The Violence You Fear May Be the Violence You’re Creating

You’re scared. That’s understandable. You see Trump rallies, hear inflammatory rhetoric, watch footage of January 6th on repeat. You’ve concluded that roughly half the country has embraced political violence as a legitimate tool. You believe you’re the reasonable one, defending democracy against people who would burn it down.

But what if I told you that your fear itself—specifically, how wildly it overestimates reality—might be part of what’s making political violence more likely? Not from them. From us.

The Numbers Don’t Say What You Think They Say

In 2024, researchers asked Democrats to estimate what percentage of Republicans agreed with the statement: “Violence against Democrats is now justified.”

Democrats guessed 47%.

The actual number? 13%.

Read that again. Democrats overestimated Republican support for political violence by a factor of nearly four. This isn’t a minor calibration error. This is a fundamental misreading of the political landscape.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: this pattern—what researchers call the “perception gap”—gets worse the more educated you are, but only if you’re a Democrat. Republicans’ misperceptions of Democrats don’t meaningfully change with education level. But for Democrats, every additional level of education correlates with less accurate understanding of what Republicans actually believe.

The people who consider themselves most informed are, on this metric, the most misinformed.

Why Does This Matter?

Because perception gaps don’t just distort your understanding—they change your behavior.

Research from the Carnegie Endowment found that “partisans overestimate the willingness of the other side to break democratic norms and that overestimation makes them more likely to support or even take antidemocratic practices for their side. The same holds for political violence.”

In other words: believing your opponents are violent makes you more likely to accept violence.

This isn’t abstract. After the Trump assassination attempt in July 2024, roughly one-third of Democrats agreed with the statement “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.” After the second attempt, 28% of Democrats said America would have been better off if Trump had been killed. Among those who strongly agreed that “white Republicans are racist,” that number rose to 71%.

Meanwhile, liberal respondents were far more likely than conservatives to say political violence can “sometimes be justified”—25% of the “very liberal” compared to 6% of conservatives in post-Kirk polling.

The Projection Mechanism

Here’s the psychological model: You’re so certain that the other side is violent that you’ve pre-authorized your own side’s violence as defensive. You’re not attacking—you’re protecting democracy from people who want to destroy it. The threat is so grave, so existential, that extraordinary measures become thinkable.

But that grave threat is, in significant part, a statistical hallucination.

When you believe 47% of Republicans support violence against you, and the real number is 13%, you’re not responding to reality. You’re responding to a phantom—one that your media diet, your social network, and yes, your education have collaboratively constructed.

And here’s the dark irony: by acting on that phantom—by tolerating, excusing, or quietly celebrating violence against conservative figures—you’re creating the very reality you feared. You’re giving Republicans genuine evidence that the left has embraced political violence. You’re validating their perception gap. You’re feeding the spiral.

The Hardest Question

The researchers at More in Common found something striking: the group with the most accurate perception of their political opponents wasn’t the most educated, the most engaged, or the most informed.

It was the politically disengaged.

People who consume less political media, who aren’t embedded in partisan social networks, who haven’t marinated in years of “the other side is an existential threat” messaging—they see their fellow Americans more clearly than you do.

That should give you pause.

Not because political engagement is bad, but because the specific form of engagement dominant in educated progressive spaces has produced a systematic distortion of reality. A distortion that makes violence more likely, not less.

What Would It Take?

I’m not asking you to abandon your values or pretend bad actors don’t exist. I’m asking you to consider whether the enemy in your head matches the neighbor down the street.

Ask yourself:

• When was the last time you had a genuine conversation with a Trump voter—not to argue, but to understand?

• How much of your belief about “what Republicans think” comes from Republican sources versus progressive commentary about Republicans?

• If you learned that your perception gap was 34 points off, what would you do differently?

The research suggests that simply presenting people with accurate statistics about the other side reduces support for political violence. Truth is, in this case, literally healing.

But it requires something progressives often demand of others and rarely practice themselves: epistemic humility. The willingness to say “I might be wrong about them.”

You’ve built an identity around being the reasonable one, the factual one, the one who follows the science and trusts the experts. Here’s some science: you’re probably wrong about how violent your opponents are, and that error is making you more dangerous.

What are you going to do about it?