Regarding support for political violence

A NYT article discusses support for political violence in the US:

A nationwide poll last month found that 10 percent of those surveyed said the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has studied American attitudes toward political violence since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, conducted a nationwide poll on the topic last month. It found that 10 percent of those surveyed said that the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.” A third of those who gave that answer also said they owned a gun.

Seven percent of those surveyed said they “support force to restore Trump to the presidency.” Half of them said they owned guns.

The shooting at Mr. Trump’s rally “is a consequence of such significant support for political violence in our country,” Mr. Pape wrote in an email. “Indeed, significant lone wolf attacks motivated by political violence have been growing for years in the United States, against members of Congress from both parties as well as federal officials and national leaders.”

Other studies on political violence have also found small but not insignificant numbers of Americans who support the idea of using violence to advance political ideas.

In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found nearly 14 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years.

Nearly 8 percent of respondents to the study said they believed there would be a situation in the next few years where political violence would be justified and were intending to arm themselves.

One can wonder if the assassination attempt yesterday is going to influence some people into adopting a more pro-violence mindset. That seems to be more likely than not. 

One can also wonder if people who anticipate a coming civil war wind up being a factor in that actually happening. At this point, civil war still seems quite unlikely to me, maybe ~3% chance within the next 2 years and ~1% in the following 2 years. But, one recent poll indicated that 41% of likely U.S. voters believed the United States is likely to experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years, including 16% who considered that very likely.

At the least, a lot of people are thinking about major political violence.