Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition

"Political violence is a curious and seductive thing. People routinely see aspects of intention and even valor in political violence notionally aimed at values they agree with, even when they don’t condone the violence itself. We can see this in the fanboying (and girling) around Luigi Mangione. And we can see it around the Jan 6th instigators. (No, I don’t think they’re comparable. You don’t see prominent elected officials cheering on Mangione.) My point here isn’t one of trying to figure out whose violence might be more justifiable. It’s that in cases of violence in the service of goals we might feel broadly aligned with we generally tend to see the violence in more linear and literal terms. The culprit believed very deeply in X or Y and was finally driven to violence because traditional means didn’t work. But it’s not necessarily like that. The train of causation and ideation can run in the opposite direction. You’re motivated toward violence and then you find an ideological framework to fit your hunger for violence into.

It’s this more general disinhibition that seems most relevant, a greater social hunger for violence that is worth taking stock of prior to the point it actualizes itself through one political narrative or another."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

Yeah, worth taking stock of the obvious "general disinhibition" towards violence promoted by Grump before electing him again. Anyway, been thinking something along these lines for awhile now. Civil war 2.0, or our national drift in that direction, will be less a territorial dispute, or regional bastions and frontlines, and more random violence and mass murders, where ideological or partisan motivation is an afterthought or twisted together in weird shapes. 

And this isn't to suggest that the urban vs rural/exurban conflict in America today isn't real. Coming from the burbs and then the sticks the divide has never appeared greater to me. But cities need rural agriculture and rural agriculture needs cities; cities are in fact the signal achievement of agricultural civilization. There's a realpolitiks in that that cannot easily be dismissed or broken up. 

Still think, though, Josh underplays in this post the way Grump has activated or accelerated the "general disinhibition" towards violence, or how much that violence skews towards conservative crackpots. There's lots of political violence in American history, sure, KKK, presidential assassinations, but is there any precedent for all the violent threats against public health officials, judges, election workers, and school board members we've seen since 2016, almost all of it republican leaning violent reaction? 

Certainly bigot hostility towards immigrants in US history is hardly new. There was a Red Scare after WWI. McCarthyism in the 1950s. All ugly episodes in American history with more than a whiff of political violence about them. But I'm not sure any of these fit the current situation very well. Today we live in a deeply polarized culture of ambient fascism where deep wells of anger seek outlets for pent up violence. "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is/Do you Mr. Jones?" Only now Mr. Jones has reached a breaking point. Everything is out of whack. 

And along with fears of civil war people are often puzzling over whether the causes of the current crisis are cultural or economic, cultural divisions or economic inequality. How about it goes like this: the pursuit of economic inequality, Billionaires, monopoly, and generally and relentlessly financializing the economy, otherwise known today as corporate rule or the neoliberal order, has exacerbated cultural divisions, poverty, homelessness, and the othering of victims of the onslaught to a breaking point? And voters just elected a Frankenstein of this historical onslaught to double down on the violent pressures in society. Forgive me if I don't think this is going to go well. 

And, again, Keynes, one of my current intellectual touchstones, was comically imperious and overly ambitious and maybe quite naive about colonialism and definitely an overly complicated theoretician (there really is no "general theory," for instance) but he did call all this out a hundred years ago: i.e., the violence and social conflict that results from the predatory impacts of unfettered capitalism without the necessary stabilizing agency of government.