number of Americans believe that vio-
lence “could be justified to advance their
parties’ political goals.” Multiple studies
show that the figure is at least one in six,
twice what it was three years ago. “That’s
a very significant jump,” Larry Diamond,
of Stanford, who helped conduct the re-
search, told me. “But it’s not just the
numbers. It’s also the context that is so
unsettling.” Diamond cited recent epi-
sodes—from white supremacists in Char-
lottesville to Trump’s exhorting the Proud
Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Dia-
mond went on, “The level of armaments
that these people have, the stockpiles of
military-style weaponry and body armor,
the high-volume gun clips—there’s no
precedent in American history for this,
and that’s why I think the current era is
more dangerous than anything we’ve
seen in decades.”
What pushes people over the thresh-
old from talking about violence to per-
petrating it? Scholars have studied ex-
amples as diverse as student protests in
Germany and Italy, riots outside the 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago, and
democracy protests in Hong Kong. In
many cases, the point of ignition is gov-
ernment repression, real or imagined—a
moment that inspires bystanders to join
fellow-citizens in fighting the perceived
abuse of authority. Trump has encour-
aged followers to see his political oppo-
nents as tyrants. On October 8th, fed-
eral and state authorities charged six
men with plotting to kidnap Gretchen
Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
She had been one of Trump’s most fre-
quent targets of criticism; this spring, as
protesters with guns demonstrated in the
Michigan capitol, Trump tweeted out a
militia slogan, “LIBERATE MICHI-
GAN!,” and called them “very good peo-
ple.” The plotters had reportedly found
one another online and through friends
involved with the boogaloo movement.
During a pro-gun rally in Lansing, on
June 18th, some of the men talked about
attacking the capitol. They met for tac-
tical training and tried to make bombs.
Adam Fox, the accused ringleader, told
others, “I just wanna make the world
glow, dude.... I don’t fuckin’ care any-
more, I’m just so sick of it.”
Diamond, who has studied the work-
ings of democracy in dozens of coun-
tries, recognized a disturbing pattern thatled to violence: “All of these instances
of pressing out the normative boundar-
ies of what’s acceptable are the prelude
to more daring, outrageous acts of po-
litical violence. Look at the climate in
Israel in the months preceding the as-
sassination of Yitzhak Rabin. You see
the same rise in inflammatory rhetoric
and the same erosion of the constraints.
It’s a downward spiral that gave the sig-
nal to this violent right-wing extremist
that it actually could be O.K.—even
morally necessary—to assassinate the
Israeli Prime Minister.”W
hat would it take to pull Amer-
ican politics out of the fire? To
make democracy more functional and
trustworthy? To make Americans feel,
in any real sense, that we are all in this
together?
One set of ideas focusses on bend-
ing the course of political culture—the
habits and the attitudes that govern our
encounters. In 2000, Robert Putnam, a
Harvard political scientist, published
“Bowling Alone,” a now classic account
of a decline in “social capital,” the net-
works of trust developed through civic,
social, and leisure organizations. A so-
ciety that retreated to the sofa, he
warned, risked losing the habits of de-
mocracy. (“TV-based politics,” he wrote,
“is to political action as watching ‘ER’
is to saving someone in distress.”)
Twenty years later, he saw that pattern
of seclusion reach its logical extreme, as
Americans fragmented in the solitude
of the pandemic.
In a new book, “The Upswing,” writ-
ten with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, Put-
nam identified a different thread of his-
tory, in which Americans have oscillated
between individualism and community.
He examined how the Gilded Age—a
time, like the current one, of jarring in-
equality, political polarization, and cul-
tural narcissism—gave way to the Pro-
gressive Era, when a broad swath of
Americans called for fundamental re-
form. In that period, Americans cre-
ated public high schools, labor unions,
the federal income tax, and financial
regulation. In 1912, all three major Pres-
idential candidates—Teddy Roosevelt,
William Howard Taft, and Woodrow
Wilson—adopted the progressive label,
and all three supported anti-monop-
“I could ’ve sworn I heard one of the kids moving back in.” oly laws and a progressive income tax.