January 12, 2024
It is hard for me to accept the lows to which our American political dialogue has fallen. The civic scene has not been this caustic since the 19ᵗʰ century when broadsheet attacks were vicious and incendiary, especially in the decade preceding the civil war. Organized bands of street toughs roved cities looking to battle with their ideological opponents. The printed word was the only mass media and many papers, if not all papers, were merely organs of hate spewing bile directed by the prevailing political bosses on all sides of every issue. One issue arose above them all: slavery.
Just like today, citizens in 19ᵗʰ century America were captured by personal choice in their own media silo. The only difference between 1855 and 2024 is the plethora of media willing to tell you what you want to hear. Next step is to see the bully boys out on the streets and the general increase in mayhem that precedes political instability. It does not matter that today is considered modern and therefore we are beyond being manipulated. Uncivilized rowdiness is coming unless we check it. Mob violence results from the coarse stirrings of fear and prejudice inside the polity. We are not immune. No generation of humans are protected from its blandishments. For some the call to violence is sweet and alluring. It is a siren song to many of the most brutish among us.
The good citizens of republican Rome thought they were immune, too. Sophisticated and the proud inheritors of hundreds of years of republican government. That is, until Julius Caesar's hired gladiators started cracking heads in the forum. Similarly, when America’s Republican party unleashed its Wide-Awake brigades, formed as an answer to the partisan chaos of the 1850's and clashed with Democrats at Stone's Creek, Americans were shocked. Everybody knows what happened next.
Today it’s the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Humans will be humans. And that is not always a pretty thing. Things can go sideways at any time during these Trumpian times.
