Latest / America's Why Project / Episode 18: Democracy on the Brink: America in the Age of Violent Populism

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Episode 18: Democracy on the Brink: America in the Age of Violent Populism · America's Why Project

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: The number one fact about political violence today in America is that tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle support political violence for the political goals they also endorse.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: This changes everything.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the America's Why Podcast.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm your host, Matt Leventure.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to a special episode of the America's Why Podcast on the topic Democracy on the Break.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: America in the Age of Violent Populism.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Our guest today is Dr.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Pape, who is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the new book Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism, which is published by the New Press in September 2026.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: For anyone concerned about the future of American democracy, this is the single most important book for you to read this year.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: To help explain why Dr.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Pape has generously agreed to join us for this special episode of our podcast.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Pape, welcome to our show.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if you could start just by saying a little bit about how you came to write this book.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's um something you wouldn't normally think I would do given my background because I focus on international issues.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: It started during COVID.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go back to March 2020.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: We have the lockdowns.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm teaching a class at the University of Chicago.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And like a lot of professors, I am pushing all my classes online, but also I'm very interested in what are the consequences of COVID.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so I found myself studying pandemics, epidemics, and looking for international consequences.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought I was going to discover links about why, since COVID started in China, this might make us more angry against China.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, that I did find that link, and that has happened.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I found something much, much more.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I found the Black Plague, which is way before COVID, way before we even started talking about the Spanish flu.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is in the 14th century in Europe.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And now I'm a professor of international politics, uh, and of course I knew vaguely about the black plague, but what I didn't really fully get until doing this look into plagues was how the plague, the black plague, directly fed into numerous popular rebellions, what became called the Hundred Years' War in Europe.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then I further discovered, and I have a lot of historians who are helping me do this, uh, great books on this subject here, by the way, um, that what was occurring was a plague led to political fragmentation and intense social fears of the other.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought about that for a second.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, my goodness, we've already been having culture wars in the United States for decades.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: What if the pandemic was to create even more intense political fragmentation, fears of the political other beyond polarization?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: So this is in April now, 2020, no particular rise of political violence on the horizon.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I vectored my research teams at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats to do some historic studies of going back just the last 10 years to understand political violence in the United States, who the FBI had arrested as perpetrators of political violence in the United States.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this took a few months.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened right at the end of May as this uh first set of studies were being completed?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: George Floyd.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now, George Floyd, those protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, not a doubt about.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: However, five to seven percent of them were violent, and they were political violence, targeting police stations, burning them down, police cars.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and this went on for weeks and weeks.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I had my research team track on a daily basis the George Floyd protests and riots, the political part in the top 50 American cities throughout the entire summer.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was stunning to track this in real time and see the rise of political violence in the United States as a mass contagion uh for the first time since the 1960s.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just a little boy at the 1960s, I barely remember the 1960s.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this told me that that hunch I had, my goodness gracious, we're possibly going into a new era.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then, shortly after the George Floyd protests and violence came January 6th.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that confirmed for me the hunch that I had, the disturbing hunch, that we were entering a new era in the United States.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I've now called that era violent populism.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in other words, what you were seeing already in the early days of the pandemic was political violence beginning to emerge in a more systemic way, both on the left and on the right.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: And now you're warning, or you warned a couple of years ago in a in a foreign affairs article that the United States is approaching a period of sustained political violence.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that really caught my attention in the preface to your new book is the following sentences.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the greatest threat to democracy is not extremists.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's when ordinary people quietly decide forces justified.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: The real danger isn't one side or the other, it's that millions of Americans now see violence as a normal political tool.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me more about that.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: The number one fact about political violence today in America is that tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle support political violence for the goals, the political goals they also endorse.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And once tens of millions of Americans support political violence, this changes everything.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It means political violence is no longer a fringe phenomenon, it seeps into the mainstream.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence normalizes political violence.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: It makes it more acceptable.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And once political violence becomes acceptable, volatile actors who may be on the edge of political violence for their own psychosocial reasons can far more easily go over the edge to actual political violence.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because the expectation of social approval is that extra straw that nudges them over the edge.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why what you have witnessed side by side with this mass pool of support for political violence in the United States is political violence on the right and the left as a historic wave of political violence that we have not seen in our country since the 1960s, since the last time tens of millions of Americans supported political violence.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so in other words, the COVID pandemic was a kind of trigger point that brought some underlying tensions to the fore.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so in your book, you discuss three structural forces in contemporary America that have the potential to weaken the guardrails of democratic restraint.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: You say these three forces are rapid democrat demographic change, widening economic inequality, and the growing perception that political institutions are no longer responding effectively to either.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Can you briefly describe each of these forces?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's yes, you've you've got it just right.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So why would tens of millions of Americans support political violence and on both sides of the spectrum?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Number one is an identity driver.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: We are going through a dramatic demographic shift in the United States for the first time in our country's 250-year history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this is restructuring political parties.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is creating fear on the part of the established Americans, think of them as traditional Americans, that they're placed, they're about to be displaced by newcomers.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this is also creating fear uh with um uh people that have arrived more recently to the United States, that those established traditional Americans won't allow them to have equal access to all the benefits of being an American.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: That tension then, that identity tension, is not just a cultural thing that we talk about on podcasts, but it morphs, it morphs into serious uh political tensions, that is, violent populism.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: But side by side with that, over the last few decades, we've seen America become, for most Americans, a negative sum economic society.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: You see, side by side with the identity driver, you are seeing massive wealth shifts to the top 1%.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's coming out of both sides.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh you have Republicans, you have Democrats, both of those pools of people, uh, unless you are right in the top 1%, you are massively losing your ability to afford almost anything, a car, a home, even rent.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's happening on both sides of the aisle.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you put these two together, and now you have a pernicious cocktail.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because now you have real reasons why people are willing to um uh support political violence, unless what?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Unless the political system can adjust, unless the political system can adjust to these massive social changes.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's the third driver, it's not adjusting.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're seeing is that um the public is becoming more and more disillusioned with our political systems, our institutions?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they don't trust the institutions, uh, they don't support the institutions more and more.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And why is that identity uh identity driver?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Negative sum society.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: The the political systems are not adapting to these massive social changes.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, what happens in countries all around the world when you have social change, uh, a gap between social change and political systems, political violence.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's happening in the United States.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like much of what you say is very familiar in our current dialogue about how to diagnose the ills of our democratic system, uh, the issues of massive income inequality, shifting demographic uh relationships between white and non-white populations, uh, and alienation from political institutions that seem fundamentally broken.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: But what's new, I think, here, or what's really distinctive about your argument, is this focus on how these institutional and demographic changes affect the norms of political interaction.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so how is this normative dimension of politics important?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: The norms of politics that we should um have really intense political contests, and then we just accept the outcome of an election and just understand that the winners are going to win, and the losers have a chance to come back for another bite at the apple a few years later.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: That is fading away.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: You see, once you have not just polarization, not just social change, but such intense social change that it's not being resolved through the political system, that creates enormous frustration and fear of permanent political exclusion.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: You see, the fear increasingly, and you see this in rhetoric, by the way, uh in the coming midterms, is not just fight hard to win, and if we lose, we come back again a few years later.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's these are contests for survival, for existence of the way of life that people want, or the survival of their vision of America.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is a different level, and that's what the book is really showing.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's showing this in data, it's uh national surveys, linking all these together.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: But more than anything else, it's laying out and explaining how the normalization of political violence is taking root in the mainstream.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: And as it takes root in the mainstream, it's aggravated by numerous other issues, social media, the rhetoric of politicians, absolutely.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: But those are not the tap root.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: The taproot is this fundamental rapid social change that really is making us our own worst enemies.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that is what is underneath this historic rise of political violence uh on both the right and the left that we, again, have not seen since the 1960s.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it also shows that as we come to the midterms, these midterms will be the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't just mean the day of the vote and the mail-in voting, I mean all the way through the counting of the vote and the seating of the next Congress.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: January 3rd is going to be the most nervous day in America since January 6, 2021.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is a very worrisome picture because if we indeed are to preserve democracy, we need to maintain a faith on both sides that the losers will have their dignity protected and have the opportunity to compete again in a future election.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And what you're saying, I think, is that both on the right and on the left, there's this kind of existential rhetoric of survival, that if we lose this election, not only do we lose power for the time being, but we lose the opportunity ever to compete for power effectively again.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, you've you've put your finger on it.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is what is occurring um um as a slow-moving wildfire inside of mainstream American politics.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is not simply fringe talk anymore.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is uh this is uh existential politics is becoming part and parcel of how we now normally run elections, which think about that.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: That means this is about the normalization curve moving up.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's becoming more normal to consider extreme outcomes.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: That is the big danger inside of violent populism, because once the public becomes normalized, then other things that you would think of would oh, we would never do, such as a leadership bombing campaign on Iran just out of the blue, suddenly start to become, oh, that's not so unusual.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, violence has become pretty normal lately.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that's part and parcel of what we come to expect.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And these are these are the ways in which normalization of political violence is the true taproot problem in so many um uh countries around the world historically, because once you have populations, and you don't have to have the majority, uh, 10%, 20% of the population supporting political violence, plenty strong enough to create a true amount of uh of um uh political violence.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: We need to remember that in our American revolution in 1776, only 30 to 40 percent of Americans, the people who called themselves Americans, supported the revolution.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: This was not a majority.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: This was oh, this was fundamentally a determined minority.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Determined minorities can do an awful lot um to bring about true political violence.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what you are witnessing here.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: So we only have a few minutes left uh today, but I'm hoping that we'll have a chance to continue this conversation in the near future.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: I guess the question that I'd like to leave our listeners with is just to hear a little bit more about your reflections on this relationship between the fringe views, what used to be fringe views, that our way of life is under threat.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: We can't survive if we lose this election.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: With those fringe positions becoming mainstream, so that it becomes acceptable by a large proportion of regular Americans on both sides of the aisle to advocate for, or at least to bless political violence as a legitimate option.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let me give a little trajectory here, and I'm only gonna focus on one side because we don't have time to do both, but we could, in fact, do both.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so if we look at uh the culture wars from the perspective of the conservative right, we can see there was the John Birch Society.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, this is many, many decades ago.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: We can see Pat Buchanan's arguments about the problems of immigration uh and how uh white American decline was going to be the taproot of all the ills of overall American decline.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and Pat Buchanan in the 90s, uh, he was uh in the in the media.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he, in fact, even ran for president uh here.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not that he was completely under a rock uh here, but what you see in that trajectory is John Birch very much fringe.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Then you see Pat Buchanan starting to become the fringe to the mainstream.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And now look at President Trump, who's taking almost exactly the same arguments uh from Pat Buchanan's book, The Decline of America.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And literally they are in almost each and every one of his speeches, uh, where he is talking about this major decline of what used to make America great, the traditional Americans.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yes, it's true, he doesn't use the uh uh he doesn't identify it as always white, but it's quite clear he means that people who have been in America for many, many, many generations.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And as I just said, for 250 years, that's white majority America.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: So so this is uh this is essentially taking Pat Buchanan's arguments um and bringing them into the mainstream.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he has won two elections, so we just need to be clear he has won two elections.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't mean to say that all of uh President Trump's supporters also support.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh violence.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: In the book, Our Own Worst Enemies, we do surveys.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can see exactly the proportions that support political violence for the two parties on both the right and the left.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it is substantial, but it is nowhere near all of them.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: But what that means is that the parties now, and I'm now I was down giving you the trajectory on the right, they have a violent core.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that violent core has become more radical.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: With the case of President Trump, for example, and this is what chapter five of the book shows is um uh January 6th is important, not just as a historical fact, but as a focal point that has made MAGA more radical since January 6th, not less radical.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is not as if MAGA touched the stove and oh, we don't want to get burned again.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: They're more radical, and the book will trace that out in detail.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is uh the the real problem that we face, which is ideas that we used to see around and think, oh, yeah, that's just a fringe idea, no problem here.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: We'll just bury it.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, well, those are now becoming part and parcel of core mainstream politics.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is why we live today in an era of violent populism.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: These social changes I've identified, they're not coming to an end unless we start to modify those changes.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And both parties start to modify those changes.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is uh left on its own devices.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: We can expect violent populism to get more intense over the next 10 years.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: What is the prescription that you might offer as an initial incremental step that both our political leadership on both sides of the aisle and also regular citizens uh from both parties can take in order to dial back the rhetoric and the uh support for the legitimacy of violent political action.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the last chapter of the book lays out certain policies, but right now we're coming into an election.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: So let me answer this in the context of the election season we're in.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: The number one thing is to get past winning elections by bare majorities, the 51% rule that you're good if you just get 51% of the vote.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you strive as a party to get 55% of the vote, 57% of the vote, what's going to happen is necessarily you're going to have to embrace a wider swath of the public.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that wider swath will mean um a more moderate set of policies that will help uh our country in general.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of the core uh issues we have is notice how we've been very satisfied with winning by one percent or two percent, and the parties will say, uh, and the and the leaders will say, Oh, sure, I'd love to do that, but I got to get that one percent.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, you can actually go for a mega majority, and we're not going for that.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: We are just uh satisfied with bare um 51%, and that 51% rule is working dramatically against us because it means neither party has an incentive to really reach into the middle, and that will be true in the midterms because the middle shows up even less in the midterm.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if the parties decide they're really just going for a bare victory, inch it out, you know, one inch is fine, and that's when and then they're done.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then this means they're ignoring much of the moderate middle.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's no surprise then that the policies that are adopted after the victory are much, much more extreme, and that alienates the other side even more.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you're in what I call the legitimacy shock cycle.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: It fuels itself.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: So at the level of political leadership, it's really important to try to go for a broader swath of the public rather than just the bare majority.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: In a recent radio interview, you issued an urgent appeal to American political leaders and citizens alike across the political spectrum.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: You called on them to clearly and forcefully repudiate the use of political violence.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Why is this so important?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because there's two reasons.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, number one, since the support for political violence in the mainstream is today the core driver of political violence in America, if you don't repudiate it, then you're not actually slowing down violent populism.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And point number two is our surveys show that 70 to 75% of Americans abhor political violence.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: So if you go for that moderate middle, the best issue to go for the moderate middle on is rejecting political violence.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, that means rejecting political violence by your own side.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that moderate middle is not just simply saying they don't like political violence by the other, they don't like political violence in their own parties.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: So this is what's important, and this is why it's important to reject political violence wherever it comes from, not just simply for Democrats to say, oh, yes, those evil Republicans should not use political violence, or the Republicans to say, oh, yes, those evil Democrats should not use political violence.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: The key message needs to be that political violence is abhorrent wherever it comes from, and as part and parcel of an effort to have supermajority victories.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you really are reaching into the mainstream, not just being satisfied with the most vocal, the most passionate voters.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, in other words, clearly rejecting the legitimacy of political violence may in fact be strategically the most effective way for both of the sides to win elections in a more convincing manner.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's what I think.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it may actually turn out, ironically, to be the best electoral strategy.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what that means is then uh both sides need to break out of their special interests.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: You see, why do we stick with the 51% rule?
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's because special interests love that rule.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's that that means they don't have to actually they get all the benefits of victory and they don't have to share them with very many people.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: But if you actually take a broader swath, a broader approach, and actually go for the center of America, not your special interests.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: My goodness gracious, what and what a breath of fresh air that would be.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any closing thoughts to share with our listeners today?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I just want to say that the most important reason for optimism is our social media and what's happening on social media.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: You see, we have opportunities for um connecting, understanding problems today that I've really rare I have not seen in my lifetime before.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this is really uh what is the source of optimism is that we really can, as a public, uh, understand more about what is occurring.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we can communicate, we can interact with each other, and what makes that possible is all the expansion of what's occurring on social media, which I think is still just in the in the early stages.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a it's an area of vibrant democracy itself.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: The the the area of true democracy is becoming social media democracy.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's a that's a really wonderful note to uh to close on.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the book that we have been discussing is Dr.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Pape's Our Own Worst Enemies, America in the Age of Violent Populism, newly published by the New Press.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I encourage all of our listeners to pick up a copy and uh and read it and discuss it with your friends.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much, Dr.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Pape.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, ma'am.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the America's Why podcast.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Our music is by James Fernando.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project.com.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week.