The New Political Violence

The New Political Violence

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-09/the-new-political-violence/

by Matthew Dallek
4/9/2010

When the House Speaker is getting death threats, militants are
spinning out of control. Matthew Dallek on what the radicals of the
1960s can teach us about today's dangerous fringe.
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This week, the FBI announced that it had arrested a 48-year-old man
for threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The day before, it
arrested a man for threatening Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. Nine
anti-government militiamen were jailed for plotting to kill police in
Michigan, while a man who threatened House Minority Whip Eric Cantor
in YouTube videos was also arrested last month.

American politics, it seems increasingly apparent, according to media
reports, is careening towards a violent cataclysm of unknown
proportions. Political violence in the United States, of course, is
hardly a novelty.

The deranged gunman John Hinckley, JR., shot and wounded President
Ronald Reagan in 1981. Anti-government fanatic Timothy McVeigh
murdered scores of Americans when he bombed the Oklahoma City Federal
Building in 1995. Yet a more telling age recalling our own times
happened in mid-20th Century America, when fears of political
violence spiked in the press and in political and academic circles.

Today's menace seems to be coming largely from the FAR right, whereas
in the 1960s, violence spanned the ideological spectrum. The threats
then had terrible consequences: From President John F. Kennedy's 1963
assassination to the 1968 murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F.
Kennedy; from Chicago police assaulting anti-war demonstrators at the
1968 Democratic Convention, to the left-wing Weather Underground's
vision of overthrowing the U.S. government, violence and politics
were a fixture of American political life. But in other crucial ways,
some of the dangers posed were also overblown, which may offer a bit
of comfort for today.

The violence of the 60s was spawned by a social fabric coming apart
at the seams. Conservative morality was breaking down. The youth
movement was testing conventions, experimenting with drugs, tuning in
and dropping out. And the civil-rights movement challenged Jim Crow
in the Deep South, provoking massive resistance, including the use of
police dogs, firehoses, bombs and bullets. Riots broke out in inner
cities across the country. Reactionary right-wing violence met an
aggressive radical leftist fringe in a perfect ideological storm that
has been likened to a 20th Century version of the American civil war.

There are a few seeds of similar unrest evident today. The country is
awash in twisted conspiracy theories about the nation's first
African-American president. During last year's campaign, a handful of
individuals appeared at rallies claiming that then-Sen. Barack Obama
was a Muslim terrorist who would ruin America. Obama's assertion of a
bold agenda, at a time of great economic crisis, has further inflamed
anti-government anger­evident at Tea Party rallies across the
country. In a handful of cases, the anger has sparked acts of
vandalism and, with the enactment of Obama's health-care overhaul,
threats to the safety of elected officials.

The understandable worry of the moment is that extremism will find a
way to triumph -- transforming essentially political debates about
health reform and the federal debt into violent acts committed by
lone nuts against largely liberal officeholders. It's worth
recalling, though, that the country overcame even the most tragic
spasms of violence of that earlier era­and that despite the string of
vicious actions that marked the 50S AND 60S, the threat to our
politics and our way of life was somewhat overblown.

Liberal academics at the time argued that right-wing extremists were
a rising power; attacking modernity and the democratic foundations of
political traditions, right-wingers posed, some liberals said, a
grave danger to America's future. But the charges also often had an
alarmist, breathless cast to them. Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'rith leaders claimed that the John Birch Society was using
television, radio, and other media to "poison" American politics with
their violent-inducing conspiracy theories. They called such
extremists "a creeping malignancy" and a "grand assault...that seeks
to penetrate every aspect of American life."

Sociologist Daniel Bell fretted that extremists not only advocated
impeaching but also "call[ed] to 'hang'" Supreme Court Chief Earl
Warren. Co-authors Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab argued in "The
Politics of Unreason" that "right-wing extremism" had "murdered six
million Jews" in Europe; if it could happen there, the authors
warned, right-wing violence could be visited upon the United States, as well.

Reporters, politicians, and academics also fixated on the threat to
the country posed by the increasingly violent American left. But this
threat, too, was often blown out of proportion. The Weather
Underground (Bill Ayers, who became a lightning rod in the 2008
presidential campaign, was a leader) was a faction of the Students of
the Democratic Society. The national media paid enormous attention to
their pseudo-revolutionary activities­even though they numbered in
the hundreds, according to famed sociologist Todd Gitlin­lending them
a weight and cultural authority they did not possess. Gitlin's
excellent book "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage" mentions
that after one violent Underground street demonstration, the
headlines blared that "SDS Women Fight Cops" and "Radicals Go on
Rampage." The Weathermen abhorred non-violent protests, spoke
casually about "getting us a few pigs," vowed to dismantle capitalism
and lead a revolution against imperialism worldwide. But the
bluster­like the oft-heard claims in the 1950s that Communists
controlled the U.S. government or that right-wing extremists were
importing faScism to America's shores­didn't amount to much.

In some ways, we have the very political establishment that was under
attack to thank for helping to contain these threats. On the right,
even conservative Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan denounced
the most outlandish John Birch Society theories. And the vast
majority of anti-war protesters of the Vietnam era carried out their
vigils peaceably, rejecting the Weather Underground's quixotic calls
to arms. And while the road was often rocky, the country's political
system did ultimately respond. The battle over civil rights ­ pitting
non-violent protesters against an increasingly violent old Southern
order--did ultimately result in strong federal protections. And
Congress, after years of pressure, belatedly agreed to cut off
funding for the Vietnam War.

Those eventualities are worth remembering today, as fresh tensions,
fueled by the food-fight culture of cable TV and the Internet, once
again boil over. Office windows may be broken, and a few deranged
individuals will be locked up for threatening the safety of members
of Congress. But it's also likely that most of the contemporary anger
will find appropriate channels, within a flexible and enduring
political system that buckles, but rarely collapses. Every time the
country overreacts by imputing more power to extremists than they
actually possess, it hands the extremists a victory--giving them what
they want and making them feel like martyrs for their dark and
delusional causes. Finding that balance isn't easy. But it's a goal
the country must­and will--meet in the difficult days ahead.
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Matthew Dallek, a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center,
teaches history and politics at the University of California
Washington Center.

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