Michael Knox Beran: The Roots of Violence in Politics are on the Left
Violence was once the law of politics. In The Growth of Political Stability in England, J. H. Plumb observed that “conspiracy and rebellion, treason and plot” were commonplace in 17th-century England. Yet by 1730, the kingdom was tranquil, and “Englishmen were congratulating themselves on their tolerance.”
Politics became pacific, in England and America, because the Whiggish revolutions of 1688 and 1776 vindicated the principle that neither life, nor liberty, nor property can be taken by the state without due process of law. The American patriots — who knew that the power to tax is the power to destroy — further refined this formula for domestic peace by insisting that there can be no taxation without representation. Where these principles prevail, politics is as a rule peaceful. The victors in a political struggle cannot proscribe their opponents; the losers need not resort to violence to save themselves....
Czolgosz, the assassin of President McKinley, was a disciple of the anarchism of social thinkers like Bakunin, who believed that a truly free society would emerge only after a violent revolution led by elite illuminés. When President Kennedy was assassinated, newscasters speculated that he was the victim of “right-wing extremism.” In fact he was killed by a deranged Marxist.
As for the Jim Crow racists the tea partiers are said to resemble, the segregationists were motivated not by the Old Whig ideal of universal liberty the tea partiers espouse, but by a paternal social philosophy grounded in the politics of classification and caste. Ditto Timothy McVeigh, who was influenced by a white-supremacist tract, The Turner Diaries.
The political violence [Eugene] Robinson deplores is a consequence, not of the Whig principles to which the tea partiers appeal, but of social philosophies reared on principles of discrimination that have often served as a pretext for bloodshed....
Some of these social philosophies are radical, others are reactionary. Georges Sorel, the social philosopher who in <em>Réflexions sur la violence</em> called proletarian violence “a very fine and heroic thing,” was a man of the Left. Charles Maurras, who as leader of L'Action Française advocated royalist dictatorship, was a man of the Right. What unites the social philosophies is hate. Lenin despised the bourgeois; Hitler despised the Jew and the Slav; the Belgian Futurist in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.” If disciples of the social imagination in the United States, like their Fabian counterparts in England, purified the social vision of hatred, they remain in thrall to its vision of class warfare....
The great expansion of material power that began in the 18th century, though it brought unexampled prosperity, overwhelmed those civic institutions, most of them independent of the crown and the feudal gentry, that strengthened communities and ministered to their sick or “strayed” souls. This civic-pastoral culture was rooted in the local knowledge of particular people and conditions. Such voluntary associations as the confraternity and the sodality, the guild and the charité, were hospitable in the widest sense. In old French towns the hotels-dieu — “hostels of God” — offered refuge to the weak and the sick. In Venice the Scuole Grandi — the “Great Schools” — brightened the city’s piazzas not only by sponsoring civic festivals, but by distributing alms, succoring paupers, and administering hospitals. In the smoky depths of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, in the coal-hell of the English Midlands, the civic-pastoral system still functioned — when Morel is too sick to work, the community helps him....
It is not simply, as Wordsworth said, that “old usages and local privilege” once “softened, almost solemnized” man’s mortal existence: They tamed or channeled passions that we, with our elaborate social mechanisms, seem powerless to control. Yet rather than question the soul-killing social codes and regulations that have replaced voluntary, spontaneous, and deeply traditional patterns of civil life, our intellectual elite prefers to blame the thunder on the right.