Daily Herald opinion: Political violence should have no home in this country

It’s a story that we have all read before, and sadly we’ll no doubt read again.

On Saturday morning, we learned of the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband. The suspect in that killing also tried to assassinate a second lawmaker, authorities said.

It’s the latest round of political violence in 2025. A year that started with a man flying an Islamic State group flag and driving into a crowd of people in New Orleans, killing 14 people on New Year’s Day.

In just the past few months, two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in Washington, a march in Colorado calling for the release of Israeli hostages was firebombed and the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania was attacked while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were inside during a Jewish holiday.

Our response after each incident is almost the same.

There are calls to tone down the rhetoric in politics while people on the left and right look for evidence to pin the blame on the other side for the latest round of violence.

“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies extremism, told the Associated Press. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”

How did we get here?

If you look back at American history, you could say that it’s always been like this. From the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, lynchings in the South after the Civil War to the turbulent 1960s, our history is scarred by political violence. Extremism has always existed in some form.

With the internet and social media, it’s easier than ever to spread lies and conspiracy theories. Extremism has found a home online and some of our political figures are more guilty of that than ever before of tapping into culture.

If social media existed in the 1960s, it would probably look similar to what we see today. A lot of name calling and bickering. Each side entrenching itself in an argument that will never end.

It’s easy to point at the problem, but how do we fix it?

There’s no simple solution. There’s no one law that is going to stop what is happening.

But we can start to remedy what ails us by remembering that we’re all Americans. We might have political differences, but most of those differences aren’t so great that we can’t overcome them. We might not agree on every policy, but we should be able to agree that there is no room for political violence in this country.

The one thing we can’t do is let extremists continue to dictate the political conversation.