Is America Headed for a Wave of Political Violence?…(2…)
By Taylor Lewis
AmericanThinker.com
March 18, 2019
In March of 2016, during the heat of the Republican primary contest, Josh Marshall, the tetchy founder of Talking Points Memo, offered an ominous augury about the raucous Trump campaign. “Someone will die,” he thundered, giving, at the time, the umpteenth warning about the violent effects of the real estate magnate’s aggressive rhetoric. “It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly,” Marshall warned his loyal audience.
I’ve thought about the piece a lot since Trump’s unlikely election and the Democrats’ slow descent into madness. Every new instance of liberal-concocted violence brings it back to mind, like a nagging reminder. Whether it’s James Hodgkinson’s attempted killing spree, Trump supporters accosted in public, or even hoaxed hate crimes, Marshall’s prediction might appear prescient, albeit in a backwards way.
But is it true that we’re living in a “climate of agitation”? A recent New York Times piece also seems to confirm what gringo expat Fred Reed observed not long after Marshall’s disquieted conjecture: that America “seems angry — quietly so, not sure what to do about it, but looking for someone to hit.”
In “No Hate Left Behind,” Thomas Edsall cites a study from political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason on the growing ease at which Americans are willing to employ violence against their partisan opponents. “Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as ‘downright evil,’” Edsall despairs, unaware that one of his byline colleagues once suggested “good people can’t be Republicans.” The data only gets worse from there. When asked if their favored party loses the 2020 presidential election, “18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from ‘a little’ to ‘a lot.’”
One wonders the difference between a “little” violence and “a lot.” Perhaps a walloping with a bar of soap stuffed in a sock is seen as a small-beer beating compared to the guillotine or firing squad? Sure, there’s the difference in degree, but as any victim of domestic abuse can tell you, soft beatings inevitably turn hard.
Then there’s the question of ontological moral status. The researchers found that “nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries ‘lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.’”
It’s a neat little coincidence that three years to the day of Marshall’s warning, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota suggested President Trump is not human. (Her opinion on Jewish Americans is, we can assume, not altogether different.) And who says white papers never represent the real world?
The statistics are troubling, to be sure. And while our times may seem uniquely unhinged, they should be put in the context of history in order to be fully understood. The phrase “political polarization” is invoked, by my count, at least 400 times a day in major publications to describe our anxious political climate. Social media enflames our imaginations by presenting the very worst of human nature: risk-less musings about the existential threats posed by our political opposites. Politics has become less about bargaining over our collective life than a passion similar to the fiery devotion of European football clubs. National Review’s David French, in commenting on the Edsall report, worries that “partisan hate is becoming a national crisis.”
The Rest…HERE
