Political violence is poison.
Can we agree on that, if nothing else? In our divided America, can we come to a collective understanding that it’s never worth a human life?
It sort of seems like we can’t. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Reuters said the country saw its “biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.” They cited 213 new cases since the Jan. 6, 2021, capitol insurrection.
For Gen Z, many of whom are coming of voting age and trying to figure out who they are politically, political violence can be especially poisonous. It garners the attention that is easy to mistake for change – especially for people who are young and absorbing politics for the first time through a social media feed.
Events like the Brian Thompson shooting – which might have started as a personal attack but is undeniably connected to a politicized healthcare industry – go viral easily, but they don’t create change on the scale necessary to repair the healthcare system. UnitedHealthcare hasn’t made improvements on behalf of its insured since the shooting.
Similarly, if President-elect Donald Trump’s life had ended in Pennsylvania when his ear was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, it would’ve caused little more than a quick-insert JD Vance campaign – propped up by the same Project 2025 policies as its predecessor.
Still, more frequent and normalized violence, taking place on a world stage before which an impressionable Gen Z sits in the front row, could lead youth to adopt the desperate attitude that violence is the only way to garner enough attention to spark change.
What’s more, it can act as a distractor from actually relevant issues.
An AP VoteCast found that more than half of men under 30 supported Republican candidate Donald Trump in this election, despite showing similar numbers for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. White men in particular showed out for President-elect Trump, with only about four in 10 supporting Vice President Kamala Harris.
A large reason for this switch, according to a write-up on the poll, was his “bombastic demeanor and a policy agenda centered on a more macho understanding of culture.” Podcast-guesting for Joe Rogan and football game appearances contributed to that image. But it was also Trump’s literal image, and one violent moment specifically, that turned young men’s heads during the campaign.
“I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Trump said in his 2024 Republican National Convention address, regarding his attempted assassination.
For the AP, Rafael Struve – the deputy communications director for conservative group Bienvenido – cited that bloody moment as a critical one for Trump’s image among young men.
Those same young men prioritized this “macho” image over their actual policy preferences, which seem to align better with the ideals of the Harris campaign. The same AP VoteCast found that climate change was a significant concern for most young male Trump voters. They wanted more government involvement in healthcare, and they disliked hardline immigration policies.
Spectacle drowning out substance is a theme among Gen Z, a generation that can’t seem to take itself seriously on social media even in the face of death. The internet storm around Luigi Mangione following the Brain Thompson shooting is one particularly flagrant example.
And in demanding our attention and haunting our offhand hallway jokes and sarcastic social media feeds, instances of extreme violence have become the most remarkable political moments in recent memory. That’s dangerous for young minds as they become active members of American democracy, trying to understand how political shifts actually occur.
There’s evidence to support this mental danger. A 2010 study from Notre Dame psychologist E. Mark Cummings and several co-authors qualitatively assessed children in Northern Ireland, where political violence had been frequent for decades. They found that such violence decreases kids’ emotional security in their community and can lead them to internalize the problems they observe around them.
An even scarier piece of evidence: one in five American adults think violence might be necessary to solve political divisions and get the country “back on track,” according to a pre-election PBSNewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. That’s the political atmosphere adolescents are maturing in. That’s the kind of widespread distrust in America’s ability to carefully and democratically repair itself we’re facing.
Widespread distrust already bubbles in the veins of our politics – from our elections to our experts to our balances of power. Pew Research Center found 75% of Americans believe trust has been shrinking among their fellow adults in recent years. That was in 2019, before Jan. 6 rioters ever ran congresspeople out of their confirmation of the 2020 election.
Violent outcries are confirmation of a toxic distrust in the system. Sometimes, that distrust is warranted due to very real flaws. Other times, it stems from fear-mongering, misinformation or conspiracy theories.
But distrust can be fought. It can be fought by reform that allows the government to better understand their constituents so they don’t feel cornered into violence as a means of outcry. It can be fought through anti-misinformation and anti-conspiracy campaigns. It can be fought by rebuilding Americans’ faith in a government for the people.
How much of Gen Z will look back on their early voting years and remember only moments of violence? Jan. 6, the Trump shooting, Brian Thompson: It’s a terrible montage of people and politics at their worst. And it’s a virulent air for youth to breathe as they venture into the political sphere, reaching for their own beliefs and identities.