The attack at the Pelosis’ home was part of a dangerous pattern

IT WAS AROUND 2AM in San Francisco when a man broke in through the back door of Nancy Pelosi’s home. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, and her protective detail of Capitol Police, happened to be in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, her 82-year-old husband, Paul Pelosi, was at home. He was attacked with a hammer. The altercation ended with Mr Pelosi requiring surgery on his skull and right arm. The suspect, a 42-year-old man named David DePape, was arrested and charged with attempted homicide, among other felonies. Preliminary scourings of his online life show a man hopped up on right-wing conspiracies—over the origins of covid-19, the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021, and QAnon, an influential myth system spreading a belief that former president Donald Trump is trying to save America from its secret control by a deep state of cannibals, paedophiles and satanists.

Although the attempt to assassinate Mrs Pelosi may have been amateurish, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as an outlier incident committed by a deranged man. As American politics have grown more feverish, the number of near-misses has been rising at a disturbing pace. In June an armed man incensed at the Supreme Court’s anticipated ruling to overturn Roe v Wade was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative Supreme Court justice who secured his post after highly contentious confirmation hearings. The man was charged with attempted murder. In July another armed man was arrested outside the Seattle home of Pramila Jayapal, a leading progressive Democrat in Congress. The same month a man armed with a knife attacked Lee Zeldin, a Republican congressman running to be governor of New York, when he was on stage.

Threats against law-enforcement officers spiked on right-wing websites in August after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched Mr Trump’s Florida estate for classified documents. Days after the raid, an armed man tried to break into an FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Last week three men were found guilty of a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, in 2020 as retribution for her lockdown restrictions. The Capitol Police has reported a doubling in the number of threats against members of Congress since 2017.

Increasing political violence is an inevitable consequence of increasing partisan loathing. In their recent book “Radical American Partisanship”, the political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason find eye-popping levels of rancour in their surveys. Nearly three-quarters of partisans view their opponents as threats to national security. A clear majority would label the other side as evil. As many as one in five Republicans express support for violence (compared with a not-insignificant one in eight Democrats). Although both Democrats and Republicans express support for political violence, the data show that extremists on the right are much more likely than those on the left to actually commit violent acts.

In the same way that heat promotes the growth of pathogens in a Petri dish, the Trump era accelerated the disturbing divergence of American politics. That is no accident. Mr Trump demonised his enemies, blamed all his failings on various conspiracies and nearly ended the American democratic experiment after he lost an election. His lies, including those about the 2020 election, have found succour in a conservative media ecosystem that has all but abandoned objective journalism and has contributed to the near-complete bifurcation of reality in America. This culminated in the attack on the Capitol, in which the president’s most dedicated supporters were prevented only by sheer luck from killing Ms Pelosi and lynching Mike Pence, then the vice-president.

Political violence has not yet reached the heights seen in the 1960s, when public figures including President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King junior were assassinated. Perhaps that is because personal-protection teams are more effective now than then. But below the highest echelons of power, where such protection is possible, the American political system comprises legions of regular people participating in civic life who are now also under threat in the increasingly febrile environment. School-board members are receiving death threats for the supposed indoctrination of children. The dull but necessary work of election administration has become a new partisan battleground. Last week two self-appointed securers of electoral integrity were filmed standing guard outside a ballot drop-box in Arizona, hiding their faces but showing their handguns.

Militias are a growing feature of American life. Many militia members saw an ally in Mr Trump, and cast off their libertarianism in favour of allegiance to the former president and the Republican Party. Some are seeking elected office. But research by Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, suggests that the larger threat comes from individual actors, such as Mr DePape in San Francisco, who are not known to be affiliated with a specific group, even if they swallow the same conspiracy theories.

“Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed,” Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, said in a memorable press conference in November 2020, when the state was defending the integrity of elections from the attacks of Mr Trump, who narrowly lost there, and his supporters. Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state and chief elections officer, went into hiding; the house of his widowed daughter-in-law was broken into. Rather than expunge that dangerous strain of conspiracism, however, the Republican Party has largely embraced it. For the most extreme partisans, that will inspire more acts of violence. More incidents such as the one at the Pelosi residence are all too likely.■

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