The Assassin will be a young man, probably but not necessarily white. He could look like anyone, but it’s not hard to imagine his face. Like Patrick Crusius, who shot and killed twenty-three Mexican Americans in an El Paso Walmart after posting a “white replacement” manifesto, or Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona representative Gabby Giffords in Tucson in 2011, or Dylann Roof, who massacred nine congregants in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, including state senator Clementa Pinckney, he will have that vague misery in his eyes, scraggly, unkempt, not quite grown. The three military veterans who met on a Boogaloo Facebook group in 2020 and planned to spark an uprising to overthrow the US government by means of spectacular explosions had that same look. The Assassin will be one of the many troubled young men in America. No one will expect him to assassinate the President. No one will be surprised when he does.
We live in an age of what scholars call stochastic terrorism, otherwise known as “lone-wolf terrorism,” although that phrase is imprecise. “Lone wolf” sounds like something from the movies. It implies that acts of spectacular violence are the result of organization, that there are masterminds hiding, like Bond villains, in distant countries, elaborating schemes and then disseminating them over networks, to be undertaken by their secretive minions. The reality of the current threat is much more banal. The background hum of hyper-partisanship, the rage and loathing of everyday American politics, generates a widespread tolerance for violence. Eventually somebody acts on it. The likelihood of a foreign government or terrorist organization killing the President of the United States is negligible. The Secret Service is simply too competent. But stochastic terrorism is a matter of an indistinct loathing, of which America has plenty. The general climate of anger and recrimination condenses into murder.
Ramón Spaaij is a sociologist of political extremism specializing in stochastic terrorism. The atmosphere of violent political hatred that permeates American society frightens him. “The background of partisan politics clearly has an influence” on shaping radical acts of political violence, Spaaij says. “If you expose many people to radical partisan politics, some of them will go on to translate that into violent action.” The violent rhetoric serves as a guidance mechanism, even when it offers no explicit plan or even specific targets. “It’s not a direct causal link but a number of cultural scripts that can then be drawn on,” Spaaij says.
The cultural scripts of political violence are spreading across the United States and becoming more entrenched. At this moment, agents and assassins throughout America are chasing and evading one another. They are fields of force, the assassins pushing from the chaos of the rage and loathing overwhelming American politics, and the agents attempting, against that rage and loathing, to preserve the integrity of American institutions. On the agents’ side is technical proficiency, an elaborate system with a “zero fail mission” mentality, and a corps dedicated literally to death. The agents have their brilliance and their courage. The Assassin has the sheer number of others like him, and time and chance.
The preferred form of political violence in the United States, by far, is presidential assassination. The country has seen one civil war and no coups d’état. But assassination? The odds of being assassinated while president is one in eleven. A further seventeen presidents survived attempts on their lives. That’s a lot.
Compare it to other countries: The only British prime minister to be assassinated was Spencer Perceval, in 1812. There have been two assassination attempts in Australian history, one in Canadian history. The second most lethal job in the United States, after serving as president, is industrial fishing. One in a thousand die at that job. The mortality rate of troops in combat is 82 per 100,000. So it’s no surprise that the US Secret Service currently spends a million dollars a day to keep the president alive. In the United States, assassination amounts to a dimension of the political process.
The reason for the high murder rate of US presidents is that they are living symbols of national unity that no other country possesses—icons as executives. In 1782, the Founding Fathers made their motto e pluribus unum, a phrase with many different meanings—“out of many states, one country,” “out of many peoples, one people”—but the specific role of the presidency, a leader who emerged from the general populace rather than the aristocracy, was also a key significance: “out of many citizens, one president.” If you shoot the queen of England, you’re not making a statement on the government of the country. If you shoot the prime minister of Great Britain, you’ve killed only the first advisor to the queen. The US president has an aura that no public servant or monarch possesses or can possess. When you murder a president, you murder an America that should have been.
One of the retired Secret Service agents I spoke to, a man who has thought a great deal about the motivations of the people who want to kill the president, offered me a simple explanation for the popularity of presidential assassination in the United States: “It’s the fastest way to change history.” When the political system cannot bring historical change, a gun will.
The Secret Service looks into every direct and indirect threat against the president, assessing for intent, means, and opportunity. An anonymous Secret Service agent—they must remain anonymous to discuss any aspect of their protocol—described to me the extreme transformation in the assessment process over the past decade due to the proliferation of political hatred. “Years ago, it was relatively straightforward, because threats were coming in to the president via telephone calls or letters, or they would show up at the White House,” he says. “Nowadays, the digital platform has allowed for threats to be made at a significantly greater volume with greater frequency by people who can remain anonymous.” It is simple enough for anyone—an assassin, a kid, just an idiot—to go into any random Starbucks in America, post a death threat anonymously on public Wi-Fi, and leave. At volume, such threats are basically untraceable. The Secret Service uses artificial intelligence to deal with the bulk of violent communication, but the effectiveness of that methodology remains unproven. The only way to know if it works is if it fails. And it hasn’t failed. Yet.
Counterterrorism agencies are increasingly turning to researchers like Spaaij to distinguish signal from noise. He’s a sociologist of political extremism but his work is psychological. He establishes the patterns that tend to manifest themselves in individuals before they commit acts of spectacular violence. Many angry people live in America but not that many are actually preparing to assassinate political leaders. Spaaij and the Secret Service face the same problem. How do cultural scripts tip over into violent action? How does a person go from raging behind the screens to pulling a trigger?
Spaaij sees what others do not in the world of deep confusion and indecipherable rage. “If there is a common thread, it is a search for belonging, a desire for transcendence,” Spaaij tells me. The state of mind that leads to assassination is both personal, “a crisis of attachment to others,” and political, a crisis of history. Grandiosity plus grievance is the toxic mixture. The Assassin feels strongly that he has not received what he deserves, “seeing himself as a historical character.”
The Assassin is alone but there are many like him. He belongs to a generation of lost young men, alienated misfits in a state of despair, who will do worse than their parents, who will live shorter lives than them, who will experience America as a country in decline. Like Crusius and Loughner and Roof, the Assassin is a product of divorce. His father moved away when he was a boy. His mother works long hours to support them.
He managed to graduate from high school despite a record of incidents, fits of rage that came out of nowhere, sudden viciousness against a female teacher that got him suspended. The other students tended to avoid him. History was his favorite subject but he never believed what they taught him. He was always on the web for alternate histories, cool stuff like how aliens had built the pyramids and the Nazca Lines in South America, how powerful hidden forces had shaped the world. What he really likes is the dark web. There you can see what people don’t want you to see. That’s what’s worth reading. Plus, it’s hilarious.
He didn’t attend his graduation ceremony. They didn’t want him, so he didn’t want them.
The Assassin lives in his childhood bedroom on the top floor of his mother’s house. His walls are covered in posters—a platoon of old B-52 bombers, Reservoir Dogs, Moonrise Kingdom, the scene from A Clockwork Orange with Alex’s eyes held open. He has an old typewriter and a half-solved Rubik’s cube on a small desk, alongside a broken board from his Tae Kwon Do lessons when he was a kid and some old junior soccer participation medals. He keeps a pair of binoculars on his desk. From the window he can see, over the soundproofing barriers, the interstate highway.
In the fall after graduation, his mother sits him down for a serious chat. She begins by telling him how much she loves him and how both she and his father want the best for him. She says that she knows he had a hard time in high school and that she doesn’t blame him for that. The Assassin just sits and listens. The less he says, he knows, the shorter the conversations are. “You can live here but only if you find a job or go to school,” his mother tells him. That seems fair enough.
He tells his mother that he’s going to apply to the local community college to study carpentry, but he delays sending off the application and ends up missing the deadline. He doesn’t tell his mother. She doesn’t ask.
One of his father’s old friends owns a hardware store. The Assassin starts to work there part-time. He likes the smell of wood. He loathes the smell of people. One day, in the lumberyard, he sees the owner laughing with a contractor, a Black contractor. He has never seen anything like it. The scene, for reasons he does not understand, fills him with a wild disgust and fear, and he just walks out and never comes back.
He wanders across the highways, past the sprawling homeless encampments, down to the local library, where he can read things on their computers he wouldn’t read at home.
He types in “Why do Blacks and Mexicans hate white people so much?” The message board fills up with links.
—Because there at war with white folks. Look around. They want jobs just for being themselves! No white man gets that!
—The “lower forms of life” hate us because we’re better. They hate that white people built the world and they just live in it. And it doesn’t matter how much we give, they always take more.
—Everybody just wants to be with their own. Look around, snowflake.
—It’s a war, man. It’s a war.
In the detritus and confusion of his young life, the Assassin will know one thing for sure. He will know that he was meant for more than living with his mother, with no job and no girlfriend and no friends and no prospects; that he is worth something to the world.
“The political ideology becomes an excuse, an overlay, a way of giving sense and meaning to petty personal experience,” Spaaij says. The violent solution becomes “a search for redemption.” This is what Secret Service agents call “nefarious intent.”
The résumé of Jared Loughner, who shot Arizona congress-person Gabby Giffords, is typical: dropped out of college after a series of violent outbursts; was denied entry to the military; couldn’t find a job; compensated for his own degradation by way of online political forums; posted his own violent fantasies on social media and YouTube. The Assassin, wherever he might be, is stewing in his failure and idealism. He’s a loser, a dreamer, a man-boy denied a destiny who feels a destiny is owed to him. His sense of his own importance only rises with each personal failure.
The search for redemption can take many forms: a petty criminal who goes into the penal system and comes out a radical Muslim; a father who defaults on his mortgage and turns to sovereign citizenship; a youth with mental health issues who can’t find employment and turns to white power. The internet will blur the Assassin’s soul further through “selective consumption of online materials”—carving the world into good and evil, confirming what he already knows, allowing him to produce hatred, to share hatred, to suffuse his own failures in ideology, driving him toward a single conclusion, a response to the disasters in his own life and in the country’s.
“From the best of our knowledge, online radicalization starts with social alienation, which is why you see radicals from all socioeconomic classes,” Alex Newhouse, lead researcher at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Extremism, Terrorism, and Counterterrorism, tells me. “Social alienation comes with anger at their lot in life. It always starts with some kind of grievance, and the contrarian viewpoint will often provide an explanation, a very clean, very convenient explanation for why they are feeling that way.”
The first step in online radicalization is often nothing more harmful than basic contrarian media—the Dave Rubins or Joe Rogans of the world, shows with massive audiences, the vast majority of which never even consider violence. Contrarianism feeds on itself. “The hunger for justification for the anger that they’re feeling pushes them farther and farther to fringe figures,” Newhouse says. Those who become radicalized progress from ordinary, healthy alternative media to accelerationist promotion of mass murder. “The other pathway is algorithmic,” Newhouse says. “Facebook, YouTube, to a lesser extent Twitter, have recommendations that actively promote engagement with increasingly fringe content.” If you go into a libertarian gun rights Facebook page, on the recommendation page you find “outright civil war groups, explicitly calling for violence against the state.” One thing leads to another. The system is designed that way.
What underlies the motivation to violence is a drive to understand the sense of grievance they’re feeling. The despair of the Assassin’s own life finds a mirror in the general despair: “There are no democratic means anymore and so violence is the only solution,” Spaaij says. The Assassin sees his life falling apart before it even begins, and he sees his country falling apart before he can belong to it.
After graduation, the Assassin spends more time online. Mostly he’s alone in the house. Sometimes he pretends he’s going to look for work but then he heads to the library to read his favorite message boards about politics and history. The drift of his life punctuates itself with electronic dreams of grandeur and pornography and violent fantasies.
He reads mostly funny stuff, like what are the best tortures in history (the Blood Eagle) and what is the weirdest porn (the lemon party). He learns that moss grows on the north sides of trees. He learns that Napoleon liked his girlfriend not to wash when they had sex. He learns that Washington is run by pedophiles. It’s well established. The press has known about it for ten years. The president organizes parties where her friends rape and murder little kids in restaurants in DC. It disgusts him.
—It’s the beginning you know? You can only become a “leader” in “government” if you have no morality. It’s like a test. It’s a test for them to see if they’re willing to rape children. Tom fucking Hanks is going to run for office. You mark my words.
—The Great Awakening. Not the Great Awokening. And all these little bitches whining about random bullshit snowflake nonsense. They don’t care about CHILDREN BEING RAPED.
—You hear of a pedophile stopping at pedophilia. What’s “next”? It’s the thrill of the new that gets them off. It’s hopeless little children today. What’s the next outrage?
—We gotta fuck someone up.
There is a war going on, or there is a war about to begin. The Assassin doesn’t need special inside information for that. The regular news tells him that. And it’s all this bitch the President’s fault. She is overseeing the annihilation of white people and men, and white people and men are finally fighting back.
It makes sense. How did the world get so fucked-up? The people with money, the people with power fucked it up.
He sees a banner ad for a gun show in town. “Sport and Hunting Equipment, Plus Historical Memorabilia!” So he goes, with $50 he’s taken from his mother’s purse, even though it’s at a mall he hasn’t heard of. The trip takes three buses; he arrives at an industrial park next to an Amazon delivery center. Inside, there is an Oath Keeper recruitment drive and a few dozen displays on folding tables. The historical memorabilia is just one booth, manned by a big-bellied old-timer who barely looks up from his work of restoring an old pistol. Under glass the Assassin sees tiny silver cups that belonged to Hermann Göring, Vietnam patches, slave shackles and bills of sale.
The Assassin peruses some of the cheaper guns, and a guy in a T-shirt that says I SUPPORT SINGLE MOMS with the silhouette of a stripper on it tells him, “I can get you that gun cheaper. That gun right there.” It’s a small black Ruger in the case, 9mm. “I can get you that gun right there for eighty bucks.” The Assassin digs in his pocket and comes out with the $50 bill. The man in the T-shirt looks pissed off but grabs the bill and hands over a small black pistol.
The Assassin comes home and unscrews a vent in the air ducts and puts the gun inside. The Assassin has taken possession of a great gift. Everything will be all right in the end. He holds a secret.
He does one good thing that year, one thing he’s proud of. A woman who claimed her daughter was killed during one of the mass shootings in California turned out to be an actor planted by people who want to take guns away from ordinary citizens, probably to make them less trouble when the government decides to impose martial law. The /freedomcosts message board he follows doxxed her and he called her number from the pay phone at the library and told her answering machine she was a lying fake bitch and she was going to get what was coming to her. The call thrilled him. He put down the receiver, radiating with excitement. He had reached out.
Later that night he posted:
—I did it. I told that fucking bitch that she could go and die.
The messages came back in a flurry:
—Fucking A!
—Every day more like us are joining in, and you should know yer not alone. And we’re coming for them. We’re coming for them.
—Do more little boy. You think yer fucking yackety-yak matters one whit. Action! What we need is action!
The Assassin reads later that the actress pretending to be the mother of a shooting victim killed herself. One less lying bitch with power. He may not have a job. He may not have a life. But he helped the fight.
The Assassin makes some changes to his room. He puts up a bright red 1945 poster that reads Blitzkrieg! and a meme of Daffy Duck with the phrase “Of course you realize this means war!” underneath.
In stochastic terrorism, political murder does not emerge out of the concrete plans of ideological opponents. It’s not some Day of the Jackal–style event. A climate of loathing finds expression in a single person with an opportunity.
The hatred motivating the Assassin will not be extraordinary. Quite the opposite. Hatred drives politics in the United States more than any other consideration. The same helplessness that motivates the assassin drives the new contemptuous politics of the United States. If you’re an American conservative, you already know that open discussions of murdering political rivals are standard. If you’re an American liberal, ask yourself how upset you would have been if Donald Trump had been assassinated.
As lousy and vicious and stupid as American politics might look on the surface, underneath the reality is even worse. Steven Webster is a scholar of the new breed of hyper-partisanship that is tearing the United States apart. For many years, he worked with Alan Abramowitz on the political modeling of partisan opposition in US politics, and together they published the 2015 essay “The Rise of Negative Partisanship and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections in the 21st Century,” which predicted the current political lunacy better than any other. Abramowitz is a rare case of a scholar being incorrectly humble: he refused to believe the results of his own model when it predicted a Trump victory, even though it had correctly predicted every presidential election since 1992. “The model is based on the assumption that the parties are going to nominate mainstream candidates who will be able to unite the party, and that the outcome will be similar to a generic vote, a generic presidential vote for a generic Democrat versus a generic Republican,” he told Vox in 2016.
Webster sees a terrible spiraling effect in action in the United States, a force that, once started, cannot be stopped except by disaster: “Partisans in the electorate don’t like each other. That encourages political elites to bicker with one another. People in the electorate observe that. And that encourages them to bicker with one another.” The past thirty years have led to “ideological sorting,” which means that the overlap between conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans has more or less disappeared. But it’s the people in the parties, not just the ideas in the parties, that have changed. Identity politics is not some phrase but a real phenomenon. The political parties, and the various branches within the political parties, have become identities by which individuals define themselves.
“There’s a really big racial divide between the two parties,” Webster says. “The non-white share of the American electorate has been increasing tremendously over the last few decades. And with this rise in the non-white share of the electorate, most of the non-white voters have chosen to affiliate with the Democratic Party.” Not only has the Republican Party become whiter and the Democratic Party become more multicultural, the white people on each side have also changed. During the Reagan-Bush years, there really wasn’t that much of a difference between the racial attitudes of white people in both parties. Over the past three decades, the Republican Party has become the party of racial resentment, “the moral feeling that Blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance,” Webster says. “During the Obama era, 66 percent of white Republicans scored high on the racial resentment scale. For white Democrats it was around 32 percent.” White Republicans have become more intolerant about the country’s growing diversity. White Democrats haven’t. That’s the big change.
America is becoming two Americas, Americas that hate each other, that don’t speak to each other. No one occupies the middle ground anymore; everyone has separated into one side or the other, one party or the other, no matter what they may claim. “A lot of people say, ‘What would happen if there was a very independent-minded candidate, a third-party candidate with no partisan label, who would come and unite America?’ ” Webster asks rhetorically. “That is absolutely not going to happen.” In surveys, independents seem like a high percentage of Americans, but if you press those self-identified independents on their actual voting behavior, they behave just like strong partisans. Only 7 percent of Americans are truly independent in the sense that they might consider voting for a party they don’t typically vote for.
How to grasp the scale of the political hatred overtaking America? Thanksgiving is one way. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, economists at Washington State University found that cell phone data and precinct-level election results revealed a chilling difference between celebrations attended by opposing-party families and celebrations attended by same-party families: “Thanksgiving dinners attended by residents from opposing-party precincts were 30 to 50 minutes shorter than same-party dinners.” The symbolism couldn’t be more apt. Because of politics, because of the brutality of the new breed of hyper-partisan loathing, ordinary Americans can no longer enjoy their feast of plenty. They can no longer celebrate the sheer good fortune of being Americans. The report calculates exactly how much goodwill has been lost: “Nationwide, 34 million hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving dinner discourse was lost in 2016 to partisan effects.” Americans diminished the time they spent talking across party lines at the exact moment they most needed to spend more time talking across party lines.
According to Pew Research, 58 percent of Republicans view Democrats “very unfavorably,” up from 21 percent in 1994, and 55 percent of Democrats view Republicans “very unfavorably,” up from 17 percent in 1994. There are 41 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans who now believe the opposing party is “a threat to the nation’s well-being.” But even those numbers fail to capture the emotional depth of the hatred between Republicans and Democrats. In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they wouldn’t want their children to marry a member of the other party. By 2010, it was half of Republicans and a third of Democrats. Differences of opinion have hardened into a siege mentality on both sides, leaving behind questions of policy or effective leadership. The dominant question of American political life isn’t what you stand for but what you stand against.
Hyper-partisanship is now the defining hatred of the United States, and it affects so much more than how people vote or how they think about their fellow citizens’ political choices. A 2015 study of polarization from the American Journal of Political Science found that “partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race.” Tribalism is no longer a mere metaphor. Democrats and Republicans really do act as tribes, with codes of purity for themselves and loathing for outsiders. This tribalism affects society as a whole. It has infiltrated commerce and religion as much as the institutions of law and government. It’s worth noting that all of these trends predate Trump, sometimes by decades.
Scott Gates is an American who lives in Norway, where he studies conflict patterns at PRIO, the Peace Research Institute Oslo. His work, naturally, has been devoted to the study of political struggles in the developing world, where most civil wars take place. He is as shocked as anybody to find that his research suddenly has applications at home. The question for the United States, as it is for every other country nearing the precipice, is how strong civil society is and how much that civil society can hold back the ferocious violence of its politics. When it comes to the United States, Gates has little confidence in either point anymore.
Americans’ spiral into loathing is far from unique. It’s typical. A recent study from Anirban Mitra and Debraj Ray, two English economists, examined the motivations underlying Hindu-Muslim violence in India and found that “an increase in per capita Muslim expenditures generates a large and significant increase in future religious conflict. An increase in Hindu expenditures has a negative or no effect.” Hindus are the dominant group in India and Muslims a comparatively poor minority. Riots start at the times and in the places in which the Muslims are gaining the most relative to the status of the dominant Hindus. Violence protects their status in a context of declining privilege. The more an underclass peacefully approaches economic and political equality, the more violent and resentful the overclass grows.
“A very similar pattern can be seen in the US right now,” Gates tells me. “Over the past twenty years the white working class community, in absolute terms, gets less now than it did in the 1980s. Systematically they see their position in life getting worse. And they see their children not doing better. At the same time, the Latino community and the Black community have been improving their status relative to where they were.” To be clear, white Americans don’t resent growing poorer. They resent losing their comparative superiority to non-white Americans.
The revolutionary prophets of the nineteenth century, like Karl Marx, believed that the oppressed would rise up against their oppressors. In the twenty-first century, the oppressors revolt. By no means is this violent reaction against lost privilege unique to white Americans. It underlies conflicts all over the world. As privilege declines, violence increases. The Republican Party has become a white party defined by racial resentment. Declining privilege in the context of racial resentment leads historically to violence. The US Census recently announced that the country will be minority-white by 2045.
One reason why Democrats view Republicans as other and Republicans view Democrats as other is that they are other. The Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy. The Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once. The political system quite simply cannot manage the instability of the demographic change.