I’ve been writing more than I’d like lately about the weakened and vulnerable state of our American experiment. Most of that work has focused on the innumerable ways President Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the constitutional balance of power in Washington, from knocking down wings of the White House to the way he is literally getting away with murder through his undeclared war in the Caribbean.
Yet while our crisis of American democracy is primarily the fault of Trump’s imperial ambitions and brazen disregard for the rule of law, it’s also corroding the fundamental relationship between government and the people it governs. A new poll from Politico and Public First puts the public’s increasing disillusionment into sharp relief: 55 percent of Americans now expect political violence to increase in the coming years, and nearly a quarter believe political violence is sometimes okay.
Our country was founded on the bedrock principle that this republic represented a better path than the blood-soaked empires that had come before. The rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power were sacrosanct ideals, even during the nation’s bitter first transfer of power between parties in 1800. That consensus took a big hit during the political violence of January 6, 2021. Now, faith in peaceful politics is in freefall across every age group, party affiliation, educational level and economic class.
Multiple polls suggest there are fewer and fewer rays of light left to illuminate our growing national darkness. How can our republic survive when the people who serve as the source of its power seem to have stopped believing?
America can’t long endure in an environment where people think murdering their political opponents is justifiable — or, God help us, admirable. More concerning is the fact that many of the strongest defenders of “justified” political violence are our youngest Americans — our future leaders. More than a third of Americans under 45 see a favorable side to assassinating their opponents, and those numbers grow as the respondents get younger.
Much of that disillusionment grows out of young peoples’ pessimism about the future of American prosperity, both in terms of their own financial futures and the federal government’s extreme dysfunctionality. Who can blame them? Our government can’t even keep itself open, much less defend its supposedly co-equal branches from Trump’s brazenly unconstitutional power grabs.
Another Politico poll found that 64 percent of respondents ages 18 to 24 believe “radical change is needed” to put America on the right track, compared to just 38 percent of people ages 65 and over. Only about 16 percent of Gen Z believe that democracy works well for young people, and mor than a third of the entire Gen Z generation report that they are politically disconnected. For young people, the country has reached a point of such terminal brokenness that political violence now seems like the only way to shock the system into once again serving the needs of its people.
Less visible in the data is the real effect of what amounts to a generational logjam in who actually represents the American people.
A larger percentage of Congress is now more than 70 years old than ever before, including 14 who are older than 80. Meanwhile, those aging leaders are flexing their political muscles to keep a younger generation of up-and-coming politicians out of power, infuriating younger voters in the process.
Those voters have voiced their simmering resentment for years, to little practical effect and often to condescending shrugs. Hemmed in for most of their lives by political institutions that rewrite their internal rules to protect their gray-haired incumbents, some of those disillusioned younger voters are now fantasizing about more direct means of persuasion. If that happens, it will represent a catastrophic failure of our experiment in self-government and an incalculable human tragedy.
We have already seen too much blood spilled in this current era of political nihilism and radicalization. But the point made by so many Americans that our government no longer seems to represent anything at all is a valid one. Our current crop of leaders have abjectly failed to defend the Constitution or serve the people, yet gerrymandered congressional maps and sclerotic political party operations make it nearly impossible to remove them through the vote that was intended to be our legitimate political voice.
Restructuring our two political parties into more representative bodies would go a long way to restoring confidence among America’s large population of disillusioned voters. A wholesale change in leadership would be even more impactful. Until party leaders are willing to show some level of self-sacrifice in order to fix our broken system, the horrible specter of political violence will continue to grow in appeal for the millions of Americans who feel their voice no longer matters.
Preventing a wave of assassinations is surely worth bowing to the momentary disappointment of an unwanted retirement. For the sake of political peace, it must be.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
