JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump marks one of the most serious incidents of political violence in the U.S. in recent memory. As NPR's Sarah McCammon reports, it also calls to mind similar moments in the past when democracy seemed to be under threat.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Historians tend to be a bit cautious about drawing too close of a comparison between the present and the past.
LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR: What we tell people is that if things look identical, go back and reassess because history does not repeat itself. It remixes itself.
MCCAMMON: That's Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. But sometimes, she says, there are key similarities, say, to the tumult of the 1960s.
WRIGHT RIGUEUR: This is actually a moment, I think, that has a lot of parallels to 1968. And so while it may not be the same, there are a lot of things in place that make it feel very familiar.
MCCAMMON: Things like widening gaps between the rich and poor, ideological polarization and disaffection with the political system. Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and author of "Making The Presidency," says political violence typically arises out of these kinds of conditions.
LINDSAY CHERVINSKY: Those things tend to then produce people who feel like they need to take extreme measures to either defend their way of life or their vision of the United States. And so I think that that's what we're seeing right now.
MCCAMMON: Chervinsky says the attack on Trump also evokes past assassinations and attempts on presidents and candidates. She says these events rarely happen in isolation and points to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, attacks on law enforcement and a young man's attempt to drive into the White House last year as a few examples.
CHERVINSKY: And so this is just an escalation. And so we could either see things get better or we could see this pattern continue and more attempts on political figures.
MCCAMMON: Leah Wright Rigueur points to attacks in recent years on members of Congress, including the shootings of Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise. She says perpetrators of such acts can have a variety of motivations, including partisan goals or, quite simply, mental health problems.
WRIGHT RIGUEUR: It can be very hard to tease that out. And more often than not, what ends up happening when there's this kind of political violence is people in the surrounding orbit use the violence for various political agendas. It begins to take on a life of its own outside of the actual act in and of itself.
MCCAMMON: Whatever the cause, Wright Rigueur believes the attack on Trump, which took the life of a rallygoer and injured two others, marks a crucial tipping point for the country.
WRIGHT RIGUEUR: This is an incredibly important and dangerous moment in American history.
MCCAMMON: Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and studies democracy and conflict. She says the nation's increasingly dangerous political climate in recent years has been driven in large part by extremist rhetoric from political leaders.
RACHEL KLEINFELD: And when you normalize violence, it spreads across the political spectrum, and you get tit-for-tat violence.
MCCAMMON: But Kleinfeld says societies can course correct if leaders and ordinary citizens push back.
KLEINFELD: And we need them to be speaking out loudly to take back their agency and particularly to condemn violence and the normalizing rhetoric that leads to it from their own side because this is not the country that most of us want to live in.
MCCAMMON: Kleinfeld notes that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum oppose extremist violence, and she hopes those voices will drown out the ones calling for more of it.
Sarah McCammon, NPR News, Milwaukee. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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