The violence has been normalized — and there's no water cooler left to gather around.
In a Washington ballroom on a late April evening, a shooting interrupted the annual ritual of American political life and sent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fleeing through service corridors — the son escaping the kind of room that claimed his father in 1968. The alleged gunman appears to fit a pattern historians have come to recognize with dread: a solitary figure, politically aggrieved, acting on a logic shaped by an era of deep fracture. Scholars who study American violence see the present moment rhyming with the late 1960s and early 1970s, but warn that what is missing now — a political establishment willing to hold the center, a public capable of collective alarm — may make this iteration more dangerous than the one it resembles.
- A gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, sending RFK Jr. — son of a man assassinated in a hotel ballroom — fleeing through service corridors while an agent shielded him with his own body.
- Donald Trump has now survived three separate assassination attempts, a figure without precedent in American presidential history, yet the country has produced no sustained national reckoning in response.
- Historians draw a sharp parallel to the political violence of the 1960s and '70s, but note a critical difference: that era had leaders who pushed back against extremism, while today's polarized landscape offers no such institutional counterweight.
- Online ecosystems have replaced the isolation of the lone wolf with networked grievance communities that provide language, validation, and what researchers call permission structures for political violence.
- In the chaos of evacuation, Steve Scalise — permanently injured in a 2017 shooting — paused to help a Democratic colleague who had himself been targeted, while Erika Kirk, widow of an assassinated Trump confidant, was guided out in her evening gown, saying only that she wanted to go home.
The Washington Hilton was doing what it always does on the last Saturday in April — filling with the comfortable noise of the political class at ease — when the shooting began. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was working the room when his security detail moved fast, one agent placing his body between Kennedy and the threat while others pushed him through service corridors to safety. The location was not incidental: his father was killed in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles in 1968. For anyone who knew that history, the echo was immediate and sickening.
The alleged shooter, who traveled to Washington by train, appears to fit a grimly familiar profile — a disaffected man nursing political grievances, operating alone. Donald Trump has now survived three separate assassination attempts, more than any president in American history, and that figure alone, historians say, should prompt something more than a news cycle.
Scholars of American political violence see the current moment rhyming with the late 1960s and early 1970s — deep partisan fractures, collapsing faith in government, a sense that the social contract is coming apart. The parallels are real, but Princeton historian Julian Zelizer argues the differences may be the more alarming part. That earlier era, for all its carnage, had a political establishment still trying to hold the center. Most elected officials pushed back against division rather than feeding it. Today, he says, violence has been so thoroughly normalized that it no longer even produces a national conversation.
What has changed, scholars argue, is the information environment. Online culture rewards outrage and punishes nuance, and people who might once have stewed in isolation now find communities that validate their grievances and provide implicit permission to act. The lone wolves of today are often downstream of movements that have given shape and language to their rage.
The dinner itself produced one unexpected moment. In the scramble to evacuate, the usual tribal lines briefly dissolved. Steve Scalise — who walks with a permanent limp from a 2017 shooting — paused to help Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz, himself the target of an assassination plot in 2024. And then there was Erika Kirk, widow of a Trump confidant killed last year, being guided out in her evening gown, audibly saying she just wanted to go home. That image — a grieving woman moving through a corridor that smelled of spilled wine and fear — is where the history lands. Not in the abstractions of polarization, but in the people who keep showing up to these rooms and keep being reminded that the violence follows them in.
The ballroom of the Washington Hilton was doing what it always does on the last Saturday in April — filling with the comfortable noise of Washington's political class at ease, glasses raised, grudges temporarily shelved — when the shooting started. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, had been working the room, chatting with guests, when the chaos broke. His security detail moved fast. One agent put his body between Kennedy and the threat while others pushed him out of the ballroom and through a tangle of service corridors to safety.
The location was not incidental. Kennedy's father, Robert F. Kennedy, was killed in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles in 1968. The son had just been rushed out of one. For anyone who knew that history, the echo was immediate and sickening.
The alleged shooter, who traveled to Washington by train, has not yet had his full motive established. But early indications suggest he fits a pattern that has become grimly familiar: a disaffected man nursing political grievances, operating alone, targeting the institutions he believes have failed or wronged him. Donald Trump has now survived three separate assassination attempts — more than any president in American history — and that figure alone, historians say, should prompt something more than a news cycle.
For scholars of American political violence, the current moment calls up the late 1960s and early 1970s with uncomfortable precision. Both periods were defined by deep partisan fractures, a collapsing faith in government, and an ambient sense that the country's social contract was coming apart at the seams. Steven Hahn, a history professor at New York University whose recent book examines extremist currents in American life, puts it plainly: violence and politics have been intertwined since the republic's founding. The question is always whether the country can contain it.
The parallels to the earlier era are real, but so are the differences — and the differences may be the more alarming part. The 1960s and '70s saw violence on a scale that dwarfs today's. The decade opened with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, then claimed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy within five years. Between 1970 and 1971 alone, radical groups including the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army carried out roughly 2,500 bombings across the country. In the summer of 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two separate attempts on his life within three weeks — first from Lynette Squeaky Fromme, a Manson family member whose Colt .45 failed to fire because the chamber was empty, then from Sara Jane Moore, who managed to get a shot off outside a San Francisco hotel before a Marine in the crowd tackled her.
And yet, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer argues, that era had something the present one lacks: a political establishment that was still, however imperfectly, trying to hold the center. Most elected officials pushed back against the divisions rather than feeding them. The perpetrators of violence were widely understood to be fringe actors. Conspiratorial thinking had not yet found its way into the mainstream of either party.
"Today we almost expect violence to be part of this highly polarized era," Zelizer said. "When these events happen there isn't even a national conversation anymore. The violence has been normalized."
What has changed, scholars say, is the information environment. Online culture rewards outrage and punishes nuance. People who might once have stewed in isolation now find communities that validate their grievances and, in some cases, provide what researchers call permission structures — the implicit signal that acting out is not just understandable but justified. The lone wolves of today are often not truly alone; they are downstream of movements that have given shape and language to their rage.
The dinner itself, for a moment, produced something unexpected. In the scramble to evacuate, the ballroom briefly became a place where the usual tribal lines dissolved. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise — who walks with a permanent limp from a 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice — was rushed out by his own security detail and paused to help Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz, himself the target of an assassination plot in late 2024. And then there was Erika Kirk, widow of a Trump confidant killed last year, being guided out of the ballroom in her evening gown, audibly saying she just wanted to go home.
That image — a grieving woman in formal dress, moving through a corridor that smelled of spilled wine and fear — is where the history lands. Not in the abstractions of polarization or the statistics of bombings and skyjackings, but in the people who keep showing up to these rooms and keep being reminded that the violence follows them in.
Notable Quotes
Throughout American history there have been periods where tensions became so great that you have these bursts of violence against our political leaders. We were living in one of those times in the late 60s through the mid-70s, and we are living through one of those today.— Julian Zelizer, Princeton historian and co-author of 'Fault Lines'
Violence and politics have been central to the American experience since the birth of the republic.— Steven Hahn, NYU history professor and author of 'Illiberal America'
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
What made this moment different from other political violence incidents in recent years?
The location did a lot of the work. A hotel ballroom, a Kennedy, a security detail running — it compressed fifty years of American trauma into a single scene.
You mentioned the 1960s and 70s had more actual violence. So why do historians seem more worried now?
Because back then, the political class was still trying to contain it. Today, the rhetoric that feeds violence comes from inside the institutions themselves.
What does it mean that Trump has faced three assassination attempts — more than any previous president?
It means something has shifted in how a subset of people relate to political power. Whether that's cause or symptom of the broader breakdown is the harder question.
The article mentions lone wolves being connected to online movements. How is that different from the organized groups of the 70s?
The Weather Underground had manifestos and cells and internal discipline. Today's actors are more diffuse — radicalized in comment sections, acting without coordination, which makes them harder to track and harder to stop.
Steve Scalise helping Jared Moskowitz across party lines — is that meaningful or just a footnote?
It's a footnote that tells you something true. Shared trauma can briefly dissolve the performance of enmity. The question is whether it lasts past the corridor.
What would it actually look like for violence to become un-normalized?
Probably the same thing it looked like in the 70s — elected officials consistently refusing to treat opponents as enemies, and a media environment that doesn't reward the loudest, angriest voice in the room. Neither seems close.