America's Years of Lead Are Here

In the wake of the brazen murder of a Minnesote State Representative and her husband, the surge in political violence is hitting a fever pitch.

The bullet that killed Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman arrived at her door disguised in the uniform of the state. On June 14, 2025, a 57-year-old man named Vance Boelter, impersonating a police officer and driving a vehicle modified to look like a squad car, manipulated his way into the homes of two Democratic lawmakers.^[1] He shot and wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife before traveling nine miles to Hortman’s home, where he gunned down the former House Speaker and her husband, Mark, in a calculated act of political assassination. It was methodical, cold-blooded terror.

Just over two years ago, a different kind of terror visited the San Francisco home of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. An intruder, David DePape, smashed his way through a glass door, searching for the Speaker and echoing the menacing chants of the January 6 rioters: “Where is Nancy?!”.^[2] Finding her 82-year-old husband, Paul, DePape bludgeoned him with a hammer, fracturing his skull. It was frenzied, conspiracy-fueled violence.

These events, one a meticulously planned assassination and the other a chaotic, brutal assault, are not aberrations. They are bloody milestones marking America's descent into its own Anni di piombo, an American Years of Lead. This is not a future threat; it is our present reality. It is a slow-boil conflict that was set to simmer years ago and reached a rolling boil on January 6, 2021.^[3] The violence is now a feature, not a bug, of the American political landscape. Despite how novel the present may seem, there are plenty of precedents not only in the history of the United States but also in Italy which underwent a similar period of societal upheaval and outbreak of political violence.

The Italian Prequel: Anni di Piombo

To grasp the precipice on which American democracy now stands, it is necessary to look back at Italy's Anni di piombo, or "Years of Lead." This period, stretching roughly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, was defined by "widespread conflictuality, the use of violence for political aims and harsh state repression".^[4] The years of lead in Italy was an era of profound social upheaval and a catastrophic loss of trust in public institutions, creating a "febrile atmosphere of cynicism, paranoia and unexploded rage".^[5] The violence was staggering. Between 1968 and 1988, political violence claimed 428 lives through bombings, assassinations, and street warfare. Events like the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, the 1980 Bologna railway station massacre that killed 85, and the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades were not isolated incidents but the drumbeat of a society at war with itself.

This violence did not erupt from a vacuum. It was born from the ashes of Italy's post-war "economic miracle," a period of rapid change that left deep social and political grievances unaddressed.^[6] The country's mainstream political parties, the long-ruling Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, proved incapable of managing the widespread labor unrest and student protests that defined the era. This failure of the political establishment to provide either reform or revolution led to profound disillusionment on both the left and the right, fostering a pervasive sense of alienation and pushing activists toward extremism. If this sounds familiar to our own situation, that’s not by accident.

The parallels to the contemporary United States are as undeniable as they are unsettling. The failure of Italy's political center to address the anxieties of its people mirrors the deep and abiding disaffection in the U.S. with the political establishment that is widely seen as corrupt, unresponsive, and captured by elite interests. This crisis of faith in core institutions creates a dangerous political vacuum, one that extremist ideologies and anti-systemic movements are rushing to fill. Trump is a manifestation of this failure of institutions, not the cause of it. Just as in Italy, where the inability of the mainstream to govern effectively birthed radical violence, the perceived failures of the American political class have cultivated the soil for our own harvest of political extremism.

The nature of this violence also offers a disturbing reflection. In Italy, terror came from both the neo-fascist right, like the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR), and the far-left, like the Red Brigades.^[7] Right-wing groups like the NAR were noted for endorsing "spontaneous acts of violence to express their disaffection from the system," a philosophy that resonates with the seemingly random but politically charged attacks seen in the U.S. today. While the political violence in modern America is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon, the ecosystem that promotes it manufactures a narrative of symmetrical threat. The right-wing media and political apparatus constantly invoke the specter of "Antifa" and "leftist mobs" to frame their own aggression as a defensive necessity, a form of mirror propaganda that serves as pretext for their own support of political violence.

Perhaps most tellingly, the Italian experience reveals how prolonged political conflict erodes the very fabric of society, transforming ideological struggle into something darker. Society breaks down into random, sociopathic violence committed by individuals disconnected from any clear political goal. This slide from political grievance into a generalized, nihilistic rage is a critical symptom of a society in the grip of a leaden age. It signals a shift beyond targeted political acts to a broader contempt for society itself, a desire not just to win a political battle, but to watch the entire system burn.
The Far-Right Vanguard

Any honest assessment of political violence in the United States today must begin with an unequivocal fact: this is not a "both sides" problem. The data is overwhelming and dispositive. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) noted that terrorist attacks by far-right perpetrators more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017 alone.^[8] The 2019 Global Terrorism Index found a staggering 320% increase in right-wing extremist attacks in the West over the preceding five years. This reality is affirmed by the U.S. government itself; the Department of Homeland Security has identified "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists," particularly white supremacists, as the nation's greatest domestic terror threat.^[9]

The 2022 hammer attack on Paul Pelosi is the archetypal example of this new form of violence. The assailant, David DePape, was not a card-carrying member of a formal organization. He was a man radicalized online, marinated in a toxic slurry of far-right conspiracy theories, including QAnon, Pizzagate, and Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the 2020 election. His motive was explicitly political and terroristic: to take the Speaker of the House hostage and "break her kneecaps" as a gruesome warning to other Democrats.^[10] The reaction to the attack was as revealing as the act itself. Prominent right-wing figures and media outlets immediately sought to obscure the political motive, spreading baseless disinformation that the attacker was a secret lover.5 This is the signature of a political movement that refuses to take responsibility for the violence it inspires, a form of stochastic terrorism that normalizes extremism by denying its existence.

The Gray Tribe's Nihilism

Beyond the organized and ideologically coherent far-right, a different and more amorphous threat is emerging from the digital ether: the "gray tribe." The term, coined by blogger Scott Alexander, describes a subculture of "libertarianish tech-savvy nerds" who define themselves by their ostentatious rejection of the red vs. blue political binary.^[11] They present themselves as self-consciously intellectual, obsessed with statistics, Bayesian reasoning, and overcoming cognitive biases. They are "systems thinkers" who prefer to attribute societal problems to complex, abstract forces rather than to individual agency or malice, and they often congregate in the worlds of tech and esoteric philosophy.
This worldview, however, is not a healthy third way; it is a symptom of advanced political decay.

While its adherents rarely preach armed insurrection, their philosophy fosters a profound and corrosive cynicism about democracy. Their intellectual detachment and posture of superiority can curdle into a dangerous nihilism, a belief that the existing political system is so fundamentally irrational and broken that it deserves to be torn down. While most members of this tribe are content to blog, code, and "shitpost" online , the case of Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of a UnitedHealthcare CEO who moved in these "gray tribe" online circles, exposed the violent potential of this worldview.^[12] Mangione, whose online presence showed an interest in the right-leaning, anti-"woke" rationalist network, represents a manifestation of violence from the gray tribe types.26 This is the danger of apolitical nihilism: when all systems are deemed corrupt and all actors complicit, violence can be recast not as a passionate crime, but as a logical, systems-level intervention. The problem is that we cannot decide who is the recipient of the violence, only the killer does that. As a result, violence becomes the only cultural currency and innocent people are caught up in the crossfire.

The Rising Tide of Threats: A War on Governance

The most pervasive and functionally effective form of political violence in America today is the systematic campaign of intimidation being waged against public officials. This is not merely angry rhetoric; it is a direct assault on the operational capacity of the democratic state.

The statistics paint a terrifying picture of a government under siege. According to the U.S. Capitol Police, investigations into threats against members of Congress skyrocketed from 3,939 in 2017 to a peak of 9,625 in 2021, remaining alarmingly high at 9,474 in 2024.^[13] A study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that federal charges for threats against public officials nearly doubled in the 2017-2022 period compared to the four years prior, driven overwhelmingly by ideologically motivated, anti-government threats.^[14]

This war on governance extends far beyond Washington, D.C. A landmark Brennan Center for Justice report revealed that over 40% of state legislators and 18% of local officials have experienced threats.^[15] Data from Princeton University's Threats and Harassment Dataset confirms that these incidents surge around elections, targeting everyone from city council members to poll workers.^[16]
This is not random anger. It is functional violence with a clear political objective. The data reveals its chilling effect: officials, especially women and people of color, are now less willing to run for office, hold public events, or work on controversial issues because of the constant abuse.^[17] This is a slow-motion dismantling of democratic governance through terror. It creates a state where only the most aggressive, the most insulated, or those most willing to tolerate threats to their families will choose to serve, fundamentally and dangerously altering the character of our political class. The threats are not just speech; they are a strategy to paralyze and ultimately capture the state without ever having to win a majority at the ballot box. This corrosive process removes political choices from the ballot to the threat of the bullet.

A Nation Divided

The descent into political violence is not rooted in simple policy disagreements. Academic research makes it clear that the primary driver is "affective polarization," a visceral, identity-based animosity toward political opponents.^[18] Americans do not just disagree with the other side; they have come to see them as alien, immoral, and an existential threat to the nation.
This dynamic reveals a toxic synergy at the heart of America's current crisis of political violence. The general population has become a tinderbox of affective polarization, primed by fear and mutual distrust. Political elites, particularly on the right, then act as the accelerant. They deploy "inflammatory and demonizing public rhetoric" and weaponized conspiracy theories to ignite that tinder.^[19] Research from UC Berkeley confirms how "unscrupulous political leaders can persuade their followers to fear political opponents," pushing them to abandon democratic values.^[20] This establishes a direct causal pathway from the rhetoric of national figures to the violent acts of individuals like David DePape in San Francisco and Vance Boelter in Minnesota. The problem is not merely that people are angry; it is that their anger is being actively cultivated, directed, and weaponized from the top down.

It is a comforting but dangerous fallacy to believe the current moment is without precedent. The United States has a long and bloody history of political violence, and the period of the 1960s and 1970s was particularly tumultuous. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, two of which occurred in 1968, scarred the national psyche. Bombings by radical groups like the Weather Underground were frequent occurrences.^[21] Much like today, it was a period of intense social and political conflict.
That era's violence was fueled by a potent mix of socioeconomic factors, including deep-seated racial inequality, the decline of urban manufacturing jobs, and the concentration of poverty. Yet, paradoxically, it was also a time of broad economic growth, suggesting that cultural shifts, including an increasing acceptance of civil rights, were also powerful drivers of unrest.
While the historical parallels are real, the current moment is different in several critical and arguably more dangerous ways. Political violence of the 1960s and 70s, particularly from the left, was often directed against property as a symbolic act.

Today's right-wing violence is increasingly aimed squarely at people, political opponents, minorities, and federal agents. Furthermore, the modern information ecosystem represents a radical departure from the past.^[22] The internet and social media enable the instantaneous, global dissemination of conspiracy theories and the mainstreaming of extremist ideologies on a scale unimaginable in the 1970s. Most critically, the leader of one of the two major political parties has become a primary engine of the inflammatory rhetoric that fuels the violence, consistently breaking norms to vilify his opponents and tacitly endorsing the actions of his most extreme followers. This represents a fundamental rupture with the past, collapsing the distance between extremist fringe and mainstream political power.

January 6, 2021, was the Rubicon moment. The violent assault on the U.S. Capitol was not the culmination of a movement but its brutal, public debut. The attack, broadcast live to a shocked world, opened the floodgates by demonstrating that political violence could be deployed on a mass scale against the very seat of American democracy to achieve a political end. The subsequent failure to hold the chief instigators accountable, culminating in the pardoning of convicted rioters, sent an unmistakable message to would-be extremists: this is now an acceptable, and perhaps even rewarded, tool in the political arsenal.
We are living in the consequences of that broken taboo. The assassination of a state representative in Minnesota, the hammer attack on the Speaker's husband, the unceasing wave of threats against public officials, and the mainstreaming of deranged conspiracy theories are not disparate events. They are the pattern. They are the undeniable evidence that America has crossed a threshold into a new and far more dangerous era. We are not on the brink of our Years of Lead; we are in them.

To ignore the parallels with 1970s Italy and America is an act of willful and perilous blindness. The conditions are all present: a populace steeped in affective polarization, a catastrophic loss of faith in governing institutions, and a political class on one side that has embraced demonization and violence as legitimate strategy. The question is no longer whether we can avoid this dark path, but whether we can find our way out before the slow boil becomes a full-scale conflagration, before the bullet and the hammer become the primary instruments of our political discourse. The silence of responsible leaders in the face of this reality is not prudence; it is complicity. And history will judge it with the harshness it deserves.