Josh Marshall has a really important take on the recent spate of violence that seems to stalk our land. We readily remember the 1960s as a violent time, because of the high profile assassinations. Those assassins were a motley blend of horseshoe theory ideologies (except for King's assassin). State violence was mirrored by protest violence. The 1990s are not as remembers for being violent, yet that was the era of Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement.
What Marshall points to is a comparison with the late Gilded Age period. That was a time of real violence. Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were assassinated, but Garfield assassin was just a lunatic. There was labor violence and violence against labor. There was the Klan re-establishing white supremacy in the South. There was the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans (Marshall forgot this one).
That violence was traced to America's first real exposure to wide disparities in wealth among free White men. Institutions were perceived as corrupt, the promise of reform that came out of the Civil War - Free Labor, Free Men - was dashed against the concentration of extreme wealth and monopoly. The violence was not a left or right wing insurgency, but rather anti-status quo. It was less purely ideological - or rather much of it lacked a programmatic agenda - and more a violent lashing out against a society that seemed to be changing faster than people could cope with.
Violence is bad, by the way. Lauding Luigi Mangione is the sign of a sickness within our overall polity. There might be a link between the two vehicle based attacks yesterday.
We seem headed not for a Civil War or even a broad based reign of terrorism, but rather the slow steady drip of these random acts of violence that - by their accumulation - are no longer random. The anti-politics of Donald Trump seems to feed into this.
As I said, violence is bad, and I wonder if there comes a point when people remember this.
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