America Has Always Been Angry and Violent

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 6:15 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] America Has Always Been Angry and Violent
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


America Has Always Been Angry and Violent
Wednesday's shooting has prompted much handwringing about the state of the
nation. But political violence and anger are embedded in America's DNA.
By JEET HEER
Jun 15 2017
<https://newrepublic.com/article/143361/america-always-angry-violent>

The shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, which wounded House Majority Whip
Steve Scalise and four others on Wednesday, has roused worrywart pundits
and politicians who fret about the state of America today. “The United
States is in a time of great danger,” John Podhoretz wrote in The New York
Post. “I don’t want to invoke all the clichés of the past decade, but you
know them all—we’re a divided nation, we’re all living in our own bubbles,
we don’t even accept the same facts and we hate each other. The problem is
these clichés are largely true.” There is a real danger, he argued, that
America is entering an era of political violence like the one that began
with JFK’s assassination in 1963, “reached an apogee in 1968, and came to
an end with the nearly successful attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.”

In less alarmist terms than Podhoretz, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
also claimed that our era is characterized by particularly intense vitriol.
“It didn’t used to be this way,” Pelosi said on Thursday. “Somewhere in the
’90s, Republicans decided on the politics of personal destruction as they
went after the Clintons.”

The notion that Americans are particularly angry today has become a rote
talking point in the political press, repeated year after year. In 2011,
after Representative Gabby Giffords was shot by a mentally ill man, NBC’s
Mark Murray wrote, “If one word summed up the past two years in American
politics, it was this: anger.” In 2007, George Will wrote in The Washington
Post, “Americans are infatuated with anger.” In 1996, in her book The Angry
American, George Washington University political scientist Susan Tolchin
described an epidemic of “voter rage.”

But long before any of these writers, amid Barry Goldwater’s demogogic
presidential campaign, the great historian Richard Hofstadter began his
classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” thus:
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years
we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers... But
behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and
that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply
because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter was exactly right—not only about the anger in the mid-’60s, but
also that it was “far from new.” We are not, as Podhoretz and Pelosi
suggest, living in a especially or uniquely dangerous moment. Incendiary
political speech and political violence have been pervasive in U.S. history.

“What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is
its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its
persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt
contrast without our pretensions to singular national virtue,” Hofstadter
wrote in the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, the
1972 collection he co-edited with Michael Wallace. It shouldn’t surprise us
that a colonial settler society that wiped out the Native American
population, imported slave labor, and relied on vigilante violence to
police newly incorporated territories should be prone to political
violence. Reading through Hofstadter and Wallace’s book, one is reminded
anew that American history has consisted of slave revolts and their violent
crushing, race riots, labor clashes, and assassinations.

[snip]

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