When Persuasion Becomes Impossible, Violence Becomes Inevitable: Tocqueville’s Culture of Persuasion and the Future of Democracy
Here are two things that you have probably noticed about the United States:
1. We have reached a level of political polarization that we have not seen since the Civil War.
2. We are beginning to see civic demonstrations increasingly turn into violent protests.
Neither of these points should produce much controversy until we start assigning blame for either the polarization or the violence. But I am not going to do that. At least not in the most obvious partisan way. What I am going to do, though, is suggest that Thing #1 has made Thing #2 inevitable. Or, more specifically, the fact that we have become too polarized to enter into conversations with each other — much less try to persuade each other of anything — makes violence the go-to strategy for political change.
For most of human history, violence has been the only way to change much about the way that people are governed. This is why more than 20% of Rome’s emperors were assassinated while they were in power — not counting Julius Caesar, who bathed the countryside in blood to become Dictator, only to be hacked to death on the Senate floor. This has been the norm for most of human history. Even now…
