Along with a meaningful right to vote on who rules, a defining achievement of democracy is the tradition and institutions for managing profound political conflict and changing leaders without violence. When disagreements escalate to violent acts, e.g., assassinations, threats against civil servants or broad unrest, the core mechanism of the state suffers. Political violence is not merely a tragic symptom of political division; it is a deliberate strategy designed to delegitimize the outcomes of democratic processes and replace the rule of law with the rule of fear. Defending peaceful resolutions of conflict and transfers of power in democratic politics means defending the principle that force has no place in political contestation.

The modern threat of political violence often bypasses the traditional sites of conflict, e.g., military checkpoints, and targets the infrastructure of self-governance. The primary victims are often election workers, legislative staff, judges and local government officials. These attacks aim to achieve what a ballot box loss cannot: the coercive intimidation of those who administer the democratic system. By creating an atmosphere where participating in civic life or simply certifying an election is a personal risk, perpetrators seek to drive impartial administrators out of public life and replace democratic professionalism with partisan loyalty. This is pure institutional sabotage.

Democracy, fundamentally, is a sophisticated system for translating competing interests into public policy through compromise, debate and the peaceful transfer of power. Its resilience rests on the shared, foundational covenant that losers of an election accept the outcome, trusting that institutional rules (courts, future elections, constitutional rights) provide a fair path for redress and future victory. Political violence shatters this covenant. Committing it tantamount to declaring the democratic process illegitimate, seeking to paralyze the system until it yields to the aggressor's demands.

The prelude to political violence is invariably the erosion of speech and norms. Violence is incubated by language that dehumanizes opponents and weaponizes legitimate grievances into calls for confrontation. By undermining trust in non-partisan authorities (scientific experts, election officials, the press, even the courts), bad-faith actors fracture the shared factual reality necessary for rational policy discourse, making peaceful conflict resolution improbable if not impossible.

The defense against this threat has to be institutional fortification.

First, there must be absolute, nonpartisan legal accountability for incitement and acts of political violence. Without swift, transparent and impartial enforcement against it, violence will become the new norm, rendering all other democratic checks meaningless.

Second, the structural integrity of democratic processes must be bolstered. This means robustly funding and securing electoral infrastructure, providing comprehensive protection for civil servants and strengthening laws that prevent the coercion of public administrators.

For peaceful politics to prevail, there has to be a collective commitment from political leaders across the spectrum to de-escalate, a rigorous rejection of violent rhetoric and a reaffirmation of the Rule of Law. The fight to save democracy is ultimately a fight to preserve the boundary between passionate debate and physical force. When that boundary is violated, the only responsible democratic response is unified, unflinching institutional defense. Violence has no place in a democracy.