At the outset of 2024, Americans were grim. Heading into a presidential election year, a CBS News survey in January found that only a bare majority — 51 percent — expected the transfer of power from one party to the other to be a peaceful affair. Forty-nine percent thought the year would end in violence.
And there was plenty of violence in 2024. But perhaps because that poll and those who were most troubled by its results were focused on the prospect that we would see a repeat of the January 6 riots, too few acknowledged that the 49 percent were right.
The trend toward political violence that we witnessed in 2024 did not abate in 2025. Indeed, it got worse. And as Politico’s recent polling suggests, even more Americans are becoming accustomed to the threat of political violence as though it were a lamentable feature of modern life.
Politico found that a majority of Americans believe “assassination culture” will metastasize and that a high-profile candidate for office will be killed. Fifty-five percent said political violence in its many forms will become increasingly common. Most Americans do not welcome this prospect, but a shockingly large minority — nearly a full quarter of respondents — told Politico pollsters that political violence can be justified. “Younger Americans were significantly more likely than older ones to say violence can be justified,” the dispatch read. “More than one in three Americans under the age of 45 agreed with that belief.”
As troubling as these findings are, the cause that younger Americans believe political violence might advance is even more troubling. Politico’s polling also found that Americans — younger voters, in particular — are succumbing to a fatalism that has put them in a revolutionary mood.
Among all Americans, 49 percent now say that America’s best days are “behind us” — a plurality boosted by the 62 percent of Kamala Harris voters who say as much. While it would be tempting to dismiss these results as the sour grapes that accompany an election loss, that despair is much more pronounced among younger voters. “More than half of Americans, 18-24 — 55 percent — agree” that the American dream no longer exists, Politico reported.
Most distressingly, a majority of poll respondents — 52 percent — said that, to “make life better in America,” we need “radical change.” Once again, the age divide is stark. Nearly two-thirds of adults aged 24 and younger endorsed radical but nonspecific revisions to the social compact. Majorities said the same among voters in every age bracket save those over the age of 65.
“Roughly one-third of Americans go even further,” the outlet observed. “Thirty-five percent say the U.S. needs a revolution — a view that, broadly, cuts across party lines, with 39 percent of Harris voters and 32 percent of Trump voters holding that view.”
Politico broke its poll’s findings out and reported them in two distinct dispatches, but both reports describe a similar phenomenon. Political violence is a revolutionary act. Its more coherent manifestations are designed, however delusionally, to advance a political agenda. Those who see utility in political violence or even resolve to commit such acts themselves do so with the assumption that cynicism is widely shared, that one sizable push on society’s rotten edifice can send the thing crashing down, and that most Americans will rally to their cause when they see its manifest weakness. That has proven a deeply flawed presumption, but it continues to attract adherents.
What is the cause of our present malaise? Is it, as so many claim, a general sense of despair among young people over the diminution of their prospects for economic mobility? Some say it is. They claim that the absurd costs associated with entry into a housing market typified by too little inventory, the difficulty of saving in America’s high-cost cities (to which so many young adults decamp after college), and the likely truncation of job prospects for young, white-collar professionals in the AI age is incubating this sort of radicalism.
Others would contend that financial hardships do not breed the kind of contempt for the status quo, nor do they compel the otherwise well-adjusted to engage in violence. Rather, a potentially violent movement becomes an actively violent one when its unreasonable demands go unmet, and the practitioners of terroristic violence tend to be comfortable and well-educated.
Still others insist that the information silos into which social media users retreat contribute to their radicalization. “Anonymity makes anger worse and gets people really ginned up,” Senator Rand Paul recently mourned. Senator Chris Murphy agrees that the pale facsimile of community that social media creates for its users deracinates them and renders them susceptible to suggestion. “We have a crisis of connection and meaning in this country,” he told Politico, “and [Donald] Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of that crisis.”
There is much more to say on this subject. I hope my forthcoming book on the crisis of left-wing political violence in America over the last century disabuses progressives of the notion that the American right is uniquely violent. Of course, political violence is not exclusive to either political coalition. Moreover, the potential for the radicalized and deluded to act on their violent fantasies becomes more likely when revolutionary politics are fashionable.
Revolutionary political violence is an expression of profound ingratitude. It represents a rejection of the American political tradition because it rejects incrementalism, which is the only sort of change the American civic compact and its legal conventions encourage. It is the language of nihilism spoken by those who indulge in self-pity — who believe they have been robbed of that which is their due.
America as a proposition does not grant dispensations beyond the guarantee that you will enjoy the liberty to define for yourself what gratifying success looks like. The American dream isn’t dead, and those who define it in material terms never grasped its meaning. That is cold comfort when confronted with an army of angry Americans who think someone or something is standing in the way of their success and are resolved to tear those obstacles down. This is more than just a “vote all the bums out” sentiment, although that will be one expression of it. What began as a sense of entitlement is becoming an omnidirectional resentment — of your country, of your government, of your neighbors.
Politico attempted to end on a high note. Even as “pessimism about the future persists,” fully 64 percent still say they’re “proud to be an American.” That is cold comfort. The millions of Americans who find themselves in the minority are resolved to shake you from your complacency. They welcome revolutionary change, and too many in their ranks see violence as the means to that desired end. It will get worse before it gets better.
Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. He is the author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. @NoahCRothman
Reprinted with permission from National Review by Noah Rothman.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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