The great rage

Recently, pundits and journalists have tended to frame worries over the presence of violence in American politics as a question of whether the United States is slipping into a second civil war. There are good reasons to think that the most extreme such scenarios are far-fetched—among them that, as the University of Chicago professor Chris Blattman writes, “letting a civil conflict happen isn’t in anyone’s interests.” But this obsession with the idea of a second fratricidal split also obscures the long presence of violence of other kinds in American life, such as the explicitly ideological attacks conducted by small extremist groups in the 1960s and ’70s and terrorism by white southerners against Black Americans. Those eras of brutality are far from an exact parallel to today, but they are a reminder that violence can persist for a long time without a crescendo into war.

In one sense, the everyday nature of the violence and harassment that have become so prevalent is part of what makes this dynamic so concerning. Trust in government has suffered a sharp decline over the past 50 years, but a study by the Pew Research Center also found that Americans have lost further trust in other public institutions over the course of the pandemic. One solution for these ills is to encourage greater participation in civic life by idealistic Amerians who want to do good. But such encouragement can’t help but be undercut by the new norm that people working in a public-facing job, or in any role that might excite public interest, can expect a potential torrent of abuse at any minute. Many—though not all—stories of health officials, election workers, and school-board members inundated with threats end with the person at the center of the storm stepping back from their work in search of some measure of anonymity. Public service, in their view, is no longer worth it.