The Shifting Ideology Behind Political Violence
Researchers see a departure from a pattern that held for nearly 50 years. “This era of violent populism will get worse before it gets better.”
But those tracking such violence say more acts are being committed by those holding either explicitly leftist views, no dominant political views or a mix of fringe ideologies, including the alleged gunman in the fatal shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive in December and the suspect in the killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington in May.
Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man charged Tuesday with murdering conservative activist Charlie Kirk, had grown political and left-leaning over the past year, “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” his mother, a registered Republican, told authorities, according to Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray.
Robinson allegedly texted his romantic partner, a male who is transitioning to female, saying he killed Kirk because “the guy spreads too much hate.”
“The murder of Charlie Kirk is an American tragedy,” Gray said.
The federal government doesn’t comprehensively track data on political violence and domestic terrorism. Various groups and academics do, but differ on the types of data collected and the definitions. They generally find that right-wing and jihadist violence has been more prevalent in the U.S. than left-wing violence in recent decades. But some see an evolving landscape.
“Now we have substantial political violence from both the left and the right,” said University of Chicago researcher Robert Pape, a political-science professor who heads the university’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Pape said he and staff researched decades of events to document motivations for political violence to come to conclusions.
Political violence has waxed and waned in the U.S. since its founding, and the political orientation of those perpetrating such violence—if one exists—has swung back and forth on the left-right spectrum over time as well.
The turbulent 1960s saw the killings of civil-rights workers and assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In 1972, a man shot presidential candidate George Wallace, crippling him.
Pape found that in this volatile period, more acts of political violence were committed by left-wing extremists, although right-wing extremists were violent as well. Then, starting around 1972, right-wing extremists were behind most such acts, until about 2017 or 2018. Today, he said, such violence is increasingly committed by those from both ends of the political spectrum. “This era of violent populism will get worse before it gets better,” Pape told The Wall Street Journal late last week. “We’re headed for more trouble.”
As attacks surge, understanding what drives violence against political figures becomes more urgent. Trump survived one assassination attempt in July 2024 and was the target of an apparent second one months later, while authorities said a gunman with lists of prominent abortion-rights supporters killed a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in June.
The government did fund efforts to look at the trend. Until last week, the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice had posted a study on domestic terrorism on its website. The report, called “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism,” said that since 1990 far-right extremists have committed more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left extremists: more than 520 compared with 78. The study can no longer be found on the government’s website but can be found on an internet archive. It appears to have been taken down after last week’s shooting. The Justice Department declined to comment.
In one of the nation’s most comprehensive surveys of political extremism and violence, researchers using data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, College Park, found that between 1948 and 2018 right-wing extremists and jihadists were about twice as likely to engage in violent behavior when compared with left-wing extremists. The researchers found 560 individuals from the far-right involved in ideologically motivated violence compared with 120 from the far left over that time period.
Gary LaFree, a co-author on the study and a University of Maryland criminologist, said left-wing extremists became less violent after the 1970s, when groups such as the Weather Underground were active. Movements like antifa, a loose network of antifascist protesters, have been implicated in widespread property damage, but haven’t been tied to many violent attacks, he said.
“The data since 9/11 shows that lethal left-wing violence has been a much smaller problem than right-wing terrorism,” said Peter Bergen, vice president for global studies & fellows at New America, a liberal-leaning think tank. “But it’s been part of the American story before in the 1970s so it can come back.”
The day after the Kirk shooting, the libertarian Cato Institute published data showing that politically motivated killings in the U.S. are rare. It stated that from Jan. 1, 1975, to this month, politically motivated terrorist attacks killed 3,599 people in the U.S., with 81 of those deaths occurring after 2020. The institute, which includes international terrorist attacks on America, estimated that 87% were committed by Islamic radicals; 11% were committed by right-wing extremists, and 2% by left-wing extremists.
Excluding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, right-wing attacks accounted for 63% of killings and left-wing for 10%.
Cato defined right-wing terrorists as those driven by white supremacy, antiabortion views, involuntary celibacy and other ideologies. Left-wing attackers included those motivated by Black nationalism, antipolice sentiment, animal rights, communism and other views.
“Politically motivated murder is unacceptable and inherently bad, like all murder, and doubly so because of how socially corrosive it is,” wrote Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at Cato. He acknowledged that statistical analyses are fragile, and that “the motivated reader can slice and dice these numbers in different ways, count marginal hate crimes as politically motivated terrorist attacks,” or “assign different ideological motivations to the individual attacker.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has joined Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis in launching an effort to tone down political rhetoric.
“We can return violence with fire and violence; we can return hate with hate,” Cox said last Friday. “And that’s the problem with political violence, is it metastasizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side, and at some point we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Write to Cameron McWhirter at Cameron.McWhirter@wsj.com and Zusha Elinson at zusha.elinson@wsj.com
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