Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The air we breathe

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Charles Homans of The New York Times Magazine look at the prevalence of political violence in the American imagination.

America is a country where college students occupy campus lawns in kaffiyehs but only until summer internships start, where suburban militia members outfit themselves with body armor and military-style AR-15s borrowed from wars they never served in. We are a comfortable and sheltered people who talk a big game that is usually just talk. Until someone throws a Molotov cocktail through a storefront, or storms the Capitol, or tries to kill a former president. [...]

If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, [Nathan P.] Kalmoe and [Lilliana] Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.

The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.

The “contours” may have altered since the 1990’s but is this atmosphere all that different from the right-wing extremism prevalent in Dallas in the days before the JFK assassination in 1963?