It was a different country when I was younger. The change has sometimes been good, sometimes bad, and occasionally disastrous. The most significant change is one you may not have thought of.
The Constitution was written by people and ratified by a nation that just wanted to be left alone. They wanted the hand of government to lie quietly on their shoulder. In fact, the only real contact Americans had with their national government prior to 1863 was when they mailed a letter. There was no draft until well into the Civil War and no draft afterwards.
The next 100 years saw an explosion in the growth of the federal government. As the government grew, it became more important in people’s eyes. Presidential races took on an added significance. Instead of being a glorified clerk who signed congressional acts into law, a president’s decisions began to affect ordinary citizens.
Politics became a matter of life and death to millions of people. The government grew larger initially because it had to, and then it was deliberately set on a course to expand even further, as a means to enrich and empower the elites.
This has made being on the winning side in an election critically important.
According to a study in Political Psychology, “out-group animosity is stronger than in-group sentiment,” meaning that “anger at perceived enemies is the driving factor in how we express our partisan affiliations,” writes Reason.com’s J.D. Tuccille.
Another study by Stanford political scientists found that “the strongest attachment… is Americans’ connection to their political party. And the strength of that partisan bond — stronger than race, religion, or ethnicity – has amplified the level of political polarization in the U.S.,” the researchers said.
A stronger bond than race, religion, or ethnicity? It’s easy to understand how that leads to the desire to defend what’s theirs by attacking the opposition.
That anger can only increase when government officials use their position to torment those across the political divide. As it is, after years of a metastasizing state, Americans must go hat-in-hand to officialdom to request permission to take licensed jobs, renovate homes, open businesses, and so much more. That creates vulnerabilities among people who live their lives at the pleasure of an overpowerful government and the creatures who control its instruments. Without explicitly exercising censorship or invoking the apparatus of authoritarianism, it’s all too easy for bureaucrats, prosecutors, and regulators to hurt those they don’t like.
Democrats and the Biden administration infamously leaned on social media companies to muzzle critics, engaged in obviously politicized prosecutions of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, and applied regulatory pressure on banks to deny financial services to opponents.
Added to the partisan divide is the ever-growing tendency to exaggerate threats of all kinds, and we end up with Luigi Mangione believing his murder of a health insurance executive was a justified act supported by millions.
He was right.
“Today’s political violence is occurring across the political spectrum—and there is a corresponding rise in public support for it on both the right and the left,” the director of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats, Robert Pape, wrote last week.
“According to Pape, his organization’s May survey revealed that roughly 40 percent of Democrats support forcibly removing Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans favor using the military against anti-Trump protesters,” Tuccille writes.
Pundits propose to calm violence with anodyne bipartisan statements and conversations across political lines. That’s fine and dandy. But so long as government remains such a powerful and destructive force, political tensions will rise over how that power should be used—and against whom. People may finally set differences aside—or at least fewer will violently act on them—when they see less reason for battle. While it won’t necessarily soothe bigots and loons, government and politics should matter less.
Easier said than done. It’s easy to see why reforming entitlement programs like Medicaid and Social Security is so challenging. People who lose their government goodies get mad. And angry people vote.
When that anger turns to violence, we end up with dead lawmakers and partisans calling for blood.
Editor’s Note: Radical leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump’s agenda to make America great again.
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