Everything You Know About Political Violence Is Probably Wrong
Everything You Know About Political Violence Is Probably Wrong
关于政治暴力，你所知道的一切可能都是错的
It could have been a scene from Cape Fear: a quiet evening, an ordinary home, a sudden intrusion by a stranger convinced that the law has betrayed him. 这本可以成为电影《恐怖角》（Cape Fear）中的一个场景：一个宁静的夜晚，一个普通的家庭，一个陌生人突然闯入，他坚信法律已经背叛了他。
In early July 2022, Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and her husband were watching television at their Seattle home when men drove past their house screaming threats: vile, racialized, and unmistakably political. They called the police. The men left. Thirty minutes later, one returned, blasting music and approaching the porch. When officers arrived, they found him armed with a loaded handgun, a round already chambered. A neighbor heard him shout, “Go back to India. I am going to kill you.” 2022年7月初，华盛顿州民主党众议员普拉米拉·贾亚帕尔（Pramila Jayapal）和她的丈夫正在西雅图的家中看电视，这时有人开车经过他们家，大声叫嚣着威胁：言语恶毒、带有种族歧视色彩，且带有明显的政治意图。他们报了警，那些人离开了。三十分钟后，其中一人折返，播放着震耳欲聋的音乐并走向门廊。当警察赶到时，发现他携带了一把已上膛的手枪，且子弹已推入弹膛。一位邻居听到他大喊：“滚回印度去。我要杀了你。”
Jayapal later described the episode not as an aberration but as evidence of a broader transformation in American politics—a climate in which grievance increasingly functions as permission and intimidation is framed as justified political expression. The threats did not stop. Nor is Jayapal alone. For years, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia lived under constant threat as one of Donald Trump’s most aggressive defenders in Congress. She reported hundreds of death threats, largely from ideological opponents. 贾亚帕尔后来将这一事件描述为美国政治更广泛转型的一个证据，而非偶然事件——在这种政治气候下，不满情绪日益成为一种“许可”，而恐吓则被包装成正当的政治表达。威胁并没有停止。贾亚帕尔也并非个例。多年来，佐治亚州众议员玛乔丽·泰勒·格林（Marjorie Taylor Greene）作为唐纳德·特朗普在国会中最激进的捍卫者之一，一直生活在不断的威胁之中。她报告了数百起死亡威胁，大多来自意识形态上的反对者。
But when Greene publicly broke with Trump—over the Epstein files, Gaza, and what “America first” had come to mean—the direction of the threats shifted. After Trump labeled her “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” messages arrived threatening her son by name. One threatened her assassination. Another claimed that a plane ticket had already been purchased. In November 2025, Greene announced her resignation from Congress, citing threats to her family. “I think that comes to a point,” she said, “where any American can look at that and say that’s a high bar and way too much to ask.” 但当格林在爱泼斯坦文件、加沙问题以及“美国优先”的真正含义等问题上公开与特朗普决裂时，威胁的方向发生了转变。在特朗普给她贴上“叛徒玛乔丽·格林”（Marjorie Traitor Greene）的标签后，针对她儿子的威胁信息接踵而至。其中一条威胁要暗杀她，另一条则声称已经买好了机票。2025年11月，格林宣布辞去国会议员职务，理由是她的家人受到了威胁。她说：“我认为这已经到了一个临界点，任何美国人看到这些都会说，这已经超出了底线，要求太高了。”
What Jayapal and Greene have in common is not ideology, temperament, or policy; it is exposure. Both became targets in an era in which political violence is no longer confined to the fringe, no longer clearly condemned by leaders, no longer monopolized by either the right or the left—and increasingly treated as a legitimate instrument of political pressure. 贾亚帕尔和格林的共同点并非意识形态、性格或政策，而是她们都处于“暴露”状态。在一个政治暴力不再局限于边缘地带、不再受到领导人明确谴责、不再被右翼或左翼所垄断，且日益被视为一种合法的政治施压手段的时代，她们二人都成为了目标。
What happened to Jayapal and Greene is no longer exceptional; it is revealing. Their experiences point to a deeper transformation: Political violence has moved closer to the center of American political life, touching elected officials across parties and becoming a recurring feature of contemporary conflict rather than a rare deviation. 发生在贾亚帕尔和格林身上的事已不再是例外，而是具有启示意义。她们的经历指向了一个更深层的转变：政治暴力已向美国政治生活的中心靠拢，波及了各党派的民选官员，并成为当代冲突中反复出现的一种特征，而非罕见的偏差。
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? 自2016年以来，美国人不仅在激烈争论政治暴力是否在上升，还在争论谁该为此负责。一种主流叙事将问题主要归咎于激进右翼：白人至上主义、民兵组织、选举否认论。另一种对立的叙事则坚称，暴力同样强烈地源于激进左翼，表现为骚乱、袭警以及在城市和校园中的有组织破坏活动。这些主张不仅仅是修辞；它们塑造了公众信任、精英行为、执法重点，以及最危险的一点——党派人士是否愿意谴责被他们视为盟友的人所犯下的暴力行为。但证据到底显示了什么？
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. 美国的政治暴力问题既不是单方面的，也不是对称的。综合联邦威胁评估、恐怖主义数据库、抗议事件数据和国会安全记录来看，证据都指向同一个结论：美国的政治暴力在20世纪90年代后的近二十年里有所下降，但从2016年左右开始急剧上升。在那之前的几十年里，政治动机暴力绝大多数集中在极右翼。今天，与右翼和左翼相关的暴力在平衡上更接近，尽管它们采取的形式截然不同。自2016年以来，右翼暴力在频率上显著更高，在致命性上也远超左翼暴力——其目标通常是选举、联邦机构和公职人员；而左翼暴力在群体性抗议场合更为常见，从2020年乔治·弗洛伊德骚乱到围绕移民执法的冲突，通常涉及财产破坏和与警方的对抗。
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. 尽管在边缘地带仍存在不确定性，但证据强烈表明，自2016年左右以来，右翼和左翼的政治暴力已达到美国自20世纪60年代动荡时期以来未见的水平。这些模式反映的不是单一的意识形态，而是暴力民粹主义的深层力量：固化的身份认同、感知到的生存威胁、制度信任的崩塌，以及将政治描绘为敌人之间而非公民同胞之间斗争的精英修辞。
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. 公众对于政治暴力是否在上升以及谁该负责的大部分分歧，不仅仅源于意识形态，还源于对“什么应该被计入”这一问题的定义之争。
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. 在学术文献中，政治暴力通常被定义为为了政治目的而使用或可信地威胁使用武力。这些目的可能包括旨在影响公众行为、政治结果或制度权威的胁迫、恐吓、惩罚或象征性信号。根据这一定义，暗杀企图、对公职人员的武装袭击、爆炸、纵火袭击、暴力恐吓、针对具有明确政治目的的建筑物的骚乱，以及针对政治目标使用武力的有组织阴谋，都属于此类。
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. 同样重要的是排除项。政治暴力不包括缺乏政治动机的普通犯罪活动、由私人纠纷引发的人际暴力，或合法的抗议——即使抗议具有破坏性、愤怒或非法。它也不包括单纯的严厉言辞，无论其多么具有煽动性，除非它伴随着可信的武力威胁。这些界限很重要，因为将政治暴力混同于犯罪或抗议，会掩盖其独特的起因和后果。
The hardest problem is determining intent. Political violence 最困难的问题是确定意图。政治暴力