I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
At this point, the main reason why I write about politics online isn't to change other people's minds necessarily, although I do enjoy that when it happens. I have too many more directly pressing personal concerns around money, personal relationships, and so on to dedicate any substantial amount of energy to attempting political change. I think at this point the main reason why I write about politics online is to get feedback that makes me feel less like an outlier. I equally dislike the left and the right, so it is affirming for me to discuss politics in places where not everyone is totally a fervent supporter of one political side or another. Places like Reddit and X generally disgust me, I dislike both the "everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is an evil fascist and it is our duty to punch them" vibe and the "I am a based trad-wife-seeking Aryan and we should literally kill the libs" vibe. I wish I could find more places online with more of a detached, looking-at-politics-objectively vibe that avoids ideological dogmatism and that kind of simple "my political opponents are evil and we should kill them" moralism that is so common online. /r/moderatepolitics can be good sometimes. TheMotte is definitely more right-leaning than I am, but you can have decent interesting discussion here so I appreciate it. rdrama.net has a few sociopathic ghouls on it, but the politics discussion generally mocks both the fanatic left and the fanatic right so I appreciate that places as well. I can't really think of any other places, which really surprises me. One would think that, with hundreds of millions of people online, it should be easy to find many forums that avoid virtue/vice signaling, empty moralizing that treats the opponent as ontologicaly evil while saying nothing interesting about politics, or just general chimpanzee-like shit-flinging at others. But I haven't been able to find many.
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