of different parties and so on. So the United States has all three, and that is probably not the strongest place to stand on. And for a long time, people said, well, you know, we’re doing fine, so maybe none of these things are so bad. And I would just argue that America had a very, very deep civic culture of democracy, and that civic culture has been eroding. You know, Robert Putnam writes about this with Bowling Alone and so on. That culture is not static, and it does change. And we’ve seen much less people joining things, much less people speaking across difference, much less people even being willing to engage across difference, not only political difference, but just in general, dealing with social friction to get things done. And as we lose those norms, then laws and design of the institutions becomes much more important. When the norms hold sway. They’re much stronger than the laws in the institutional design. But as they weaken those other things come to the fore, and the United States is being hit with this triple problem. Now, voters just rejected that whole argument. I think it’s a little wonky. It also ran into the headwinds of institutional parties, where you got Michael Bennett in Colorado and other sitting leaders really speaking against these changes, and that’s because, you know, whatever they might do for democracy, people who won in a system like that system, because they know how to win in it. So if you’re a campaigner or a politician who’s been elected from either party, it’s not really partisan. They tend to prefer to keep their system. Now, what we do about it? You know, I think there will be a lot of regrouping and a lot of thinking about, how do we help the United States connect the dots between the system that they have and these things that they say they don’t like, about gridlock and extremism and so on. And that’s a real messaging challenge. And I think a lot of folks need to maybe get out of the rooms that they’re usually in talking to one another and start reaching out to voters on the ground and seeing how they experience these different systems. And I should add, none of them are silver bullets. You know, institutional design can help or hinder a good democracy, but it’s not going to decide the issue for you. You people have to do the work of changing their civic culture as well.
Jenna Spinelle
So speaking of finding our best selves, I think that there are a lot of folks who would consider themselves supporters of democracy, maybe feeling a little hopeless, a little dejected, given everything that we’ve just spent the past 40 minutes talking about, I wonder if we can end on if there are places where you’re finding hope in this time,
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
I find hope in taking a look back at our history. If we look at the trajectory of the United States, we look at the director to direct trajectory of the world, we are moving in the right direction, and the only thing that has moved us in the right direction is doubling down on democratic principles and people stepping up, both leaders and citizens stepping up and choosing to be their best selves. That is what has moved us from a time where we had Global War, where we had two world wars back to back, where we had segregation and lynching and horrible civil rights abuses in the United States into a place which is much better. We have a lot of challenges in the United States. Freedom House has has shown how we have been backsliding for 13 years. And we have democratic principles. We have democratic we have democratic institutions. We have processes. We have everything in place. What we need is both the leaders and the people to take the tools that exist for them. And I have every hope that we have what we need to turn a moment around where people may feel despondent because we have done it before, and we are a nation that can do it.
Rachel Kleinfeld
I could not agree more. I mean, I look at history as well, and I also look comparatively, and I say, look the United States. Not Belarus. It’s a democratic country that just had a very free and fair election, and those are good things. Some folks might disagree with the outcome of that election, and guess what? They’ll get to contest again, and they’ll get to contest at the local level and at the state level, and they’ll get to use law and all sorts of tools to affect these decisions. That’s a really revolutionary moment in history. I mean, if you look at human history over the last 300,000 years, democracy is the blink of an eye. And the idea of a pluralistic democracy, a democracy that actually should care about minority rights and so on, is even a smaller blink of an eye. So, you know, we’re looking at a very small time period, and we’re saying, How can we make it better? And what’s amazing is that during that small time period, things have gotten better in country after country that have adopted these democratic principles. And it’s not a linear path, but it’s really astounding how much humanity has grown under these democracies when they adopt pluralistic principles. And in all of these countries, you can look back not too far to find much more difficult times than we’re facing right now. And so I would say, you know, put on your big girl and big boy pants, and it’s time to take the agency that you have and use it. And the country and the world will come out of this period. But it’ll come out because a lot of people work very hard to make it so
Jenna Spinelle
That is a fantastic note to end on. Thank you both for offering that closing dose of hope. We will link to your journal of democracy article, as well as the other work that we mentioned from Freedom House and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibb in sadaqa. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Thank you for having us.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, I thought that was just a really fantastic interview. I really appreciate what, what, what both of the speakers had had to say about both the current political climate in the United States. We’re also kind of comparing that to other democracies around the world. You know, one of the things that that I found so useful was thinking through some of the causes of political violence that they laid out. We’ve talked a lot on the show about polarization, and that was certainly kind of front and center of the discussion. But I also really liked the concept of conflict entrepreneurs. We see this a lot in the kind of the research that I do. I talk about specialists of violence in a lot of my classes, right? So, so not only folks that that have grievances, but folks that know what to do kind of with those grievances and focus more on on violence. And so the idea that it’s not just bad leaders, but it’s bad leaders that foment violence, right? That lean lean on that towards the spectrum, and they do it for kind of survival of their own political position and to kind of make them more important in the structure, and then also this idea of dissatisfaction with the existing political system. It’s a little bit different than polarization, I think, when we’re talking about kind of different ideologies we’ve see on both sides of the aisle, a real dissatisfaction with the institutions of American politics.
Chris Beem
You know, I think that is, you know, something that I, you know, I’ve joked that, among academics, Trump’s name is like Voldemort. We just don’t want to say it.
Cyanne Loyle
It’s he who should not be named.
Chris Beem
Yeah, right, right. And so we’ll say these things, like leaders who do these things. Well, you know, in, you know, if Trump had lost the 2024 election, the prospects for political violence, I think, would be very different. And I think if you don’t believe that, then you’re just not paying attention. And, you know, and Trump did many of the same things before the election that he did in 2020, kind of, you know, stoking the idea that if I lose, it’s because there was cheating going on. Well, if he wins, then, of course, the election is completely legitimate, and you have among Democrats far more support for the rule of law and for electoral integrity. You know, if that’s wrong, I would love to see evidence right? I just don’t think as an empirical matter, that’s wrong. And so it I think it is important for us as as academics, to to describe the circumstances accurately. And when you have a two party system, that’s a very difficult thing to do, we can. And they talk a lot very accurately. I think about how up for failure the American system is, because it’s all, you know, it’s it is automatically us versus them, right anyway.
Cyanne Loyle
I like, I like your point a lot. Chris, about about the differences between in I would call it norms, right and norms and appropriate responses. So I think we have dissatisfaction with the political system, both across Democrats and Republicans in the United States. I think that when you’re talking about empirical evidence, you know we can see that. So lack of trust in the judiciary, trusted security forces is going down. You know, Pew has been, has been surveying on this for a couple of years now, and I think that that’s across both Democrats and Republicans. The issue is not whether or not there’s dissatisfaction, whether or not there’s polarization. It’s about whether or not you believe that that violence is an acceptable means of political expression in the face of that dissatisfaction and polarization, and that’s some of the data that I’ve been seeing that’s most worrying for me.
Chris Beem
So Cyanne, you were talking about how people are more open to the idea of just confronting their neighbor versus doing it more in a more civil or more political way, getting a cop to be involved or something like that. But you also said that there’s something similar going on on at an international level, right? I mean, the decline of the liberal political order, I think, is what you called it.
Cyanne Loyle
I mean, it’s one of the things that really concerns me about the recommendations that Rachel and Nicole come up with kind of at the end of their piece. So they’re making the argument that we need to increasingly encourage, or continue to encourage nonviolent social movements, and also really fall back on or continue to respect the rule of law. And these are kind of core tenets that have been central in both the political science and public policy and and kind of, yeah, social movements literature for a really long time now. So, you know, one of the core findings that we have in the social movements literature is that non violent social movements are more successful than violent movements and and that finding is is actually old. So, so in the last decade, we found that that trend has eroded. So in some ways, what what Rachel and Nicole are suggesting, I don’t know that that holds anymore. In the 80s, 90s and the early 2000s nonviolent movements were an incredibly effective means of social change against autocratic governments and pushing back against autocratic tendencies. And that that result was based in large part on domestic and international responses to violence against non violent social movements. So when you know, a government would bring the, you know, the dogs or the water cannons out against non violent activists, there was a backlash against that, and a backlash that you wouldn’t necessarily see if those activists were engaging in violent activity. But we’ve the erosion of the of the global liberal world order, or whatever we want to call it. For me, a lot of what that means is that we’ve stopped having that incredibly negative response. So as Americans, for example, are more tolerant of political violence as a means of political expression in their own country. And so I think I don’t have solutions right now to preventing political violence and its growth, but I’m I would focus way less on nonviolent social movements, way less on the strengthening of rule of law, and instead pay a lot of attention to changing the incentive structures for conflict entrepreneurs and thinking about other ways to kind of remind people that violence is and beings of political expression can have some really negative consequences, but, but ultimately, you know, this dissatisfaction with the political system or the dissatisfaction with the status quo is where we’ve got to start, right? So people are unhappy with their lot in life, and they’re willing to take way more chances and risks than they would have been in the past, because the cost benefit calculus has shifted so drastically.
Chris Beem
Well, we started this conversation by, you know, me ranting that. You know, we can’t look at this with rose colored glasses. You certainly have thrown your rose colored glasses away. So, I mean, so, so that’s where you start, right. There is it’s not, you know, we’re in a a precarious place with respect to our our democracy and democracies around the world, and some of the standard strategies are at least not as reliable as they used to be. So it’s it’s going to be a difficult period it has been and will continue to be, and the fact that it is worldwide is is relevant, when we start thinking about what is the cause of these things, and what do we do about it? And so, yeah, we’re setting ourselves up for a very challenging year here on democracy works, but, but this is a good start. And I, and I’m, you know, I really, I think we both. Are very grateful to Rachel and Nicole so for Democracy Works, I’m Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
And I’m Cyanne Loyle.
Chris Beem
Thanks for listening.
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