A Gen Xer wonders: Can young voters stave off the calls to engage in political violence?

My Gen Z kids don’t want to fight, but many see it as inevitable

I’m online talking with my 20-year-old son, a hardcore tech nerd who lives for anime-themed music and holding court on Discord as Shogun of Flame. To my knowledge, he’s never sustained a violent thought for more than a moment.

We were having a peaceful chat. But when the conversation shifted to politics, things got darker. As far as he’s concerned, civil war is inevitable within the next decade.

“Believe whatever you want,” he says. “It doesn’t change anything. Violence is on the way.” This comes from somebody who’s far to the left of his extremely progressive mother.

His words are a frightening echo of what I’m hearing about the other side. One story I read recently quoted a young man armed with a rifle who got up at a right-wing gathering in western Idaho and asked when it would be time for him to start executing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he asked, drawing applause from the audience. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill those people?”

When I hear about the increasingly loud demands to solve problems with bloodshed, I’m flabbergasted and out of my depth. For most of my life, I’ve lived in a country that seemed to be staggering forward despite our uneven progress.

As a Gen Xer in her late 50s, I have a gut-level understanding of how social activism can help make changes once thought impossible. After all, I was raised during the Civil Rights era and have grown up assuming that social change is possible.

To be sure, I’m not suggesting that the last few decades have been all hearts and flowers. For example, my generation was rocked by the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the massive riots that followed.

King was an unarmed 25-year-old black man living in Los Angeles whose assault by police officers was captured on film by a bystander.

When the four officers who beat King were acquitted of criminal charges, we watched as large sections of Los Angeles went up into flames at the hands of rioters who felt that they’d run out of peaceful options.

However, as bad as things were at times, I don’t recall seeing political, social, and religious leaders encouraging their followers to engage in violent rebellion against government officials.

Today, though, the idea that it’s time to start hurting each other is becoming an accepted trope on the right. Everyone from former President Trump to local officials is encouraging their base to threaten their neighbors with assault, destruction of property and murder.

Trump’s calls for violence have only intensified over time, becoming more graphic and urgent as he works to keep his base of armed racists stirred up and ready to become troops in a new civil war.

One of the most egregious of Trump’s insane provocations came in the form of a public statement suggesting that the recently retired Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for holding standard diplomatic and strategic conversations with China.

GOP leaders are feeding these calls to violence with a bitter but potent cocktail of outrage, a sense of entitlement, and warnings that immigrants, black and brown people, queer folk and non-Christians are preparing to destroy their way of living.

Members of Gen Z are well aware that this drumbeat of hatred and fear is growing steadily louder among members of the far right, and most of its members want to see it go silent.

The question is whether they can keep the peace when even members of Congress suggest that violent action is acceptable and even admirable.

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To get a sense of where we are headed on these issues, it helps to look at recent shifts in the balance of political power over the last few years.

In part due to high turnout by Gen Z voters, Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms, holding the Senate and losing the House by a very small margin compared with historic norms.

A network exit poll conducted by Edison Research and the AP Vote Cast conducted during the midterms found that 63% of voters aged 18 to 29 voted for Democrats, compared with 51% of voters aged 39 to 44 percent, 44% of voters aged 45 to 64 percent and 43% of voters aged 65 percent and over.

In addition to voting, a growing share of young adults are channeling their energy into running for office, including Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. Frost, who won a seat in Florida’s 10th Congressional District, previously served as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, a group focused on eliminating gun violence.

Frost is unlikely to be the last Gen Zer to pursue elected office. According to data released early this year by the Millennial Action Project, 261 Gen Zers ran for state legislative office in 2022, and 73 were elected. This is up from just 27 in 2022, a 170% increase in just one year. Party affiliations are split near-evenly, with 38 identifying as Republicans and 35 as Democrats.

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That being said, it’s clearly becoming more dangerous for ordinary people to hold office than at virtually any point in my life.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice released last spring found that one in six election officials had experienced threats due to their job and that 77 percent said that they felt the volume had increased in recent years.

Some threats are leading to violent actions, including the hammer attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The attacker, David DePape, had hoped to capture and interrogate Ms. Pelosi and assault her if she didn’t tell the “truth.”

My son, for his part, isn’t especially active politically. He’s just come to believe that the other side will force the matter eventually and expects to have to defend himself.

To be sure, it’s not likely that he would make the first move when conflict arises, nor is he condoning political violence. But unless we figure out how to go back to a time in which political violence is unacceptable, the aggrieved forces of the far-right grievance might bring it to them.