The U.S. Has Always Known Political Violence, But Seldom Has It been so Pointless
By: Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
January 6 marked a dark turn toward a new American nihilism.
By Charles P. PiercePublished: Nov 26, 2022 Anadolu Agency//Getty Images
Yes, indeed, we live in a period in which actual violence is perilously close to the surface in our politics. One of the two major political parties seems to have made the shadow of the mob into a kind of informal Political Action Committee, and the putative frontrunner for the party's presidential nomination seems to be a master of getting other people to fight for him and then ducking out of the responsibility when they do.
Political violence, of course, is nothing new in this country. After all, it was born in political violence. The Sons of Liberty hereabouts were very much not into peaceable assembly to petition the government for a redress of grievances. They were, rather, very much into violently assembling to throw the tea into the harbor and running the government's ass up to Halifax where it belonged. In the early years of the Republic, there was Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts (hometown, represent!) and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. The late Pauline Meier's masterful Ratification recounts how the adoption of the Constitution took place as much in the streets as in Independence Hall. There was that conspicuous unpleasantness between settlers in Kansas and Missouri, which lead to the still more conspicuous unpleasantness between the years 1860-65.
And then there is the long-running political violence from which Ronald DeSantis is so desperately trying to spare the delicate little children of Florida. The way that slavery gave way to Jim Crow gave way to lynching, all with the acquiescence (if not the overt approval) of the political classes. The continent-wide genocide of the Native people was an act of political violence the way that subjugation for profit of any people is. And there is also the violence of the anti-choice movement, which finally blew up enough clinics and killed enough doctors that it got its way last spring. That our history is not as deeply bloodstained as that of Europe is simply a matter of our not being as old as France or Spain.
For me, the difference between the violence of January 6 and all of these previous explosions of political controversy is that most of them were about something tangible. The Sons of Liberty realized the real limits of being a colony. Farmers who followed Daniel Shays were legitimately at the edge of financial ruin. People opposed to the Constitution were opposed to a new form of government. The utter breakdown in the mid-19th Century was prompted by an inhuman economic system that had to be ripped out, root and branch, and a sanguinary conflict was the only alternative.
What was January 6 about? It was about nothing tangible, nothing real. It was about delusions and theories, carried over the air on waves of sound, or across the country in millions of pixels. It was about a rigged election that wasn't. It was about imagined oppressions, podcast tyrannies of the twisted imagination. It was about mob violence as a getaway vehicle for a criminal president. There was an essential—and delusional—nihilism about it that made it all the more threatening, all the more terrifying, and less and less American.....
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It was about people who think that "their" country is being taken away from them.