Since 2016, Americans have argued fiercely not only about whether political violence is rising but about who is responsible. One dominant narrative attributes the problem primarily to the radical right: white nationalism, militias, election denial. A competing narrative insists that violence emanates just as strongly from the radical left, manifested in riots, assaults on police, and organized disruption in cities and on campuses. These claims are not merely rhetorical; they shape public trust, elite behavior, law enforcement priorities, and—most dangerously—the willingness of partisans to condemn violence committed by those they regard as allies. But what does the evidence actually show?
America’s political violence problem is neither one-sided nor symmetrical. Taken together, the evidence from federal threat assessments, terrorism databases, protest incident data, and congressional security records points toward the same conclusion. Political violence in the United States declined for nearly two decades after the 1990s and then rose sharply beginning around 2016. For decades prior to that year, politically motivated violence was concentrated overwhelmingly on the far right. Today, violence associated with the right and left is closer to balance, even as it takes very different forms. Right-wing violence has been substantially more frequent and far deadlier than left-wing violence since 2016—aimed at elections, federal institutions, and public officials—while left-wing violence has been more common in mass protest settings, from the 2020 George Floyd unrest to clashes over immigration enforcement, typically involving property destruction and confrontations with police.
Although uncertainty remains at the margins, the evidence strongly suggests that since roughly 2016, political violence on both the right and the left has reached levels unseen in the United States since the upheavals of the 1960s. These patterns reflect not a single ideology but the deeper forces of violent populism: hardened identities, perceived existential threats, collapsing institutional trust, and elite rhetoric that frames politics as a struggle between enemies rather than fellow citizens.
Much of the public disagreement about whether political violence is rising and who is responsible for it stems not from ideology alone but from competing definitions about what should be counted.
In scholarly literature, political violence is generally defined as the use or credible threat of physical force for political ends. Those ends may include coercion, intimidation, punishment, or symbolic signaling intended to influence public behavior, political outcomes, or institutional authority. Under this definition fall assassination attempts, armed assaults on public officials, bombings, arson attacks, violent intimidation, riots against buildings with explicit political aims, and organized plots to use force against political targets.
Just as important are the exclusions. Political violence does not include ordinary criminal activity lacking political motivation, interpersonal violence driven by private disputes, or lawful protest—even when protests are disruptive, angry, or unlawful. Nor does it include harsh rhetoric alone, however inflammatory, unless it is paired with a credible threat of force. These boundaries matter, because collapsing political violence into crime or protest obscures its distinct causes and consequences.
The hardest problem is determining intent. Political violence is defined not only by what happens but by why it happens—and intent is often ambiguous. When a crowd burns a police precinct, is the act political rebellion, criminal opportunism, or both? When a gunman attacks a synagogue, is the motive ideological antisemitism, personal grievance, or mental illness layered atop political belief? When an individual sends a death threat to a lawmaker, is it expressive rage, partisan trolling, or preparation for real-world violence?
