Americans Lead World in Viewing Politics as Risk to Safety

Nearly half of Americans — somewhere between 40 and 45 percent, according to the Gallup World Poll — say their country’s political environment makes them feel personally unsafe. That number is the highest recorded for any nation in a survey spanning more than 140 countries. Higher than Colombia. Higher than Kenya. Higher, remarkably, than several nations where governments have recently jailed journalists and stripped citizens of their citizenship wholesale.

This is not a story about crime statistics or foreign adversaries. It is a story about what happens when democratic institutions lose the trust of the people they were built to serve — and what it costs a society when fear becomes the dominant political currency.

How January 6th, DOGE-Era Turbulence, and a Decade of Normalized Threat Rhetoric Shattered America’s Safety Consensus

The United States did not arrive at the top of this grim ranking overnight. The erosion has been measurable, year by year, event by event, inflammatory speech by inflammatory speech. The Gallup Law and Order Index — which tracks personal safety perceptions, confidence in police, and comfort walking alone at night — began its steepest American decline after 2020. The compounding events are not hard to identify.

January 6, 2021. A sitting president’s supporters stormed the Capitol while Congress certified an election. Then came the normalization cycle: the minimization, the revisionism, the prosecution of some participants followed by the pardoning of others. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024. The ongoing turbulence of his second term — the DOGE restructuring, mass federal workforce reductions, executive order battles, and the sharpening of partisan rhetoric into something that feels, to tens of millions of Americans on both sides, like an existential conflict.

Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup, has specifically cited the erosion of institutional trust as the driving mechanism behind the safety-threat numbers. When people stop believing that courts, police, and electoral systems will protect them impartially, they transfer that anxiety into raw fear of the political opposition. And in America right now, both sides have done exactly that.

The comparison is striking. Germany — a country that has watched far-right parties surge to historic electoral highs, where democratic fault lines run deep across Central Europe — registers political-safety threat perception at roughly 18 percent. The U.S. number is more than double that. Brazil, with genuine documented political violence and a January 2023 Capitol-riot equivalent, comes close. No stable Western democracy comes anywhere near American levels.

This is the paradox that should stop everyone cold: the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the country that has spent 80 years exporting the idea of liberal democratic safety and stability, now leads the world in feeling politically threatened at home.

The Gallup Numbers That Both Parties Are Using as Weapons Right Now

The data is real. The political weaponization of that data is also real, and it is happening in real time. Here is what Gallup actually found, and here is what each side is doing with it:

What the numbers show:

• Approximately 72% of Democrats identify far-right political actors — including militia groups, election deniers, and what they describe as authoritarian executive overreach — as threats to their personal safety
• Roughly 68% of Republicans cite left-wing government overreach, prosecutorial targeting of political opponents, and what they call the weaponization of federal agencies as their primary safety fear
• Both numbers have increased since 2020, meaning the fear is not partisan in origin — it is systemic
• The sharpest single-year jump in American political-safety fear came between 2020 and 2021, driven primarily by the Capitol attack and its aftermath
• Younger Americans (18–34) report higher political fear levels than any other age group, suggesting this is not a phenomenon that will simply age out

The result is a country where both major political coalitions are simultaneously convinced that the other side represents an existential threat to their safety and way of life. That is not a political disagreement. That is the architecture of a society primed for escalation.

Key accelerating factors identified by Gallup analysts:

1. The January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and its multi-year legal and political aftermath
2. The July 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania
3. The DOGE-era federal restructuring under Trump’s second term, including mass workforce reductions perceived by millions as politically targeted
4. The proliferation of social media content algorithmically optimized to amplify threat perception
5. The collapse of shared factual frameworks between partisan media ecosystems

For broader context on what happens when political fear calcifies into institutional hostility — and what governments do when they feel cornered — the story of Nicaragua under Ortega offers a cautionary extreme: a government that stripped 222 citizens of their nationality in a single day. America is not Nicaragua. But the psychological infrastructure of political fear, left unaddressed, does not stay static.

Gallup’s Jon Clifton, the MAGA Coalition, and the Progressive Left: Three Readings of the Same Crisis

Jon Clifton and the Institutional-Trust Framework

Jon Clifton, who has led Gallup since 2021 and overseen the World Poll’s expansion into 140+ countries, has been clear-eyed about what the safety data represents. His analysis centers not on partisan blame but on a specific mechanism: when institutions lose credibility, citizens stop outsourcing their sense of security to those institutions and begin to perceive political opponents as direct personal threats. The breakdown of trust in courts, electoral systems, law enforcement neutrality, and media creates a vacuum that fear fills. Clifton’s prescription — rebuilding institutional legitimacy — is analytically sound and politically unachievable in the current environment, which is perhaps the most depressing thing about this entire dataset.

The MAGA Coalition’s Reading

Donald Trump’s political coalition has a consistent interpretive frame for the safety-fear data: the fear is real, and the source of it is left-wing institutional power. The Department of Justice prosecutions of January 6 participants, the criminal indictments of Trump himself, the perceived weaponization of federal agencies against conservative organizations — these are offered as concrete evidence that political affiliation carries legal and personal risk. This is not an entirely fabricated argument. There are documented instances of differential institutional treatment. The problem is that the MAGA response — which involves threatening prosecutors, undermining judicial independence, and normalizing extrajudicial solutions — does not reduce political fear. It multiplies it on both sides.

The Progressive Left’s Reading

For the Democratic coalition, the safety data is straightforward confirmation of what they have been saying since Charlottesville in 2017. The rise of armed militia groups, the mainstreaming of political violence rhetoric, the pardoning of January 6 defendants, executive orders perceived as targeting LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrants, and political opponents — these are not abstract concerns. They are, from this perspective, a measurable political climate in which belonging to the wrong demographic or holding the wrong beliefs carries genuine physical risk. The progressive critique has the advantage of pointing to real documented events. Its weakness is that it consistently underestimates how mirrored the fear is on the other side — and how that mirroring prevents any political de-escalation.

Why the Fear Is Real, the Threat Inflation Is Also Real, and Neither Side Will Admit Both Are True Simultaneously

Here is the thing nobody running for office will say out loud: the political safety fear recorded by Gallup is simultaneously legitimate and wildly inflated, and both of those things are true at the same time.

The fear is legitimate. Political violence in America has increased. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) documented a surge in political violence events between 2020 and 2023. The assassination attempt on Trump was real. The threats against members of Congress — from both directions — are documented and increasing. The normalization of violent rhetoric, the explicit dehumanization of political opponents in mainstream media and political speeches, the proliferation of weapons — none of this is imaginary.

The threat inflation is also real. The statistical probability that any individual American will experience direct political violence remains extremely low. The cognitive gap between perceived threat and actual personal risk is enormous, and that gap is being deliberately widened by political actors and media systems that benefit from fear. A Republican voter in rural Ohio is not going to be harmed by a Democratic senator. A Democratic organizer in Atlanta is not facing death squads. But both of them, fed a steady diet of worst-case framing, experience something that feels neurologically identical to genuine threat.

This is the actual crisis. Not that America is as dangerous as Nicaragua — it is not. But that the psychological experience of political life in America is beginning to resemble countries where political membership genuinely does determine personal safety. Consider the contrast: in Tunisia, a prominent lawyer was arrested live on television in May 2024 — that is state-directed political persecution. In America, we are dealing with something different but in some ways more insidious: a self-reinforcing fear ecosystem that does not require actual persecution to generate the psychological experience of it.

What neither side will acknowledge:

• That their own political rhetoric contributes directly to the fear levels they then cite as evidence of danger
• That the media ecosystem serving each coalition is financially incentivized to maximize threat perception
• That the Gallup data reflects psychological state, not objective risk — and conflating the two is itself a political act
• That de-escalation requires unilateral gestures, which neither side believes they can afford to make first

Four Ways the American Political-Fear Cycle Plays Out From Here — and What Each Path Costs

The Gallup data does not exist in a vacuum. It will be weaponized in the 2026 midterm elections. It will shape policy debates, judicial appointments, and foreign perceptions of American stability. Here is how the trajectories diverge:

• Scenario 1 — The Fear Feedback Loop Continues: Both parties double down on threat framing heading into 2026. Fear numbers reach 50%+ by election day. Turnout is driven almost entirely by negative mobilization — voting against rather than for. Whoever wins inherits a country where roughly half the population believes the result poses a personal threat to their safety. Governance becomes impossible. This is the most likely scenario based on current incentive structures.

• Scenario 2 — A Catalyzing Violence Event Forces a Reckoning: A major political violence incident — an assassination, a mass casualty event explicitly tied to partisan motivation — shocks the system into a temporary de-escalation. Congress passes bipartisan security measures. Rhetoric cools for 12–18 months. Then the underlying structural drivers reassert themselves. This is a historical pattern, not a solution.

• Scenario 3 — Institutional Rebuilding Begins to Shift Perception: A sustained period of consistent, nonpartisan judicial and electoral administration — combined with deliberate media literacy investment — begins, slowly, to move the numbers. This requires political will that currently does not exist in either party’s leadership. Timeline: 8–12 years minimum.

• Scenario 4 — The Fear Gap Becomes a Governing Tool: A sufficiently skilled political actor — from either party — figures out how to campaign explicitly on reducing political fear rather than amplifying it, and wins. This is the historical “normalcy” play, executed by candidates ranging from Eisenhower to Obama. Whether the current media environment permits this kind of campaign is genuinely unclear.

For ongoing coverage of how political fear and institutional breakdown interact across democracies, see our worldwide political news coverage.

The Gallup finding that Americans lead the world in political safety fear is not an indictment of any single party or president. It is a structural diagnosis of what happens when a political system spends a decade treating its domestic opponents as existential enemies rather than fellow citizens with competing interests. The world’s most powerful democracy has convinced roughly half its population that politics is a threat to their personal survival — and both parties are actively invested in keeping it that way. At what point does the fear itself become the thing we should actually be afraid of?

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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