by liberal japonicus
On his most recent turn at PBS, David Brooks gives us a tour d’horizon of periods in history where there were ‘rising climates of violence’. OMG, Davey, do tell! He lists, in order
- The French Revolution
- Reconstruction
- the 1970’s, name checking the Bader Meinhoff gang, the Red Guard and the Weathermen.
Capehart looks like he is going to snap his pen in half and then comes back with:
Excuse me, I’m not going to just let the comment that progressives more than folks in the far right think that violence is justified.
What I wouldn’t have given to hear Capehart ask Brooks why he skipped over the 1930’s. Tis truly a mystery…
Does he see Reconstruction as a time of violence? Or, more accurately, the period after it was terminated and the southern whites were empowered to institute Jim Crow and all the trimmings? Because the latter would be a pretty clear case if the reactionary right indulging in violence.
Well, wj, those were of course the Democrats (while the Republicans were still the malodorous n-word loving carpetbagging s–m of the Earth but we do not talk about that because that would spoil everything). 😉
I’d also be interested to know the source of the statistic Brooks quoted which Capehart is objecting to:
“If you look at who thinks violence is justified, it tends to be young people by a lot. Most progressives and most conservatives oppose violence, but you get two and a half times as many progressives say it’s justified as not.”
I wonder where he gets that from? And I wonder what the hell it actually means – It seems to completely avoid mentioning the percentage split within conservatives, but the grammatical meaning makes nonsense of “most progressives and most conservatives oppose violence”.
Could he possibly be trying to say that two and a half times as many progressives as conservatives justify violence (even though this is not what he actually said)? And if so, I wonder what the actual percentages are, not to mention when these statistics were derived. If, for example, during the ICE adventures in Minneapolis, it would be interesting cherry-picking indeed….
Brooks’s list tells me that when he thinks about rising climates of violence, he thinks in terms of violence against the state, and “against the order of things.” Political repression doesn’t enter into his calculus because he doesn’t conceive of “law and order” as violence, even when the state is using violence against protesters while invoking the state of exception and allowing themselves to violate the laws they have sworn to uphold.
I wish Capeheart would have asked Brooks to expand on what he meant by naming Reconstruction. Was he referring to the KKK and their terrorist campaign against freed blacks, or was he referring to the disenfranchisement of southern whites? It would be really nice to know where Brooks drew that line.
What Americans really think about political violence
Poll: More Americans now agree political violence may be necessary to right the country
I suppose Brooks was making a mangled reference to this poll which found that 17% or liberals compared to 6% of conservative say that political violence can sometimes be justified. This was shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Of course, the answer to this sort of question is going to depend on current events – I’m sure there would have be a much different response immediately after the Jan 6th insurrection. It’s wildly dishonest of Brooks to quote that poll out of context, even if he’d got it right.
In reality, most of us think political violence is justified in some extreme circumstances – who, for example, would oppose on principle the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich?
“you get two and a half times as many progressives say it’s justified as not.
I wonder where he gets that from?”
I think he pulled it out of his ass,
Pro Bono’s response to that YouGov poll seems right to me, and it fits with my sense of David Brooks’s ideological leanings as I describe them earlier here. I think his mention of the French Revolution as his ur-scene of rising political violence shows that. He’s giving us an essentially Burkean response in a moment where he sees the left as the chief threat to the established order.
The US was built with electoral safety valves. The GOP is systematically monkey wrenching all of those, empowered by a corrupt judicial cabal.
Nope. Our biggest worry isn’t that, it’s that the college kids are losing faith in the political process.
Never mind why that might be happening.
Never mind the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Boogie Boys, Patriot Prayer, Atomwaffen Division, Patriot Front, and all of the Active Clubs on the right.
Those guys are all a bit over-the-top, but not a threat to anything important and essential.
We need to be careful that we don’t get another Baader Meinhof. Those guys were marxists!
Over the years, I’ve created an (admittedly biased) model of an “East Coast, mostly BosWash urban corridor” perspective on American history. Brooks fits it pretty well, IMO. So he doesn’t think about things like the post-Civil War Plains Indians genocide. Nor the western states mining unions violence. Nor, likely, the post-WWI racial violence peaking in the 1919 Red Summer because mostly it wasn’t in the places he thinks of as “historical”. Nor the Zoot Suit Riots because they were white-on-brown, not white-on-black.
Never really thought of Brooks as Burkean, just thought of him as a burk…
David Brooks is an exemplar of that person who believes he stands for order and principle in a crazy world when actually he stands for the established power structure because he sees himself as part of it–in other words, he stands for himself.
My husband made the comment a couple nights ago that his great-grandparents were from Quebec and we might be eligible under the new Canadian law to emigrate. I felt such a lift in my heart.
He did the research and, yes, all you need is a great-grandparent. I can tag along and get permanent resident status. Further research revealed that he has THREE great-grandparents who were born in Quebec. Sadly, he is one generation away from citizenship in Ireland, or we would be long gone.
We are going to go through the application process. He has contacted the relevant officials in Quebec to get the long form birth certificates required. We are checking into other factors such as British Columbia taxes and housing costs. We live just down the highway from BC, so that’s the logical place to go although I could easily be persuaded to head for the Maritimes. Or even Quebec or parts of Ontario. Not Alberta which is infested with Canadian MAGGOTs.
It will not be easy to make the final decision, but not because of any feeling about the US. I’ve been disgusted for a long, long time. The biggest regret of my life is that I didn’t emigrate somewhere when I was fifty years younger. The only thing I will miss is the wilderness and that is being so thoroughly trashed that most of it is either gone or will be soon.
I’m 73 so don’t have much longer to live. I’d like my life to get wider as I get older, not narrower. Also, like Gore Vidal, I am thinking about where to be to watch the end of the world. (He picked Rome.)
I’d prefer Ireland, but BC works for me.
The breaking point for me is the destruction of our public lands. I don’t have anything to love about America anymore. So I think I want to go.
wonkie – The breaking point for me is the destruction of our public lands.
I’m still trying to come to terms with how my brother, who was a big Edward Abbey fan and conservationist, could trade that birthright for a bowl of anti-vax, anti-abortion pottage. I’m really struggling with it.
I do continue to support One Tree Planted on a monthly basis. It doesn’t change my bafflement or sense of betrayal, but it is a counterbalance against despair.
I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water. I’m wondering how those externalities might affect the local politics. The Woodchucks have always struck me as lilely being a bit more stubborn and less grasping than their ND counterparts were when the fracking gravy train pulled up.
Here’s hoping.
I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water.
I loosely follow a site that puts up blurbs about interesting developments in all sorts of science and engineering. My impression is that there are multiple technologies under the broad category “direct lithium extraction” that are close to ready and will greatly reduce all of those impacts. A billion dollars in directed development might do the trick fairly quickly. Granted that they won’t be as cheap as the dirty methods, but if we’re going to have national industrial policy we don’t have to always go the cheapest route.
That’s good to know, Michael. I’ll have to check into it further.
I’ll remain worried, though, because it seems likely to me that the fast-and-cheap-and-damn-the-consequences crowd are still in the driver’s seat where policy is concerned, and where judicial obstruction is concerned as well.
Still thinking about what wonkie was saying. I just came across this bit that I posted on social media eight years ago:
— Sigurd F. Olson