Welcome to the Burning ’20s

Political violence is hardly new to the United States, but over the past two decades the appetite and tolerance for violence in American political life has been growing. The country entered an unprecedented phase in November, when voters returned Donald Trump to the presidency despite his vague promises of revenge and his specific promises of pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists. Terrorists and assassins are emerging from unexpected corners of society. Call it the burning ’20s: America is in the middle of a decade of dangerous instability.

The new year opened with two spectacular horrors. In New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran from Texas who allegedly self-radicalized as a supporter of the so-called Islamic State, drove a truck into innocent people on Bourbon Street early Wednesday morning. So far, at least 14 victims have died, and dozens more are injured. Hours later, a man whom authorities have identified as Matthew Livelsberger, an Army Special Operations master sergeant, shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump property in Las Vegas. Explosives in the vehicle detonated immediately afterward, injuring seven people nearby. On Livelsberger’s damaged phone, investigators found a variety of somewhat inchoate political messages, along with this specific statement: “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.” The events in New Orleans and Las Vegas follow the December murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk. The suspect in that case, the University of Pennsylvania graduate Luigi Mangione, has become a folk hero to many people.

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All three incidents of violence appear to be the work of what are commonly called “lone wolves.” A more precise term for cases like these is stochastic terrorism, meaning that the perpetrators have committed themselves to violence amid environments of hatred or despair but without the direct involvement of any specific individual or group. Stochastic terrorists radicalize themselves, almost always online. Historically, many stochastic terrorists have been obviously disturbed, profoundly maladjusted young men living on the margins of society—people such as Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church in South Carolina in 2015, and Jared Lee Loughner, who wounded former Representative Gabby Giffords and killed six others in a 2011 attack in Arizona.

At least from the outside, the lives of Mangione, Jabbar, and Livelsberger appear far more normal, for lack of a better word, than scholars who study stochastic terrorism typically expect to see among politically motivated perpetrators.

That fact points to a fundamental change to America’s security situation. For my 2022 book, The Next Civil War, I interviewed a number of civil-war experts in an attempt to understand the emerging pattern of violence in the United States. Several described a breakdown process that happens in democracies all around the world. First, partisanship dominates politics and saps the legitimacy of previously trusted national institutions. As the public’s faith in democracy collapses, so does its sense of debate and negotiation being the only acceptable ways of making political decisions. When ordinary people feel that the system no longer offers solutions to their problems and instead removes justice and agency from their lives, violence begins to seem more and more justified. Many experts identified 2008—the year of a global financial crisis—as a major turning point in public attitudes. I fear we have reached another.

The legitimation of violence, among not just political extremists but tens of millions of ordinary Americans, has become a fact of life in the United States. In a December poll, one in six respondents, and more than 40 percent of adults younger than 30, said that Thompson’s murder was acceptable. Merchandise featuring Mangione’s likeness showed up almost immediately on e-commerce websites. Free Luigi posters appeared on the streets of West Hollywood. That the shooting of a man out in public in New York City would meet with anything but universal condemnation is startling; the murder of a perfectly innocent man, a man who leaves behind a widow and two young sons, needless to say, will solve nothing. But to many people, that’s beside the point: Broad swaths of the American public are furious at the health-care system and feel that politics no longer offers them any possibility of changing it.

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The stochastic-terrorism experts I interviewed also provided a framework for understanding individual terrorists’ self-radicalization, the process that underlies the new breed of American violence. The movement toward spectacular political murder begins with a crisis of attachment to others and a search for belonging, mediated by a selective consumption of online materials, proceeding into a search for redemption and a sense of themselves as having a role in history. Even in 2022, when the prototypical stochastic terrorists were Loughner and Roof, the number of Americans susceptible to self-radicalization was large enough to be fundamentally unmanageable. As the pool of people seduced by the promise of violence widens, so does the danger to society.

Jabbar, a graduate of Georgia State University with a degree in computer information systems, worked in military human resources and information technology and then with the consulting firm Deloitte. Livelsberger had five Bronze Stars. Mangione has two Ivy League computer-science degrees. To be sure, all three men seemed to be facing significant personal crises. But these aren’t losers or fringe figures. How many people do you know who have a crisis of attachment, and are in search of belonging, and indulge in a selective consumption of online materials, and are under intense pressure?

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Meanwhile, the material threshold required to perform terrorist acts keeps dropping. On the same day as the New Orleans massacre, the FBI uncovered the largest cache of homemade pipe bombs that the agency has ever recorded. The United States has about six guns for every five people. New ways of inflicting carnage arise with some frequency. Mangione allegedly built a weapon with a 3-D printer; Jabbar and Livelsberger used a vehicle-sharing app.

Any idea of a policy response to the problem of rising violence gave way, almost instantly, to political posturing and partisan squabbling. Less than a day after the New Orleans attack, Trump began sharply criticizing the FBI on Truth Social. The pattern of the breakdown of institutional legitimacy and the rise of the legitimacy of violence is what civil-war experts call a “complex cascading system”: The chaos feeds on itself. The violence leads to institutional breakdown, which leads to more violence, which leads to institutional breakdown, and so on. Trump’s choice of Kash Patel—whose greatest qualification seems to be his willingness to do the president-elect’s bidding—to lead the FBI seems likely to accelerate the cycle.

At the moment, the demand for private-security firms is skyrocketing. But no one can avoid the dangers that arise when people lose faith in democratic institutions. No strategy is sophisticated enough to protect political and economic elites if ordinary people see “spectacles and violence” as legitimate paths to political change and cheer when an unsuspecting father is murdered on the street.

The burning is under way; that much is already clear. As faith in democracy decays, the result is radical unpredictability. Lighting fires is easy. But no one can say how far and how wide they will spread, or whom they will consume, or when.