A safe haven no more
After pipe bombs and shootings, citizens are worried about rabid partisanship
Arrival of violence shocks many in Pittsburgh’s quiet, tree-lined Squirrel Hill neighborhood
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — She flipped through television channels and radio stations, scanning from conservative to liberal media, searching for any sign that the polarized nation had finally reached its tipping point.
For days, Elisa Karem Parker had been seeing updates in the news: A pipe bomb sent to liberal political donor George Soros. One delivered to CNN. More to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other prominent political figures — a bizarre plot unfolding just ahead of the midterm election that will decide which party controls Congress.
“It’s like our country is becoming ‘The Hunger Games,’” Parker, who considers herself squarely in the middle of the political divide, told her husband and teenage son over dinner.
As authorities intercepted more than a dozen pipe bombs addressed to President Donald Trump’s critics — and then, on Saturday, as news broke of yet another mass shooting in America — political scientists and ordinary citizens observed again that rabid partisanship had devolved to the point of acts of violent extremism. Many wonder whether this latest spasm might be the moment that the nation collectively considers how poisonous the political culture has become and decides to turn the other way.
“If this isn’t it, I’d hate to think about what it will take,” said Parker as she cast her ballot in early voting last week in Louisville, Ky.
The mail-bomb plot is merely the latest in a series of stunning attacks to test how much political animosity Americans are willing to accept: the shooting of a Republican congressman at a baseball practice, the white supremacist rally that turned deadly in Virginia, the recent ricin scare-letters mailed to Trump and other top members of his administration.
On Friday, authorities arrested a suspect in the bomb probe — a 56-year-old registered Republican and Trump enthusiast. By then, politicians and talking heads had already backed into the usual corners. Both parties blamed the other, and the president called for unity, then again described liberals and the media as villains. The hope Parker had that this might be a turning point faded.
Then came the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that claimed 11 lives, an attack likely to cause ugly partisan debates over gun control, hate speech and more.
“I just can’t believe the kind of violence that we’re experiencing in our country,” Pittsburgh resident Cindy Jennings said at a vigil for those targeted at the Tree of Life Synagogue. “I feel like the leadership in our country right now is just encouraging violence, and I wish that that would stop.”
The volatile tribalism now so ingrained in American life will eventually right itself, says Robb Willer, a sociology professor at Stanford University, but not until the public decides it’s had enough and stops rewarding politicians who use incendiary language and demonize the other side. It’s impossible to guess, he notes, how much damage will be done in the meantime.
Animosity between parties has been growing for decades, to the point that studies show Republicans and Democrats don’t want to date one another, don’t want their children to marry one another and don’t want to live in the same neighborhoods at a rate unprecedented in modern America. At the same time, politicians began using increasingly apocalyptic language. Willer says those two forces — the splintering of society along party lines and the ascent of vitriolic campaigning — merged to create a breeding ground for violence. There is little evidence the tide will turn soon. Moderates are becoming increasingly rare in Washington, D.C.
“You don’t really have those reasonable voices kind of trying to bring everybody together,” says Tom Freeman, a Republican attorney in Lincoln, Neb. “It’s just kind of round and round we go, and the sides just get more and more extreme, and you don’t have that rational leader in the crowd saying, ‘Hey, let’s dial it back.’ The sad thing is, if you did have that person, I don’t know that anyone would listen to them.”
The polarization is bleeding into everyday Americans’ personal lives.
“I think it’s time for the little guy to take control, but will that happen?” says Randy Wick, a 68-year-old Republican in Bloomingdale, Ill., who blames Republicans, Democrats and the media for the division. “It seems like a good ol’ boys club up there in Washington. It’s all about money.”