"The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic
decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why,
for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO
in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning
signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and
the conditions that exacerbate it.
In recent days, journalists and other observers have worked to uncover
the motivations of the accused killer. This is a worthy exercise when
trying to understand a single, shocking event. But when attempting to understand how brutality spreads across society, studying individual
ideologies only gets you so far. As violence worsens, it tends to draw
in—and threaten—people of all ideologies. So if in the early stages of a violent upswing, law enforcement can see clearly that the greater threat
comes from right-wing extremists, which has been the case in the U.S. in
recent years, as the prevalence of violence snowballs, the politics of
those who resort to it get messier. That’s in part because periods of heightened violence tend to coincide with social and political
reordering generally—moments when party or group identities are in flux,
as they are in America right now. As I’ve written for this magazine, eruptions of violence are not necessarily associated with a clear or
consistent ideology and often borrow from several—a phenomenon that law enforcement calls “salad-bar extremism.”
We already understand many of the conditions that make a society
vulnerable to violence. And we know that those conditions are present
today, just as they were in the Gilded Age: highly visible wealth
disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a heightened
sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity,
rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away
with it. These conditions run counter to spurts of civilizing, in which people’s worldviews generally become more neutral, more empirical, and
less fearful or emotional."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/decivilization-political-violence-civil-society/680961/
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