Propelled by delusions and united by hatred, growing numbers of Americans believe that political violence is justified, necessary, and even at times desirable. If we no longer can, or care to, adhere to the dictates of civility and reason, then we will have surrendered control of our destiny and will become the authors of our own extinction.
I.
If violence is the antithesis of politics, Americans may yet witness the death of politics in the United States, and with it, perhaps, the death of civility and civilization. A functional politics does not require consensus. It does require a willingness to negotiate and to compromise, in addition to a measure of forbearance. Opponents cannot regard each other as enemies and should accept as a matter of faith the goodwill of those with whom they disagree. Violence forestalls these possibilities. Once a people substitute violence confrontations for reasoned debate and begin to kill one another there is not much to discuss.
Americans on the extreme right and the extreme left inhabit their own reality. In some respects, the situation is reminiscent of the ideological conflicts that took place in the United States during the sectional crisis of the 1850s and in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s when radical politics eclipsed all hope of moderation and restraint. Propelled by delusions and united by hatred, growing numbers of Americans (twenty percent according to a University of California, Davis poll conducted in 2022) believe that political violence is justified, necessary, and even at times desirable.[i] Predictions to the contrary notwithstanding, this advocacy of violence seems unlikely to end in another civil war. A more probable scenario is a multifaceted war of all against all that will result in the gradual but steady descent toward anarchy.
Americans tend to underestimate the extent and significance of the violence unfolding in our midst. However dreadful, violent incidents appear to be isolated and sporadic. For the vast majority, ordinary life suffers no disruption. To many, the midterm elections in 2022 offered reassuring evidence that Americans wanted no part of fanatical politics or violent extremism. The worst had passed. Good sense and common decency at last prevailed. Yet, although acts of violence seem random and unconnected, and although there may be a momentary respite, violence has already become, and has in fact long been, endemic in American society. It has taken on a life of its own, further eroding Americans’ confidence in their institutions and trust in their fellow citizens.
Meanwhile, the comfort that many Americans find in the disorderly and unsystematic nature of violence may easily be transmuted into a cause for distress and anxiety. If violence is indiscriminate and unpredictable, no place is safe from it and no one immune. Three conditions make the current outbreak of violence in the United States at least potentially worse and perhaps more enduring than those that have occurred in the past. First the ubiquity of guns, including of course assault weapons, makes possible murder on a large scale. When the Communists and the Nazis fought pitched battles in the streets of Berlin and other German cities, they used fists, clubs, and chairs because they had no access to more deadly weapons. They bloodied, maimed, and sometimes killed their rivals but they could not slaughter them. Second, some politicians are now complicit. They urge their followers to resort to violence. Others go further, aligning themselves with groups that are inclined to commit violent acts and then praising them when they do. Third, far from bringing people together, social media has done much to divide them and to fragment the nation. Vile rhetoric and dangerous conspiracy theories abound. Stoking anger and hatred boosts profits. The skepticism that social media has instilled about everything and everyone, from the outcome of elections to the motives of politicians, has not only bred contempt. It has also given rise to deep and abiding suspicion and uncertainty. The determination to assert and protect rights may originate as much in the desire for security as it does in the quest for freedom.
Apprehensive and frightened, some citizens, perhaps in time a majority, transfer their allegiance from a leader whom they perceive to be weak to a leader whom they perceive to be strong—a leader whom they are convinced will not abandon or betray them but will protect them and fight for them. But as often as not, figures who project strength and encourage violence, whether nineteenth-century imperialists, twentieth-century dictators, or twenty-first-century tyrants, themselves forsake the responsibilities of citizenship and, in some instances, of adulthood. Instead, they compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy and immaturity with a penchant for bullying supporters and opponents alike as a way of maintaining power over them. For such leaders now as in the past, violence is not merely a political tactic unleashed to dispose of opponents; it is also a strategy of government and a means of regeneration. Theirs is at once the promise of revenge and of salvation through violence.
In marked contrast to this attitude, the political ideals that inspired the Founding Fathers rested on the virtue of the citizenry. “Public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics,” wrote John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren.[ii] Freedom shorn of responsibility was anathema to republican thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. The triumph of unalloyed individualism over legitimate authority is, according to republican theory, a utopian dream likely to degenerate into an anarchist nightmare. Such chaos invariably bred despotism, as it had in Revolutionary France. Republican virtue, on the contrary, entailed an unselfish devotion to the commonwealth. When summoned to do so, individuals must be willing and able to set aside private interests to serve the public good.
But even as Americans declared independence, many entertained doubts about the republican potential of the new society. It seemed preposterous to imagine that Americans could discard or alter human nature to eliminate their selfish desires and passions. “How long then will their Virtue last?”Adams asked Mrs. Warren in October 1775. In a subsequent letter he answered his own query, despairing that “there is so much Rascality, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition… among all Ranks and Degree of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.”[iii] Since no political or legal mechanisms could enforce disinterested public virtue without also destroying liberty, the future of the American Republic remained tenuous.[iv]
Between 1775 and 1783 American colonists fought a war of independence. They did not stage a revolution designed to transform self and world. Despite John Adams’s contention that the “Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People,” the war for independence did not fulfill the dreams of redemption and liberation that Europeans and their progeny had long ascribed to the New World, nor was it intended to do so.[v] The war itself could not have done more than establish political independence from Great Britain, a considerable accomplishment in itself and one that permitted the colonists to determine their political future. It did not even fashion new relations of power within American society or completely supplant English legal, political, and constitutional traditions and practices. Yet, the sense that war as revolution sustained and expanded the liberating and redemptive mission of America soon enough became the purpose which Americans attributed to their struggle for independence, the defining characteristic of an American national consciousness.
Today many Americans embrace an even more extravagant interpretation, imagining that the Revolution so-called produced a new kind of person living in a new kind of society, and projecting onto national independence the assurance personal liberation without constraint. Those hopes, they complain, have been deliberately enfeebled, and they are determined to punish those whom they hold responsible. For radicalized individuals and groups, the myth of the transformative power of violent revolution enthralls the mind, even to the point of justifying murder. Unable or unwilling to confront the disappointments, hardships, and injustices that have befallen them, these extremists look for someone to blame. They turn their frustration and rage not only against the government but also against their fellow citizens, many of whom are themselves victims of similar misfortunes.
Neither the partisans of the right nor the partisans of the left enjoy a monopoly on the resort to violence as the engine of liberation. To be sure, political violence in itself is not always morally objectionable. Oppression thrives on coercion, violence, and terror and has rarely, if ever, been defeated except by the same. Frantz Fanon, the West Indian theorist of anti-colonial revolution, insisted that:
The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists…. Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the middle ages [sic], endlessly marking time.[vi]
However regrettable this necessity may be, there is no reason to be squeamish or dishonest about a self-evident historical truth. My concern, rather, is with the psychological dimension of violence.
Beyond the achievement of any specific political objective, beyond even retaliation or vengeance against a merciless adversary, violence can—and in American society, I believe, has—become cathartic. It may be therapeutic to punish those considered to be the source of evil in the world. But if radical proclamations offer any insight into our thinking, it seems only through violence that human beings can free their consciousness and recreate themselves, becoming in effect new men and new women poised on the threshold of a new era in history, indeed, a new reality. For Americans, this enterprise amounts to a recovery of innocence and purity, the revitalization of the American Adam, relieved of doubt, fear, and sin. Under such circumstances, violence is much more than a political tactic. It is an act carried out not even, as Fanon would have it, “to understand social truths,” but for personal gratification. It is the instrument of spiritual rebirth for those willing to stand at Armageddon and do battle for the Lord.
II.
Such naïve and unsophisticated innocence, such willful ignorance, disregards experience. Violence is not a panacea for the setbacks, dissatisfactions, and unhappiness that are inseparable from the human condition and for which no one is to blame. The utopian struggle to set things right through violence ends by perpetuating the very suspicion, fear, resentment, anger, and hatred that it was supposed to exorcise. There are always new enemies in our midst and new monsters to slay. For all of our hostility to ideas, we Americans it turns out are even more mistrustful of experience. We act as if encounters with, and exposure to, alien peoples, cultures, ideas, and beliefs are almost certain to be fatal. We fear that the traditional American way of life, however we conceive of it, is perpetually under siege and that we must reinforce our defenses to preserve it, even if doing so necessitates the use of violence. Our identity as a people, our ability to decide who is and who is not worthy to be counted an American, the very survival of the nation depend on it.
Only experience can provide emotional maturity and moral growth, especially if enlightenment and resilience are the products of failure, suffering, and grief. With the curious sense of disempowerment that increasingly dominates our perspective on the world, Americans vacillate between an arrested development and a premature old age. Like children and the elderly, we feel vulnerable. We are bewildered and afraid. Violence has become for many the substitute for wisdom and virtue. Violence is a shortcut to dealing with a complex and sometimes frightening reality, a way of asserting the will and forcing the world to obey.
Far from remaking society and humanity, violence endangers their existence. In its allure, violence unsettles the mind and loosens all restraints, as Georges Sorel understood at the beginning of the twentieth century. The myth that violence cleanses, invigorates, and ennobles restored grandeur and heroism to a decadent and corrupt society. But the logic of Sorel’s argument suggests that the objects of violence—in this instance the European bourgeoisie–had no right to exist and any means used to destroy them were justified. The aim was to impose the will and to win the day. All other considerations were irrelevant. In the pursuit of victory, anything was possible because anything was permissible. The principle is horrifying; its application is ultimately disastrous.
Reason is now subordinate to violence, as the conduct of the war in Ukraine demonstrates. The United States, of course, is not formally at war. But the continuous rise in violent incidents during the last thirty years, whether acts of domestic terrorism, threats against public officials and their families, battles fought in the streets of American cities such as Portland, Oregon, recurrent mass shootings, or the attack on the U.S. Capitol, have made the entire country a battleground. If the trend persists, acts of barbarism will multiply until civilization dissolves. To complicate matters, those who engage in these exploits are often convinced that they are in the right. Any hesitation on their part, any restraint, any show of compassion would signal a lack of moral commitment. Theirs is a punitive mission to inflict as much torment as possible on a diabolical enemy who would do the same to them if given a chance.
The fault lies in our thinking. We assume that people must learn to hate. But hatred is a fundamental human instinct. People must learn not to hate or, more realistically, they must learn to control their hatred. Similarly, the will to violence entices the human spirit. It tantalizes and satisfies a deep emotional need in unleashing the more destructive aspects of the human psyche. Violence is fed by a host of emotions: outrage, fear, pride, honor, the dread of humiliation, and fantasies of sadistic pleasure. It manifests itself finally in the implacable rancor that people bear against others when they believe they have been the victims of a grievous wrong. There is thus no such entity as a “culture of violence.” Violence has an ontological foundation.
Attempts to eradicate violence are thus sure to fail. The best hope that remains is somehow to curtail it. History affords one intriguing possibility: the revival of chivalry. Misinterpreted and ridiculed, when it is not ignored, dismissed, or forgotten, chivalry, although an imperfect response to the widespread violence in American society, imparted a rigorous code of social and moral conduct to temper the bloodshed of the Middle Ages. Describing the vicious intensity of medieval partisanship, Johan Huizinga explained:
And what could the people better comprehend of the politics of their princes than these simple motives of hatred and revenge?… In purely feudal times, separate and isolated feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and possessions of the other. But in addition to the question of material wealth, there is not less importantly that of honor. Family pride and the thirst for vengeance or the passionate loyalty on the part of supporters are, in such cases, primary motivations.
Nor were judicial proceedings immune from the delight attendant upon brutal punishment. “What strikes us about the judicial cruelty of the later Middle Ages,” Huizinga observed:
is not the perverse sickness of it, but the dull, animal-like enjoyment, the country fair-like amusement, it provided to the people…. The unchristian extreme to which this mixture of faith and thirst for revenge led is shown in the prevailing custom in England and France of refusing individuals under the sentence of death not only extreme unction, but also confession. There was no intent to save souls; rather, the intent was to intensify the fear of death by the certainty of the punishments of hell.[vii]
Chivalry developed to moderate such heartless and profligate violence.
Although an arresting solution to the problem of violence, the restoration of chivalry is not entirely apposite to present circumstances. Chivalry emerged as part of an extensive movement to dispel the aggression of medieval knights. Knights had emerged as a distinct and independent warrior class during the tenth century. Taking advantage of the unstable political situation in Europe, they ravaged a defenseless peasantry for their own aggrandizement. Their plundering deprived the Church of important sources of revenue. As a consequence, during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries the clergy sponsored the Peace of God (Pax Eccleiae, c. 999) and the Truce of God (Treuga Dei, c. 1027) to dissuade the knights from assailing the peasants as well as to shield Church property, pilgrims, women, and the clergy themselves from assault. The chivalric code further decreed that it was the Christian obligation of the knights to safeguard the weak, the sick, the helpless, and the downtrodden. The ideal of chivalry also worked because the First Crusade, begun in 1095, directed violence out of Christendom and toward the Muslims and the Jews.
Yet, in its emphasis on valor, integrity, honor, and fellowship, the chivalric code reminded men especially in those moments when passion most confounded their judgment that they and their enemies alike were human beings. No one had the right to disavow the humanity of another just as no one had the right to abrogate their own humanity to justify carnage. Fight men will and apparently must, but chivalry obliged them to fight in ways that did not place civilization in jeopardy. If it could not eradicate violence, chivalry refined and perhaps elevated it by compelling adherence to the principles of ethical conduct. However inexpedient and unsatisfying it may be to espouse the rights and to acknowledge the humanity of antagonists, the failure to do so brings an even worse outcome. Such malevolence, hubris, and impiety will plunge civilization into an anarchy so absolute and unfathomable that a humane order may never again rise to the surface.
The question facing us is whether it is already too late. History provides some reason to hope that it is not. In a previous age of upheaval and chaos, human beings, with fewer resources than we now possess, conceived and implemented the means to contain the most violent and destructive impulses of the human spirit. The current infatuation with violence is also susceptible to reform. Americans may yet turn irrevocably away from it, determining that the future welfare of the country and our salvation as a people entails following a different course. But we will realize this hopeful prospect only if the madness that infects us is not fatal. If we no longer can, or care to, adhere to the dictates of civility and reason, then we will have surrendered control of our destiny and will become the authors of our own extinction.
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Notes:
[i] “Survey finds alarming trend toward political violence,” UC Davis Health, July 20, 2022. See also Rachel Kleinfeld, “The Rise in Political Violence in the United States and Damage to Our Democracy,” March 31, 2022, Testimony: Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
[ii] John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 16, 1776, Warren-Adams Letters (Boston, 1917-1925), Vol. I, 222.
[iii] Adams to Warren, October 19, 1775 and January 8, 1776, in Ibid., 146, 202.
[iv] It would constitute too great a digression from the subject of this essay to explore in detail the idea of virtue among members of the founding generation. Suffice it here to point out that the ideal republic was primitive and austere. Samuel Adams, for example, spoke with approbation of establishing a “Christian Sparta.” But by the time Americans achieved independence, the United States was already an advanced commercial society, which raised the disturbing prospect that wealth, avarice, and luxury might tarnish or destroy the unselfish virtue of the people and thereby undermine the Republic itself. Property, which provided the indispensible economic basis for freedom and independence both for the individual and the nation, might, ironically, also be a dangerous source of corruption. See Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 114-18.
[v] John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, reprinted in Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An American Primer (New York, 1985), 248.
[vi] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1968), 37, 147. Fanon’s theory of violence exhibits many of the characteristics that I criticize in this essay. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon maintained that for the oppressed violence inflicted upon their oppressors liberates the consciousness and creates a new identity and a new reality. In other words, human beings do not discover but, in fact, make, or re-make, themselves, asserting both their political and psychological independence, though violence. In so doing, Fanon conjectured, they prevail over the limits of the human condition. His was yet another dream of earthly perfection effected by violent means from which it should be our every instinct to recoil.
[vii] Johan Huzinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996; originally published in 1921), 17, 20-21.
The featured image is War Party (1942) by Forrest Flower, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
