Are We Living in America’s Assassination Era?

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Most people would agree that the U.S. is experiencing a deep partisan divide. It’s fueling a particularly insidious form of extremism that has resulted in a growing number of violent acts against politicians, judges, and activists, plus their families. Charlie Kirk’s death this week is the latest example, and it prompts the question: Is America in its assassination era?

The question is a long time coming. Back in 2017, white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia for the Unite the Right rally that killed^[2] counterprotester Heather Heyer and injured 19 others. By 2020, the son of Obama-appointed Judge Esther Sales was killed by a self-described Donald Trump volunteer^[3]. Then there was the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, fueled by right-wing extremists, which was connected to the deaths^[4] of four Americans and five police officers. In 2022, a Trump supporter invaded former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her husband. Last year, President Trump dodged two assassination attempts. Thus far in 2025, we’ve seen two Minnesota lawmakers killed^[5] in a targeted attack and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home fire-bombed. This week, Kirk’s death joins this horrifying list.

This isn’t the first time America has experienced an escalation in politically motivated attacks. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a string of high-profile assassinations rocked the country, from President John F. Kennedy to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. How does our modern-day political climate compare? Are we worse off than we were some 60 years ago? Are there lessons from the past we can learn from to help us survive the current moment?

To help answer these questions, I spoke with Matthew Dallek^[6], Ph.D., a political historian and professor of political management at George Washington University. Dallek has written numerous books about extremism and political violence in the U.S. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: Is the U.S. facing a wave of political violence that is just as bad as the 1960s and 1970s?

Matthew Dallek: Yes. In the 1960s it was not just the political assassinations, starting with John F. Kennedy in 1963, but also the waves of violence caused by the social upheavals of the decade, from opposition to the Vietnam War to the white supremacist massive resistance to Civil Rights. I think what the country experienced in the ’60s and early ’70s was a coming apart, a kind of fraying of the institutions and bonds and trust in political and civic leaders that had helped the country endure the Great Depression and World War II. Today also feels, in broad strokes, like an echo of the ’60s, in the sense that Americans are at each other’s throats, and certainly the most active, engaged, and energetic people in politics often view the other side as not just opponents, but as Trump has put it, the “enemy within.” We’re also seeing similar social frictions in the aftermath of the Great Recession with the fierce debates that erupted around COVID protocols, the rise of so-called alternative facts, plus now we have social media that acts as an accelerant to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Unlike in the ’60s and ’70s, where the parties sorted themselves out ideologically, the most conservative Democrat today is going to likely be to the left of the most liberal Republican. So it feels as if, in some ways, we’re still living in the 1960s and ’70s, or at least the legacy of that time and division, alongside a collapse of faith in government and institutions. At one level, you could look at the moment we’re experiencing now as an outgrowth or culmination of that force. On another level, though, it does feel as if the United States, over the past roughly decade, has entered into a new era of political violence that is not, I don’t think, as violent as the ’60s and early ’70s. But you would have to go back to the ’60s and ’70s to find the last time that we experienced so much political violence as we are now.

Do scholars have a formula that looks for specific criteria to determine whether a society is experiencing a moment of high political violence?

I don’t have a specific formula in mind, but I have a series of anecdotes and data points that lead me to that conclusion. One is that the threats against lawmakers^[7] at the national and state level have rocketed upward in recent years, and threats against judges^[8] have also gone through the roof. We have also seen a steady series of high-profile acts of political violence that feel akin to the 1960s, whether it’s the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, arsonist attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, obviously the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk. We could go on and on, and the reaction in the country to these acts of political violence, and I think that’s what we’re seeing now, feels very much like the reaction in the ’60s where acts of violence generated more division, rather than, say, the Oklahoma City bombing^[9]. That killed 168 Americans and led to a fairly impressive condemnation from various quarters. It was led by Bill Clinton, but we saw both parties, many aspects of civil society, pushing back on extremist ideas and elements.

It’s another metric that’s hard to quantify, but extremists feel more empowered. They seem to be taking bolder and bolder steps and are often in positions of power and authority. Certainly, I think that’s true on the American right, but there are clearly those on the American left too. Also in the ’60s, there was a group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and they were a violent extremist anti-war group considered to be at the fringe. But increasingly, as the ’60s wore on and bled into the early ’70s, the anti movement became more fringy, radicalized, and violent. I see a similar process at work now, where radical ideas and groups have a certain amount of cachet and momentum. Now, we have Steve Bannon^[10] saying we’re at war, Jesse Watters^[11] saying this is war, and Enrique Tarrio^[12] tweeting out in support of [domestic] war.

How did the U.S. come out of that era of political violence in the 1960s and ’70s?

I think, not just in the ’60s and ’70s, but throughout American history, where political violence has ebbed and flowed, a couple things have happened. One is that the violence burned itself out; people got tired of it, and the issues that were inflaming the violence didn’t necessarily disappear, but they became less salient for a lot of people. For example, the Vietnam War wound down and no longer was this gaping wound on the body politic. The Civil Rights Movement, which was an unfinished revolution but did notch major achievements, became more or less accepted as part of America’s social fabric. And we no longer experienced as a country the kind of white mobs who attacked the nine Arkansas high school students, known as the Little Rock Nine, or the level of white supremacist bombings in the ’60s and ’70s also petered out.

However, there are ways in which I think institutions like mass media had more authority in the ’60s and ’70s and civic organizations like the NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, Americans for Democratic Action, and other powerful voices within both parties pushed back successfully on the extremists. They condemned them on a consistent basis and they marginalized them. They made the case to the country that extremists were outside the bounds of where politics should be. It was highly imperfect, but I think that that also had an effect in many ways because extremist groups and ideas were discredited. They were seen as fringe. And then the system was more effective by the early to mid-’70s. After Watergate, when Richard Nixon was forced to leave, we had a series of presidents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, whatever their flaws, I think that they were generally interested in trying to present a kind of united front to the country. I’m not saying that they were perfect uniters, but I think that they had that aspiration, and that helped.

It’s very hard to take neat lessons because the country is just so different now. But sure, there is hope that the violence can burn itself out, that people will become so revolted by it and it becomes so condemned that one day, the voice of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who had a sane and rational response yesterday that called for calm on all sides and condemned political violence from any actor, that those kinds of sane and rational voices will, if not supplant, be more competitive with the far more inflammatory voices [like] Trump, who simply blames “the radical left” for all the evils in the country. If the political system and other institutions can be reformed too, so that they are seen to be working better for Americans, that could be helpful. That will tamp down some of the anger. And some of the issues like immigration, for example, may no longer be the flash point that they have been in recent times. So I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, but I do think that there are ways in which we can see that the country has lived through violent times, like the Civil War, where more than 500,000 Americans were killed. We’ve also lived through the turmoil of the 1960s and experienced all kinds of turbulence in other areas, and survived it. I’m not totally pessimistic, and I think we can see ways that the country can get out of this cycle over the medium and long term.

One major difference between our current day and the 1960s and ’70s is the presence of social media. It’s how Kirk rose to prominence and where numerous political influencers helm massive platforms. How does that factor into political violence?

It functions as an accelerant to political violence. I don’t know that it is the root cause of it. If we had social media in the 1960s, it could have been even bloodier and a lot more violent than what we saw. The phrase from the late-1960s anti–Vietnam War movement, “The whole world is watching^[14],” is on steroids now with social media, because everybody sees the terrible videos of political assassinations. They get circulated on an endless loop in real time and those images can both revolt but also radicalize. On social media, people write anonymously, or sometimes not anonymously, and call for violent action. Social media has a way of exacerbating preexisting social tensions and divisions, making it easier to dehumanize the other side and engage in a kind of verbal warfare.

What’s your assessment of how right-wing communities view political violence?

My sense is that what Donald Trump said in his Oval Office address^[19] resonates with a lot of Kirk’s supporters. He claimed the primary problem is the American left, Antifa, this vicious, radical communist left that is calling the right fascists and Nazis. This is obviously a one-sided view, but I think what Trump said reflects a significant portion of how his base acts and feels. The problem here is that if each side is blaming each other, it’s very hard to have any kind of dialogue. However, I was struck by Gov. Cox of Utah, who talked about political violence in terms that transcended partisanship, but he felt like one of the few leaders to do so. I think that is worrisome. Over the past decade, more of the political violence has been coming from the right, whereas in the ’60s and ’70s, more of it was coming from the left. Of course, no side has a monopoly on it, but I think it’s a somewhat different dynamic than what the country experienced in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

What’s the right way to handle these brazen acts of political violence?

There isn’t a specific formula that one can clearly pull out, but if we look at what New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said, where he condemned political violence, along with what Gov. Cox of Utah said, I think that that is the right way. Also think back to George W. Bush going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., days after 9/11 and saying “Islam is peace,” and Bill Clinton going to Oklahoma City after the bombing. And probably the greatest speech of his presidential campaign was Robert F. Kennedy’s speech after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. All of these things, I think, are sources of inspiration that can give Americans a bit of solace in a really dark time.^{[20][21][22][23]}

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