The Real Face of Political Violence: It’s Your Neighbors, Not Extremists

When we picture the January 6th attack on the Capitol, many of us imagine a mob of fringe extremists and militia members driven by radical ideology. But the data tells a very different story—and it’s one that should unsettle every American. According to political scientist Robert A. Pape, the people who stormed the Capitol that day weren’t primarily members of groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Instead, they were overwhelmingly ordinary citizens: your neighbors, your colleagues, your fellow community members.

In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism, Pape draws on extensive data collected through his role as founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats to paint a stark picture of who actually participated in the January 6th insurrection. The findings are shocking in their ordinariness. A staggering 90 percent of those charged with crimes related to the attack had no affiliation whatsoever with militias or militant organizations. These weren’t radicalized extremists who had been secretly training in compounds. They were business owners—22 percent of them—and people with college degrees, comprising nearly 30 percent of those charged. The list of defendants includes doctors, engineers, CEOs, and government employees. Nearly 40 percent held white-collar jobs, while only 8 percent were unemployed at the time of the attack.

This revelation fundamentally challenges our comfortable assumption that political violence is the domain of the mad and the marginalized. Pape’s research suggests something far more troubling: that violence has become normalized among mainstream Americans as an acceptable response to political disagreement. This isn’t a problem of “those people” out there—it’s a problem woven into the fabric of ordinary American life. The very ordinariness of these participants makes the threat more dangerous, because it suggests a widespread cultural shift in how average citizens view the use of force in politics. When your local dentist or the CEO of a small business decides that violence is an appropriate response to an election outcome, we’re not dealing with a fringe problem anymore—we’re dealing with a mainstream crisis.

The implications of this are staggering. If a significant portion of the American public believes that political violence is acceptable—even occasionally necessary—then we’re not looking at isolated incidents but at a systemic problem that could transform how our democracy functions. The individuals who participated in the Capitol attack weren’t anomalies or outliers; they were, in many ways, a cross-section of Middle America, and that reality demands we reconsider everything we thought we knew about the roots of political violence.

Pape’s analysis of this phenomenon centers on what he calls “violent populism”—a dangerous political climate where substantial segments of the population increasingly accept physical force as a legitimate tool for gaining, preserving, or defending political power. This isn’t just about one election or one protest gone wrong. It’s a fundamental shift in how Americans view the relationship between violence and democracy. The rise of this mindset stems from what Pape identifies as a profound cultural clash over the very nature of American identity and citizenship.

What makes this cultural clash so combustible is its combination with elite rhetoric that frames politics as an existential struggle between enemies. When political leaders describe their opponents not as fellow citizens with different views but as existential threats to the nation itself, they create a framework where violence becomes not just acceptable but necessary and even patriotic. This structural dynamic transforms ordinary, mainstream citizens into active participants in political aggression, convincing them that they’re defending something sacred rather than committing criminal acts.

The ordinariness of the January 6th participants reveals something crucial about how this transformation happens. It’s not that these people were extremists all along—it’s that they became radicalized through a process that many of us might find disturbingly familiar. They listened to the same media, absorbed the same narratives, and reached the same conclusions that millions of other Americans did. The difference isn’t their starting point; it’s their endpoint. At some point along the way, the line between passionate political engagement and violent action became blurred—even invisible.

This understanding is essential for addressing the threat, because it suggests that the warning signs will not come from suspicious compounds or radical manifestos. Instead, they’ll come from the everyday conversations, the dinner table arguments, the social media posts of people who have come to see political violence as a legitimate tool. The farmer from Iowa, the real estate agent from Florida, the nurse from Ohio—they don’t look like terrorists, which is precisely why they’re so dangerous and why our current approaches to preventing political violence may be fundamentally inadequate.

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, Pape warns that American elections are entering what he describes as “a danger zone”—a terrain where state power, protest, and political legitimacy increasingly collide. The comforting narrative that political violence is episodic, that it shocks us when it erupts but inevitably fades, is dangerously wrong. This assumption of impermanence is reassuring, to be sure, but it’s also increasingly disconnected from reality. The conditions that produced January 6th haven’t disappeared—they’ve evolved and even intensified.

The concern isn’t hypothetical or academic. There are concrete reasons to worry that upcoming elections could trigger further violence. The same forces that propelled hundreds of ordinary Americans to storm the Capitol remain active. Communities remain polarized, trusting institutions have weakened, and the narratives that preceded January 6th continue to circulate. The infrastructure for the next violent episode—the justification narratives, the social networks, the sense of grievance and existential threat—is already in place. The question isn’t whether it could happen again; it’s what will be the spark that ignites it.

Pape’s analysis suggests that the danger isn’t limited to federal elections or national institutions. Local officials, election workers, school board members, and other figures in positions of authority have increasingly become targets of threats and harassment. The violence doesn’t need to reach the scale of January 6th to be devastating to American democracy. A hundred smaller incidents—a county clerk threatened, a poll worker intimidated, a protest turning violent—can do just as much damage to the fabric of self-governance as a single dramatic assault on the Capitol.

Understanding these dynamics is urgent because our traditional responses to political violence may not be adequate for what we’re facing. Law enforcement approaches designed to identify and neutralize terrorist cells may be less effective when the threat comes from ordinary citizens who don’t fit the profile of typical radicals. Legal responses that treat violent acts as isolated criminal behavior may fail to address the cultural conditions that produced them. And political responses that seek to portray the problem as the work of a radical fringe may provide false comfort while the mainstream threat continues to grow.

This brings us to the question of hope—what, if anything, suggests that American democracy might weather this storm? Pape’s analysis, while sobering, also points toward possibilities for intervention. If political violence is rooted in cultural conflict over national identity, then addressing the cultural grievances that drive ordinary citizens toward violence becomes essential. If elite rhetoric plays a role in legitimizing violence, then expecting more responsible leadership becomes not just a hope but a necessity. And if we recognize that the participants in January 6th were our neighbors and colleagues, then we might also recognize that the work of preventing future violence is a community responsibility.

The path forward requires honesty about the nature of the threat. We cannot address a problem we refuse to see clearly. The story of January 6th as a tale of fringe extremists engaged in an isolated event is comforting, but it’s also dangerous—it lulls us into a false sense of security while the real threat continues to grow. The story Pape tells is harder to hear, but it’s the one we need to understand: the threat to American democracy comes from within, from the mainstream, from people who look and sound like us.

This understanding could also open the door to a different kind of response. If we recognize that radicalization happens through community—through conversations, shared media, and social networks—then we might also recognize that healing can happen through those same channels. The struggle against violent populism isn’t just about law enforcement and prisons; it’s also about winning hearts and minds, about rebuilding the social fabric that connects Americans across political differences, about telling stories that can compete with the narratives of grievance and existential threat.

In the years ahead, Americans will be tested by a question our founders could not have anticipated: whether a nation that has accepted political violence as normal can find its way back to the conviction that democracy depends on peaceful conflict. The answer will not be determined by presidents or courts or even the outcome of particular elections. It will be determined by whether Americans themselves—in their communities, their churches, their schools, their workplaces—are willing to reject the violent populism that has taken root in the national soul.

The hope—perhaps the only hope—lies in the fact that the problem is so intrinsic to American life that the solution must be too. If the threat comes from ordinary Americans, then the answer must also come from them. If violence has become mainstream, then the rejection of violence must become mainstream too. This will require the kind of courageous, difficult conversations that Americans have historically been capable of having—conversations about who we are, what we believe, and what kind of country we want to be. The alternative is to continue on the current path, where violence becomes an increasingly normal feature of democratic politics. That’s not a future any of us should accept.