“It’s Probably as Bad as It Can Get”: A Conversation with Lilliana Mason

By Greg Berman

In the aftermath of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the threat of political violence has become a topic of urgent concern in the United States. While public support for political violence remains low—according to Sean Westwood of the Polarization Research Lab, fewer than 2 percent of Americans believe that political murder is acceptable—even isolated incidence of political violence can have a corrosive effect. 

According to political scientist Lilliana Mason, political violence amounts to a rejection of democracy. “If a person has used violence to achieve a political goal, then they’ve given up on the democratic process,” says Mason, “Instead, they’re trying to use force to affect government.”

Mason, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has devoted her professional career to the study of American partisanship. In her first book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, she looked at the social sorting of Democrats and Republicans into increasingly hostile parties. This was followed by Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (co-authored with Nathan P. Kalmoe), which used national opinion surveys to document the spread of radical beliefs among Americans, both left and right.  

Mason comes away from her research with deep concerns about the state of American democracy. According to Mason and Kalmoe, “the data is undeniable: although public support for political violence is increasing across the partisan spectrum, people on the Right are far likelier to translate this sentiment into real-world, violent action.” 

Mason recently sat down with Greg Berman, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s distinguished fellow of practice, to discuss her research. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: In recent years, we have seen two assassination attempts on Donald Trump and the storming of the US Capitol. This suggests to me that we’re currently in a very dark place. On the other hand, if you zoom out a little bit, there have certainly been periods in American history where political violence was much more widespread than it is today. I guess my question is: How worried should we be about polarization and political violence in our country right now? 

Lilliana Mason: In terms of polarization, it’s probably as bad as it can get. The way that we think about each other as partisans is deeply distrustful and even vilifying and dehumanizing. Having vilifying and dehumanizing beliefs about another group doesn’t always lead to mass violence, but when mass violence does occur, those beliefs are usually there beforehand. 

Now, we still have relatively strong norms against political violence in the US. Even in the worst numbers that we find, there is still something like 80 percent of Americans who think that violence should never be used to achieve political goals. But the worrisome part is that we went from 7 percent of people approving of political violence in 2017 to 20 percent today. That’s potentially significant. 

Let’s be clear: the people who do engage in political violence are generally unwell people. In some cases, like the assassination attempt against Trump [in Pennsylvania], it was clearly a plea for attention—that kid could just as easily have been a school shooter. The guy in Minnesota [who killed a lawmaker and her husband] was also having a mental health event. I think that what political polarization does is take people who are already unstable and point them in the direction of politics. They are being fed information that makes them believe that there’s an existential threat coming from the other side. That’s what creates political violence. 

I think that what political polarization does is take people who are already unstable and point them in the direction of politics. They are being fed information that makes them believe that there's an existential threat coming from the other side. That’s what creates political violence.

In your book, Radical American Partisanship, you compare Democrats and Republicans across a variety of measures and find that there’s not much difference in terms of radicalization. But you don’t believe that both parties are equally responsible for our current political situation. Walk me through the difference that you see between the two parties. 

We do see similar levels of vilifying attitudes in the electorate as a whole. But when it comes to actual violent political events, they’re just unimaginably more prevalent on the right. Right-wing domestic terrorism has outpaced all other kinds of domestic terrorism in the United States.

We can’t exactly identify why, but there does seem to be pretty clear evidence that political rhetoric on the right is much more vilifying than rhetoric on the left. You find a lot more far-right media that explicitly says things like, “Democrats are violent criminals, and they’re coming to hurt your family.” The types of storylines that we see in right-wing media are just much more extreme in terms of their intent to vilify Democrats and people on the left in general. 

The other thing that I would say is that we know that approval of political violence is correlated with anti-pluralistic and anti-egalitarian attitudes. Racism, Christian nationalism, replacement theory… those types of attitudes tend to be associated with approval of political violence. And those kinds of attitudes are more prevalent on the right. 

The reason that Democrats and Republicans hate each other right now is that they’re having a fight about questions that are truly existential. The people who are the most vilifying and dehumanizing of their opponents are Republicans who are high in racial resentment and Democrats who are low in racial resentment. These Republicans say that Democrats are subhuman because they’re minorities. And the Democrats say that Republicans are subhuman because they’re racist. The fact that vilifying attitudes are equally prevalent on both sides doesn’t mean that the moral argument is the same on both sides. The current project of the Right is to undo our pluralistic, multi-ethnic democracy. And so this isn’t just a normal political fight. 

What impact, if any, has Trump had on all of this?

In a 2021 American Political Science Review article I wrote with some co-authors, I looked at a unique data set. Basically, in 2011, something like nine thousand people were interviewed, and then they were reinterviewed in 2016, 17, 18, 19, and 20. 2011 was before Trump was a major political figure, so this enabled us to ask a basic question: Did Trump encourage people to be more racist or did Trump bring already racist people into the Republican Party? And I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s the latter. The people who liked Trump in 2018, when you go back to 2011 and ask what they had in common, you see that those people were much more likely to dislike traditionally marginalized groups like Latinos, Muslims, African Americans, and LGBT people. Trump brought those people into the Republican Party. They were largely independents in 2011. Trump made the Republican Party a comfortable place for them. 

Don’t get me wrong: these attitudes existed in the Republican Party before Trump, but they tended to be the minority of the party before he came in. When Trump came in, he essentially empowered the ethno-nationalist faction of Americans. That faction is now in control of one of our political parties. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if we had more than two political parties, but because we only have two, they can control the levers of government. 

It feels like there is a lot of anger out there at the moment. It is unclear to me to what extent Trump has created this problem and to what extent he is a symptom of this problem. 

The problem definitely didn’t start with Trump. You can go back to Rush Limbaugh, who said things like “The Democrats are evil and they’re coming to get you and your family.” That type of rhetoric became really popular in the 1980s when Limbaugh had his AM radio show. 

And then, when the Republican majority came into power in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich had the GOPAC memo, where he basically laid out a vocabulary list of words that Republicans should use to describe Democrats. And that really did change the tenor of how political leaders talked. Before Gingrich, it was considered kind of uncouth to use that type of language. 

And then, of course, in 1996, we get Fox News. In the beginning, Fox News was not explicitly a project about vilifying the Left and pushing right-wing talking points, but by 2001, it had become a very explicitly pro-Republican news source. 

So I don’t think that Trump started it. I think that he is an outgrowth of decades of extremist right-wing rhetoric. 

I’ve always taken some comfort from issue polling, which suggests that Americans are actually not that far apart ideologically, even when it comes to controversial issues. But in Uncivil Agreement, you argue that partisans don’t have to hold extreme positions in order to grow increasingly biased against their political opponents. Walk me through how that works. 

A while ago, I worked on some experiments where I had people read blog posts that threatened either their issue positions or the status of their political party. So one group of blog posts said things like “If this person is elected, we’re not going to have abortion rights anymore” or “We’re not going to have health care anymore.” Another set said things like, “If this person is elected, no one is going to like Democrats anymore. Everyone is going to hate us and we’re going to lose elections.” And what we found was that the partisan messages make people a lot angrier than the issue-based messages. 

I have also looked at the extremity of people’s issue positions versus the strength of their identification with the label “liberal” or “conservative.” What I found was that if someone identifies really strongly with one of those labels, then they really hate people in the other ideological category, regardless of what their policy attitudes are. I looked specifically at the most liberal people who nonetheless identify as conservative. These are people who hold liberal policy preferences, but they identify as conservative. That identification still makes them hate liberals, even though they hold very similar policy preferences.

What most of the data show is that we do have a lot of policy preferences in common. There are huge proportions of Americans that agree on even divisive issues like abortion and guns. So we have a lot of common ground, but we deeply hate each other. And that’s based in identity. 

The reason that Democrats and Republicans hate each other right now is that they're having a fight about questions that are truly existential.

One of the themes that runs through your work is a concern about social sorting and how our political parties are overlapping with other categories like geography and gender. Given this, I’m wondering how you read the results of the most recent presidential election. The exit polls suggest that Trump was actually a force for racial depolarization, attracting greater numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian American voters to the Republican Party. 

Just being a member of a minority group doesn’t mean that you don’t dislike other minorities. Whatever resentments you might have against other groups of people, Trump activated those. I think the reality is that there are plenty of Black Americans who don’t like LGBT people. There are plenty of Muslims who don’t like LGBT people. There are plenty of Latinos that don’t like Black people. 

What I’ve found in my more recent research is that the people who voted for Trump in 2024 were really motivated by attitudes about the appropriate roles of men and women in society. A lot of people, despite being a member of a racial minority group, voted for Trump on this basis. They were not voting based on the interests of their racial group, but on the interests of their gender group. The people of color that were voting for Trump were generally men. 

Men of all races are listening to the manosphere bro podcasts, which really like Trump. They like the way that he talks. They think he’s funny. Bloomberg did a really good analysis of the content of the nine most popular bro podcasts in the year leading up to the election. And they basically found that, as we got closer to the election, these podcasts started talking more about transgender issues and about distrusting medical science and about how the economy was terrible. These podcasts are disproportionately listened to by men of all races. So the stories that these people were hearing were stories that were about how you can’t trust the establishment and you should be worried about the economy and that Trump is going to be able to fix all that. 

How much do you blame social media for our current political environment? 

I think social media has some responsibility, for sure. Particularly algorithmic social media. Because we know that in the two weeks before the election in 2020, Facebook changed their algorithm to promote happy news instead of angry things. And they lost engagement. So they changed it back after the election. 

To the extent that we are being rewarded for being angry all the time on social media, I think that’s definitely making things worse. It’s actively changing norms. Now the norm is to be extremely rude and harassing rather than the traditional way of thinking about politics, which was that you have to be serious when you’re talking about the government. 

It’s like the kids have taken over the elementary school, like the principal is gone. And so we’re just going to get rid of all the rules. Trump’s approach was basically, “I’m just going to say all the things that you’re not supposed to say. And that’s going to be really fun.” There’s probably some connection with social media, but I think that political leadership still has a lot to do with it. I don’t think that social media alone would have done this if we didn’t have political leaders willing to behave this way. It’s probably symbiotic in some way. 

In recent months, we’ve seen a few prominent examples of left-wing political violence, including the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, as well as acts of violence against Jews that seem to have been motivated by the war in Gaza. Are you concerned that we could be on the brink of more left-wing political violence?

The antisemitic violence is not surprising to me in that the language used to describe what’s happening in Gaza is very similar to the kind of existential language that is prevalent in right-wing, conspiracy theorist circles. It’s about genocide. It’s about good versus evil. You know, you cannot compromise with evil. So I’m not surprised that there’s been violence coming out of the Left related to this issue. That’s not to say that this kind of rhetoric is not appropriate. It really does feel existential, I think, to a lot of people. 

In terms of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, I’m not sure how political that was. I feel like that was done by a guy who was just troubled and struggling.

Some of the response to that murder from left-wing commentators was not exactly full-throated condemnation.

I didn’t hear that as much from elites as I heard it from random people on Bluesky. There’s a real difference in the standards that we have for Democrats and Republicans these days. When one Democrat on Bluesky says something, it’s taken to be emblematic of the entire party. But most of the Democratic leadership really doesn’t use extremist language. Whereas on the right, we see extremist language coming from the president of the United States. I think a lot of Democratic voters are really frustrated with the lack of passion coming from the Democratic leadership. They think the party is not being angry enough. 

Talk to me about the role that institutions can play in moderating the behavior of Americans. Am I wrong to think that part of the problem with polarization in the US right now is that people are not participating in institutions, or trusting institutions, the way that they used to in the past?

The Bowling Alone argument suggests that we’re not part of communities in the way that we used to be. And communities are important because that’s how we get our norms. That’s how our norms are enforced. So to the extent that we’re not part of communities anymore, then norms are not being enforced to the same degree. 

I do think that COVID played a pretty big role in ways that I don’t think we’re going to be able to see for a long time. What COVID did was drive people online and away from each other. We’re now having political conversations online. And a lot of people went online during COVID to find comforting information. In that context, comforting information was “COVID is not real. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill anybody.” That type of misinformation was really attractive during a global pandemic. 

We have institutions in part to tell people what’s real and what’s not real. Those institutions are failing. I’ve listened to focus groups with Trump supporters, and the things that they’re talking about are things I’ve never heard of before. These people have entire soap operas that they’re worried about that are not real, that are not based in science. The type of institutions that might help these people find some more information and look at the evidence are collapsing, if they haven’t already collapsed. I don’t know who can play that role anymore. Our political leadership is pushing misinformation and condemning science and eliminating evidence from government websites. 

I get the sense from reading your work that you don’t consider the looting and property destruction that have attended some political protests in recent years to be political violence. Am I reading that correctly? 

That kind of thing can certainly be political violence. But in general, the thing that I’m most worried about is hurting people. That’s the political violence that I think is the most damaging to democracy. Protest is democratic. Protest is 100 percent protected by the First Amendment. Protests are often a sign of a healthy democracy and people having their voices heard. So, to the extent that property damage is associated with protests, I don’t want to paint all protests as violent. 

To the extent that we are being rewarded for being angry all the time on social media, I think that's definitely making things worse. It's actively changing norms.

While you’re obviously deeply concerned about political violence, you take pains not to say that all political violence is bad. When is political violence justified in your mind? 

If we ask Americans, “Was the Civil War justified?” Most people would say, “Yes, we needed to end slavery.” The vast majority of Americans would also say that the Revolutionary War was justified. So the context is always important. And a lot of the questions that we tend to ask about political violence are context-free. A lot depends on what the violence is trying to achieve. In general, we tend to agree that violence that is meant to increase the level of equality in the country is more justified than violence that’s intended to oppress people. The context matters. Political violence is sometimes okay if we’re fighting for a more just future. 

What gives you hope these days? 

The reason everything is so hard and tense and polarized right now is that we’re fighting over some pretty existential questions about who belongs in America and who deserves the full rights and protection of the Constitution.  

As a country, we have made so much progress toward racial equality and gender equality over the last fifty years. My mom couldn’t get a bank account without her husband’s permission until she was twenty-eight years old. We just marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. We’ve only had the right to same-sex marriage for ten years. In historical terms, these changes have been extremely rapid. 

That kind of change can’t happen without some kind of backlash from the people who previously held power. There’s no way for us to make progress without living through this resistance to it. We’re just in the struggle right now. But it would be extremely naive to imagine that we could make this much progress and not have a strong backlash. 

Maybe that makes my final question irrelevant. I was going to ask you where we should be making investments if the goal was to reduce polarization and political violence in the United States. But maybe you think polarization is necessary right now because we need to fight an authoritarian movement on the right.

I certainly don’t think polarization is always a bad thing. The world was polarized against the Nazis during World War II, right? I think polarization becomes bad, specifically within a democracy, when it obscures reality and political accountability. If we’re so polarized that we can’t believe anything bad about our own side, and that we will never vote against our own side, that undermines democracy. 

If I were putting a lot of money somewhere, I would actually put it into local media. I would like to rebuild local news because many people will only trust information when they’re reading it next to the high school football scores and whatever is happening at the farmer’s market on Saturday. To the extent that people trust media anymore, they trust their local media. And there is really good evidence that the decline of local media has increased political polarization. 

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This interview is part of  The Polarization Project, a series about political division from Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of the book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG, which addressed the rise in crime in New York City following the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.