The Red Cell Project
The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with The National Interest. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges.
Charlie Kirk’s killing last month has sparked fears that the United States is headed to an all-out second civil war or revolution. According to a YouGov survey earlier this year, “more Americans than not believe it is likely that the United States will see a civil war over the next decade” while several hundred political scientists and historians in an April 2025 survey saw the U.S. slipping into authoritarianism with Trump’s second term. Trump’s deployment of the military at home, combined with his vow to suppress “the enemy within” while his domestic advisor, Stephen Miller labels the Democratic Party a domestic extremist organization, can easily be seen as setting the stage for an authoritarian takeover. Revolutions don’t come out of nowhere, but how and when are often surprises when they do happen.
Political Violence Exploding
Even before the Kirk killing, the number of assassinations was climbing, according to the academic Peter Turchin’s U.S. Political Violence Database (USPVDB). The five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations, higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s.
Violent threats against lawmakers hit a record high last year, for the second year in a row. Since the 2020 election, state and local election officials have become targets of violent threats and harassment, as have federal judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. As of April, there have been more than 170 incidents of threats and harassment targeting local officials across nearly 40 states this year, according to data gathered for the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.
The Capitol Police investigated over 9,000 threats against members of Congress in 2024, a sharp rise from previous years. The Department of Homeland Security reported a rise in threats and harassment aimed at election workers during the 2024 election cycle. As fears grow of a spreading contagion, House leaders announced after the Kirk killing that Congressional members will get “$10,000 per month to cover personal security costs,” doubling the $5,000 currently available. The White House has also recently asked for “an additional $58 million in security funding for the executive and judicial branches.”
Right-Wing Violence More Prevalent
Both government and academic research has shown that over two-thirds of extremist violence since 2001 until recently has been linked to right-wing extremists. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism indicated in its 2024 report that “All the extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds.” In recent years, there has been a drop-off in Islamist-fueled violence domestically. Yet, according to CSIS’s Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program, the first half of 2025 “was marked by an increase in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots.” Although less deadly historically than right-wing violence, recent left-wing killings — Luigi Mangione’s assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December 2024; the fatal shooting of right-wing protester Aaron Danielson in Portland, Oregon, in August 2020, and possibly the Kirk murder —could signal a growing broad-based conflict. By contrast, many left-wing extremist attacks in the 1990s and 2000s were tied to anarchist or environmental movements.
Most of the attackers, left- or right-wing, have been “lone wolves.” And the U.S. is not the only country seeing a rise in such attacks. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace: “In 2024 alone, terrorist incidents in the West surged to 52 — a sharp increase from 32 the previous year. As a result, seven Western countries, Germany, the U.S., France, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Sweden, now rank among the top 50 nations on the Global Terrorism Index 2025.”
These “lone wolves” self-radicalize via online engagement rather than joining a group. “White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities,” according to Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A University of Chicago analysis of participants in the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol found that these insurrectionists tended to be older than 1960s extremists and often held jobs, were married with children, and attended church.
What’s also concerning about recent violence is its growing societal acceptance. Luigi Mangione, charged in the December killing of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson “has become a left populist folk hero,” according to Georgetown University’s Bruce Hoffman. There is now a musical called “Mangione” that is selling out, and terrorist organization flags fly at demonstrations and protests. Trump has “encouraged attendees at his rallies to “knock the hell” out of protesters, praised a lawmaker who body-slammed a reporter, and defended and pardoned the rioters of January 6, 2021, who clamored to ‘hang Mike Pence.’”
It’s little wonder an American Psychological Association survey found that the 2024 election was a significant source of stress in Americans’ lives. More than 7 in 10 adults (72%) were worried the election results could lead to violence.
Losing Out
Kleinfeld believes the right-wing extremists are united by a belief that as Christian white males, they are losing their “cultural power and status” to other groups, including women, ethnic minorities, and Black communities. There is strong evidence to reinforce their views. The 2020 census showed the U.S. was diversifying faster than anticipated. In 1980, white residents comprised almost 80% of the national population, with Black residents accounting for 11.5%, Latino or Hispanic residents at 6.5%, and Asian Americans at 1.8%. By 2019, the decline of the white share had accelerated, losing over almost 20 percentage points from 20 years earlier. By contrast, the Latino or Hispanic and Asian American population shares showed the most marked gains, at 18.5% and nearly 6%, respectively while the Black share remained stable. Most significantly, for the under 16-year-olds, over 50% identified as a racial or ethnic minority.
On top of the actual changes that are shifting America from a majority white country to a majority minority one, there is a tendency to overestimate the percentage of the population that is Black or from an ethnic minority group. A nationwide 2022 YouGov America survey recorded that adult respondents believed that 41% of Americans are Black when the figure is close to 12%. The findings from a 2016 academic psychology study of Western countries’ public attitudes found “the increasing diversity of the nation may actually yield more intergroup hostility.”
Fear of economically losing out is also part of that hostility and, once again, those fears are not unfounded. Inequality has been growing in the U.S. more than in other countries. There remains a huge wealth gap between whites and racial and ethnic minorities (except Asians) despite some gains by minorities. Harvard’s Raj Chetty has shown children born in lower-income white families not only fell behind higher-income white peers but also their Black peers. Fewer were married, fewer had graduated from college, more have been incarcerated, and many face lower life expectancy than those who are rich and better educated. Disadvantaged whites see the world in zero-sum terms, blaming the success of others, such as Black and Hispanic communities, for their misfortune. According to the University of Chicago study of 2021 Capitol insurrectionists, “Believing that Blacks and Hispanics are overtaking whites increases odds of being in the insurrectionist movement three-fold.” This is one reason for the popularity of Trump’s crusade against DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) among his base.
Cyclical Factors
Quantitative historians have examined the correlation between such factors as demography and inequality with societal breakdown. Peter Turchin, perhaps the best known, puts great emphasis on what he calls elite overproduction that over time promotes the disintegration of nations and civilizations. More and more people are trying to improve themselves and move up, but there are fewer openings at the top. Aristocratic privilege in ancien regime’France prevented the rise of the bourgeoisie while the gentry’s impoverishment in prerevolutionary Russia radicalized figures like Lenin. In today’s U.S., those same class divisions seem at work. A recent academic study has shown that “Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to be admitted and attend” an Ivy League university as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. “Average wealth of the top 0.0001 per cent of the global population grew on average 7.1 per cent a year between 1987 and 2024, compared to 3.2 per cent for the average adult,” according to French researcher Gabriel Zucman. And he found that the top 400 wealthiest Americans had a total effective tax rate of 23.8% of income, like the rate paid by the middle class. For some time, middle-class children have struggled to do better than their parents, and only 50% achieve it, compared to 90% in the 1940s.
America has been there before in the Gilded Age (1876-1900). The great industrialists, or “robber barons” as they were called, flaunted their wealth gained from monopolizing the technological breakthroughs of those times — railways, steel, and oil — widening the gaps with the ordinary middle class and poor. Like today, the two major parties were evenly divided, making it impossible to pass reforms. Immigration was at its height as well as violence and discrimination against newcomers. A populist party emerged of farmers and workers. Political violence also grew; one historian, Beverly Gage, has written that, “Left-wing radical and revolutionary groups — anarchists, syndicalists, Wobblies, militant trade unionists — erupted with remarkable frequency,” including the assassination of President McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
Why didn’t this eruption of violence result in a widespread revolution? Most historians credit the Progressive Era and its many reforms with stopping the drift towards revolution. Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency after McKinley, made reform a centerpiece of his administration. The Progressive Era saw improved labor conditions and workers’ rights, more regulation of big business, consumer protection laws, and conservation of natural resources. For instance, Roosevelt doubled the number of national parks. Women’s suffrage also gained steam, and women got the vote in 1920.
No Clear Pattern to How Revolutions Start
The self-immolation of a fruit seller in Tunisia was the spark that started the Arab Spring uprisings, overthrowing the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, but in the decade since, the Middle East still appears far from democracy. Revolutions don’t require mass rebellions. Germany and Italy slipped into fascism and dictatorship through electoral manipulation and political intimidation. The collapse of the Soviet Union was largely peaceful, triggered by a stagnant economy, the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms, and disunity among the Soviet republics.
Coups are probably the likeliest way for violent revolutions to start. Examples include the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and Franco’s war against Spain’s Second Republic in 1936. A contested election is sometimes the prelude, as happened in Myanmar when the military seized power after its side lost the 2020 election. Whether a coup succeeds or fails depends on the “presence of popular nonviolent mobilization.” There has been a secular decline in coups according to the IMF, but many of the underlying factors behind coups exist in the U.S., such as political polarization and growing class divisions.
Is a Second American Revolution So Hard to Imagine?
According to Pew Research Center, “Trust in our nation’s institutions has never been lower.” Only 22% of U.S. adults said they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, down from 77% six decades ago. It’s not just the federal government; Gallup reports that “Only 32% of people have trust in churches and organized religions, down from 65% in the early 70s; over roughly the same time, trust in the medical system has fallen from 80% to 36%.” Trump’s MAGA base sees him as a savior rescuing America from its dysfunction and decline, and even some of Trump’s opponents are entranced by his energy in defying the usual political sluggishness. Revolutions start when the old order becomes part of the problem.
Trump’s unprecedented deployment of the military to counter crime in U.S. cities is a move that risks undermining the military’s position as a politically neutral actor. At the recent military offsite, Trump told the military chiefs that they should be prepared to battle “the enemy within,” an ominous phrase with a fraught history. Moreover, Trump’s pardoning of the protesters who invaded the Capitol sends a dangerous signal, with its potential interpretation of sanctioning an attempted coup. Ignoring the warning signs is perhaps the biggest lesson and the ultimate reason why coups and revolutions happen.
