Robert Pape

What you are seeing here is an existential concern.

They are treating politics now not as a policy dispute, not as a minor dispute here about whether Social Security should be taxed at

You know, 6%, 7%, 8%.

We're way beyond that.

And this is why it's not just simply polarization.

What we are seeing is the rise of true existential politics.

And what that is doing is it's occurring on both sides.

And it's because of this generational period.

We're going through this 20-year tipping point, and this is really the danger zone of violent populism.

And we are now coming up to a pivotal midterm election.

And this election, I believe, in the midterms in November, will probably be the most dangerous election in our lifetime.

Well, we need to understand we've left out that it does matter what our leaders say.

When political leaders talk about literally punching people out, and Donald Trump has famously done this.

And I'm not really trying to pick on folks, but if you will just go back to last August and see some of the videos of Beto O'Rourke.

It's not quite exactly the same as Donald Trump, but you'll see that as they're trying to demonstrate to their constituencies, they will fight.

They are coming quite close to President Trump's images of actually hitting people.

And this is very important because our leaders really are authority figures.

And so if those authority figures start to find a violence acceptable, and again, they may not even fully understand that they're doing that.

Others are going to are going to hear that and they're going to move in that direction as well.

Now, I want to be very careful here.