I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.

To my mind, no person has better captured the frustration that so many of us are feeling in this political moment than Patty Davis.

One of the things that I find not helpful is when elected officials go on air and say, well, this is not who we are.

This is not what America is about. Really?

Davis's father, President Ronald Reagan, was the target of an assassination attempt in

1981 outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.

Because from where I sit, this is exactly who we are right now. And I don't know how we change that or how we fix that unless you look at it straight on and take ownership of that.

So today, we are going to try to look at this moment with someone who has studied not just how we get into cycles of political violence,

but how we have gotten out.

How even in the age of being very online,

it's what people say in real life that counts.

Stay with us.

Hey there, Rachel. Welcome back.

Happy to be here. I'm saying welcome back because the last time we

talked, it was on TV and we had about four minutes. And I remember thinking, I feel like I have

more questions than this. Absolutely. In fact, I was just about to answer another question and then I was like,

okay. Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

And her entire career is dedicated to studying what drives cycles of conflict, like the one

that we are living in now. But I didn't have enough time to ask her everything on TV last week.

So I brought her back. Her theory is that there are certain moments

in our history. She calls them political realignments that are especially fertile for violence.

It's when the battle for ideas becomes so fraught that people either directly or indirectly

...