Section II: The Real Internal Threat
American politics in 2026 is not merely contentious. It is structurally hostile in ways that political scientists can measure. The most cited longitudinal evidence comes from the American National Election Studies, which since 1978 has asked Americans to rate the parties on a feeling thermometer running from zero (very cold) to one hundred (very warm). In 1980, partisans on each side rated the other party near 45 — chilly, but not hostile. By 2020, both Republicans and Democrats rated the opposing party in the low 20s, the coldest readings in the survey's history, and the share of partisans giving the other party the lowest possible score of zero had climbed from roughly 8 percent in 2000 to about 40 percent by 2020 (Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra, & Westwood, 2019; Pew Research Center, 2022).
Pew Research has documented the moral framing that now drives those numbers. In its 2022 study of partisan animosity, Pew found that 72 percent of Republicans say Democrats are more immoral than other Americans, and 63 percent of Democrats say the same about Republicans. About 72 percent and 64 percent respectively describe the other side as more dishonest, and majorities now say the other party is not merely wrong but a threat to the nation's well-being (Pew Research Center, 2022). In 2016, only about half of partisans held that threat view; by 2022 it was roughly 70 percent on each side. When two-thirds of each side regards the other as an existential threat, the country has stopped being a political competition and become something closer to a low-grade civic emergency.
The academic name for this is affective polarization, a term coined by Stanford's Shanto Iyengar and colleagues. What divides Americans is no longer primarily ideology — most Americans hold a mix of liberal and conservative positions on specific issues — but emotion and identity. We have come to dislike the people on the other side more than we disagree with their policies. The 2019 follow-up review in the Annual Review of Political Science extended the finding: Americans now discriminate against members of the opposing party in hiring decisions, dating preferences, and even neighborhood choice — patterns that twenty years ago were detectable only on race and religion (Iyengar et al., 2019). That is the rule of our politics now. The opposite-position reflex — whatever they're for, I'm against — has become so durable that it is the first principle of American partisan life, and very nearly the only one.
The Right and the Left?
Before going any further, it is worth pausing on the vocabulary itself. The political language we now use to sort almost every public question — left versus right — is barely older than the United States itself, and its origin is almost embarrassingly literal. It refers to where people sat.
In May 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI convened the Estates-General at Versailles. When the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly on June 17, 1789, the new revolutionary legislature faced an immediate practical problem: how to seat itself in a hall now occupied by deputies who held radically incompatible views. Deputies who supported the king, the established Church, and the traditional social hierarchy clustered to the right of the presiding officer. Deputies who favored deeper reform sat to the left. Baron de Gauville, a conservative deputy, wrote in his memoirs that the partisans of the king grouped themselves to the right "to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that took place at the opposite side" (cited in Schama, 1989). The arrangement, in other words, began as a matter of acoustic and physical self-protection.
By the early 1790s, la droite and la gauche had been promoted from descriptions of seating to metonyms for ideological position. The Revolutions of 1848 exported the terminology to other European parliaments. The terms entered American political vocabulary surprisingly late — they began to appear in American journalism and political science in the early twentieth century, propelled by the translation of European socialist literature in the 1900s and 1910s and journalistic adoption during the New Deal era.
A persistent oddity of the original French seating arrangement deserves notice. In the National Assembly, almost no one sat in the middle. The hall was structured for confrontation, not mediation. The center, as a stable, electorally durable political position, is largely a nineteenth-century invention — a product of mature parliamentary systems in which a swing bloc could extract concessions from both extremes. It is worth keeping this lineage in mind when contemporary commentators speak of the center as if it were a natural feature of political space rather than an artifact of particular institutional arrangements. The American constitutional system was designed before the left-right vocabulary existed, and it shows: our institutions do not assume two coherent ideological blocks. They assume a roiling mass of factions, regions, and interests, channeled and counterbalanced.
Modern political science has long understood that the left-right axis is a one-dimensional projection of a multi-dimensional political space. The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map plots societies along two orthogonal axes (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). The Nolan Chart separates economic freedom from personal freedom. Why does the simplification persist? Because it is operationally useful. Empirical work by Poole and Rosenthal using roll-call data has shown that the great majority of variance in congressional voting can be explained by a single dimension (Poole & Rosenthal, 1997). The left-right axis survives not because it is true but because it is the smallest model that gets most of the work done. The price we pay is that anyone who does not fit the model — and most Americans do not — gets forced into one camp or the other, and the third party or center question gets dismissed before it can be examined on its merits. Section IV returns to this honestly.
Party Goals and Representation
Honest fairness requires acknowledging that the procedural cynicism in Washington is a bipartisan inheritance, not a one-sided sin. On October 23, 2010, in an interview with National Journal's Major Garrett, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered what may be the most quoted articulation of pure power politics in the modern era:
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
— Mitch McConnell, National Journal, October 23, 2010
McConnell did not deny saying it; he later defended it on the Senate floor as a clarifying statement of political reality. Whatever one thinks of the strategy, it was an explicit subordination of governance to electoral outcomes — by the leader of the upper chamber, on the record.
The same critique attaches to Democrats. On March 9, 2010, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the National Association of Counties' Legislative Conference, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy" (Pelosi, 2010). Pelosi's defenders correctly note that the longer quotation is somewhat less damning than the soundbite — she meant that the policy benefits would only become tangible after implementation, and that opponents' fog was distorting the legislative text. Fair enough. But the soundbite endured because it landed on something real: a 2,400-page bill was about to become law before most members of either chamber had read it in full, and the Speaker was openly saying the politics had to come first. Both quotes — McConnell's and Pelosi's — should be cited together, because they expose the same underlying disease in different costumes.
The filibuster offers the cleanest case study in bipartisan procedural opportunism. In 2005, when Democrats were filibustering President Bush's judicial nominees, Republican leader Bill Frist threatened the nuclear option, and then-Senator Joe Biden warned this would be "the most consequential decision any member will make in his or her tenure." By 2013, with the parties reversed, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the nuclear option to lower the threshold for non-Supreme Court judicial confirmations to a simple majority. In 2017, with the parties reversed again, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominations to confirm Neil Gorsuch (Kane, 2017). Each side did exactly what the other side had just condemned, and each side condemned the other for doing it. Neither party gets the moral high ground.
Election-result rejection is symmetric too, even though the intensities differ. After 2016, Hillary Clinton repeatedly described the result as illegitimate. In a May 2017 Recode interview she said her opponent had been "engaged in a successful effort to suppress the vote"; in a 2019 NPR appearance she said the 2016 election was "stolen" from her. After 2020, Donald Trump made the rejection of the result the central organizing claim of his post-presidency, with consequences that included the events of January 6 and more than 60 court losses. The two cases are not morally equivalent — Clinton conceded on election night and attended the inauguration; Trump did neither, and the second case ended in a Capitol assault. But the rhetoric of "the election was stolen" did not begin in 2020, and the partisan inclination to deny unfavorable outcomes is bipartisan in kind even where it is not bipartisan in degree.
Underneath the rhetoric is the structural fact of who members of Congress actually represent. Donor-funded campaign infrastructure, primary electorates dominated by the ideologically committed, and geographically sorted safe districts have produced a Congress whose incentives point sharply away from the median constituent and toward the median primary voter and donor. The result is gridlock punctuated by performative outrage. According to the Pew Research Center's analysis of Congressional Research Service data, the 80th Congress (1947–48) passed 906 substantive laws; the 116th Congress (2019–20) passed 344; the 117th passed 365; the 118th is on pace to be one of the least productive in modern history (DeSilver, 2024). The institution the founders designed as the engine of self-government is producing less government with each decade, even as the country's problems get harder.
The Left and the Extreme Left — Recent Years
A patriotic and fair examination has to be honest about both flanks. On the left, the past four years have produced specific incidents and rhetoric that should trouble anyone who values civility and the rule of law — and I include myself in that company.
In Congress, the so-called Squad — a small group of progressive House Democrats — has produced statements and votes that even sympathetic observers describe as inflammatory. Representative Ilhan Omar was formally censured by the House in February 2023 (vote 218-211) and removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for past comments characterized by colleagues from both parties as antisemitic, including her 2019 tweet implying that American support for Israel was "all about the Benjamins" (Edmondson, 2023). Representative Rashida Tlaib drew widespread condemnation, including from her own party leadership, for using the phrase "from the river to the sea" in a November 2023 video, a slogan that many Jewish Americans interpret as a call for the elimination of Israel; the House formally censured her by a 234-188 vote (Sotomayor & Roubein, 2023).
The 2024 campus protests over the war in Gaza produced multi-week encampments at Columbia, UCLA, MIT, and dozens of other universities. At Columbia, demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall on the night of April 30, 2024, forcing university leadership to call in the New York Police Department; more than 100 arrests followed (Otterman & Bromwich, 2024). At UCLA, a counter-protest by pro-Israel activists turned violent in the early hours of May 1, 2024, before police intervened. Critics on the right and the center pointed out that some of the rhetoric at these protests — calls for intifada or for the destruction of Zionists — crossed from political protest into harassment or incitement. Critics on the left correctly noted that the vast majority of demonstrators were peaceful and that the underlying grievance — civilian deaths in Gaza — is a legitimate subject of political concern. Both observations can be true.
The 2020 protests following George Floyd's death produced the most expensive civil-disorder insurance event in American history. Property Claim Services, a unit of Verisk Analytics that tracks insurance industry data, reported that paid insurance claims from arson, vandalism, and looting during the May–June 2020 unrest reached between one and two billion dollars — the first multi-state civil disorder catastrophe to exceed one billion (Kingson, 2020). The Associated Press, the Washington Post, and USA Today documented at least 19 deaths directly tied to the protests and surrounding violence (Beckett, 2020). The vast majority of demonstrations were peaceful — the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that about 93 percent of more than 7,750 BLM-linked demonstrations in 2020 involved no violence or destructive activity (Kishi & Jones, 2020). But 7 percent of 7,750 demonstrations is still 542 events with serious incidents, which is not a small number, and the property damage was real. The Minneapolis Third Precinct of the city police was burned to the ground on May 28, 2020. The Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland sustained months of attack from May through October.
The "defund the police" slogan emerged in earnest during the summer of 2020 and was embraced by a number of progressive elected officials, including Representatives Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. The policy implications were politically catastrophic for Democrats: post-2020 surveys found that the slogan was unpopular with about 80 percent of Americans, including majorities of Black Americans (Gallup, 2021). By 2022, most national Democrats — including President Biden, who in his 2022 State of the Union said "fund the police" — had publicly distanced themselves from the phrase. House Majority Whip James Clyburn called the slogan one of the most damaging political mistakes of the cycle.
President Biden's September 1, 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia — the Battle for the Soul of the Nation address — belongs in this accounting. Standing before a backdrop bathed in red lighting, flanked by two Marines, Biden said: "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic" (Biden, 2022). He was careful to distinguish MAGA Republicans from "mainstream Republicans" he had worked with — a distinction conservatives largely felt was either insincere or impossible to apply in practice. Republicans criticized the speech as the most divisive presidential address in modern memory. Whatever one thinks of the substance, the visual staging combined with the rhetoric — a sitting president describing tens of millions of his fellow citizens as a threat to the soul of the nation — deserves to be on the ledger.
Hillary Clinton's post-2016 statements need to be in this ledger too. In a May 2017 Recode interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Clinton said her opponent had been "engaged in a successful effort to suppress the vote" and described the 2016 election as fundamentally illegitimate. In a 2019 NPR appearance, she said the 2016 election was "stolen" from her. Clinton conceded on election night and attended the inauguration — the ritual conservatives often credit and progressives often underestimate — and the moral distance between her conduct and Trump's post-2020 conduct is real and worth preserving. But the rhetorical claim that the election was stolen did not enter American political vocabulary in 2020. It was used by the losing Democratic nominee in 2016, and a fair-minded conservative who wants the moral high ground on election acceptance should also be willing to say it.
Antifa-coded violence in 2020–2023 deserves its own paragraph in this ledger and not just a passing mention. The Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland sustained more than 100 consecutive nights of attack between May and October 2020, with federal officers reporting over 300 injuries during operations to defend the building (DOJ Office of Inspector General, 2022). FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in September 2020 that antifa was "more of an ideology or movement" but that the bureau was actively investigating "violent anarchist extremists" within it (Wray, 2020). The 2023 Atlanta Stop Cop City confrontations escalated when activists occupied a forested police training facility site; a January 2023 confrontation with state troopers resulted in the death of activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán ("Tortuguita") and the wounding of a Georgia State Patrol officer. State prosecutors subsequently charged 61 activists under Georgia's RICO statute — a sweeping use of organized-crime law against protest activity that civil liberties groups including the ACLU criticized as overreach. The RICO charges are a separate concern; the underlying property destruction and the trooper shooting are not.
Nicholas Roske's June 8, 2022 attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh belongs in this section, even though I treat the case in more detail in Section III. Three weeks before the Dobbs decision was issued, Roske flew from Los Angeles to Washington with a Glock 17, ammunition, a tactical knife, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape, and tools for breaking and entering, and called 911 from outside Justice Kavanaugh's home to confess his intent to kill the justice and then commit suicide. Roske's motive, as he described it to investigators, was the upcoming abortion ruling and the Uvalde school shooting. He pleaded guilty in April 2025 and was sentenced in October 2025 to 97 months in federal prison (U.S. Department of Justice, 2025). The case is one of the most serious individual acts of attempted political violence against a federal official in modern American history, and it was a left-coded attack — driven by opposition to the conservative majority's anticipated ruling on abortion. Members of Congress who downplayed it as a mental-health episode were doing the same kind of motivated discounting that they correctly criticize when it is applied to right-coded incidents.
The Right and the Extreme Right — Recent Years
The right-wing examples are equally documented and equally serious, and intellectual honesty requires giving them the same weight and the same column inches as the left-wing examples above. I am a conservative. That makes this section harder to write, not easier. It also makes it more necessary.
The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is the single most consequential incident of domestic political violence in modern American history. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, in its 43-month update issued in August 2024, reported that more than 1,488 defendants had been charged across nearly all 50 states; approximately 944 had been sentenced; 547 had been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers; and over 140 police officers had been assaulted during the riot (U.S. Department of Justice, 2024). Five people died in connection with the events of that day. In the weeks and months that followed, four officers who had defended the Capitol — Jeffrey Smith, Howard Liebengood, Gunther Hashida, and Kyle DeFreytag — died by suicide (Sprunt, 2021). These deaths are part of the moral ledger of January 6, even where the causal chains are complex.
The Proud Boys leadership convictions are not in dispute. On September 5, 2023, Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison — the longest sentence handed down for any January 6 defendant — after a jury convicted him of seditious conspiracy (Hsu & Weiner, 2023). His co-defendants Ethan Nordean (18 years), Joseph Biggs (17 years), Zachary Rehl (15 years), and Dominic Pezzola (10 years) were sentenced separately. The Oath Keepers leadership followed the same trajectory: on May 25, 2023, founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy, with Judge Amit Mehta applying a terrorism enhancement to the guidelines — the first time a January 6 sentencing court had done so (Hsu, 2023). Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs received 12 years the same day. These were not procedural matters or trespass charges. They were findings, by juries, that the defendants had conspired to use force against the United States government — the definition of sedition under 18 U.S.C. section 2384.
Trump's August 15, 2017 press conference following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville is regularly miscited in both directions, so the full quotation matters. After saying that the deadly violence in Charlottesville involved "many sides," Trump told reporters: "You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park, from Robert E. Lee to another name" (Holan, 2019). Defenders correctly note that Trump went on to say he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said "should be condemned totally." Critics correctly note that he applied moral equivalence between torch-bearing white nationalists chanting "Jews will not replace us" and counter-protesters, one of whom — Heather Heyer — was murdered the next day by an avowed neo-Nazi who drove his car into the crowd. The full quotation does not exonerate the moral equivalence; it documents it more precisely.
On November 11, 2023 — Veterans Day weekend — at a rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, former President Trump said:
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
— Donald Trump, Claremont, New Hampshire, November 11, 2023
The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and historians including Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU and Timothy Snyder of Yale immediately drew comparisons to the dehumanizing language of 1930s European fascism — Untermenschen, Ungeziefer — used to describe political opponents (Snyder, 2023). Whatever one's political loyalties, vermin is a word whose historical resonance is unambiguous and uncomfortable. A presidential candidate from the party of Lincoln does not need to reach for the vocabulary of Goebbels to make a political point.
Election denialism is the unifying right-wing thread. Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through the present, Donald Trump has maintained that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through massive fraud. More than 60 federal and state lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allied parties were dismissed or decided against the campaign, including by judges Trump himself had appointed (Bump, 2020). The Trump-appointed Attorney General, William Barr, told the Associated Press on December 1, 2020, that the Department of Justice had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election" (Tucker & Balsamo, 2020). The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, then led by Trump appointee Christopher Krebs, called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history" — for which Trump fired him by tweet (CISA, 2020). The Republican Secretaries of State of Georgia (Brad Raffensperger) and Arizona, all elected Republicans, all of whom voted for Trump, testified or publicly refused to act on requests to overturn results in their states.
Reuters's reporting on threats to election officials documented the systemic nature of the intimidation. In a four-part investigative series beginning in June 2021 and continuing through 2023, Reuters identified more than 800 menacing communications to election officials in 12 battleground states, of which at least 100 met the federal threshold for criminal threats (Eisler, Layne, Parker, & So, 2021). Few resulted in arrests. Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia Secretary of State, received sexualized death threats after her husband refused Trump's request to "find 11,780 votes." The FBI and DOJ created an Election Threats Task Force in June 2021 in response.
Right-wing extremist organizations have continued to act in the open. On June 11, 2022, 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested near a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with riot shields, smoke grenades, and an operational plan drawn up by their leader Thomas Rousseau (Sottile, 2022). Seven members were ultimately convicted of conspiracy to riot. The Buffalo, New York supermarket shooting on May 14, 2022 — in which a self-described white supremacist murdered 10 Black shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market — produced a 180-page manifesto that explicitly cited the great replacement theory (Feuer, 2022). A New York Times analysis found that replacement had been invoked in more than 400 Tucker Carlson episodes on Fox News (Confessore & Yourish, 2022). Carlson's defenders responded that he had never explicitly endorsed racial violence and that demographic replacement was a legitimate policy concern about immigration; critics responded that the shooter clearly believed otherwise.
An Honest Asymmetry Note
A patriotic, fair paper must say the hard thing: where the empirical record is asymmetric, it has to be reported as asymmetric, in whichever direction the evidence points.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, under terrorism researcher Seth Jones, has compiled the most-cited dataset on U.S. domestic terrorism. CSIS data show that, between 1994 and 2020, right-wing extremists accounted for the largest share of terrorist plots and attacks in the United States, and that the right-wing share grew sharply in the late 2010s. In 2019, CSIS found right-wing extremists responsible for about two-thirds of attacks and plots; in the first five months of 2020, more than 90 percent (Jones, 2020). Anarchist, antifascist, and other left-wing extremists accounted for roughly 20 percent of plots and attacks in 2020 — a notable increase from prior years, but still significantly below the right-wing share by these measures. Lethal mass-casualty events have clustered on the right-wing side over the past decade: Tree of Life synagogue (Pittsburgh, 2018, 11 dead); El Paso Walmart (2019, 23 dead); Buffalo Tops Friendly Market (2022, 10 dead). On the left-wing side, the 2017 Steve Scalise shooting at a GOP congressional baseball practice and the 2022 Nicholas Roske attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh are the most serious individual incidents.
On the other side of the ledger, property destruction and arson during the 2020 unrest vastly exceeded any comparable right-wing activity in the same period. The one-to-two-billion-dollar figure in insured property losses from the 2020 protests was unprecedented; the equivalent number for right-wing actions during the same months was a small fraction of that. The honest picture is: lethal organized terrorist incidents tilt right-wing; large-scale property destruction tilts left-wing. The Just Security review of CSIS data (Pape, 2024) emphasizes that what you count matters — incidents, plots, fatalities, arrests, property damage, and lone-actor versus organized-cell measures all produce somewhat different rank orders. Both sides have produced political violence; both sides have produced extremist organizations; both sides have produced rhetoric that crossed from disagreement into dehumanization. No American who loves this country gets to look at this evidence and conclude that their side has clean hands.