It’s very likely to worsen. The tectonic shifts in American culture have caused periods of political violence before. The Civil Rights movement, the race riots and unrest between 1968 and the 1970s, and abortion clinic bombings are a few key examples, but even those ‘conflicts’ eventually died down. Oftentimes, conflict is generational. One generation goes away, and future generations develop their own problems.
For current generations, I believe conditions are more likely to worsen before they get better because the culture war now includes more fronts that foment the anger and resentment that cause political violence.
The areas of every day life that have been heavily politicized, and the ways in which Americans can express identitarian anger and resentment (race, gender, class, politics, ideology; there’s plenty of overlap there), have grown over the past decade, thus leading to a higher potential for violence.
Not only has the number of cultural ‘battlefields’ grown, but identitarian anger and resentment — the desire to “get even” or exact punishment against others based on race and class — has become more acceptable. As political violence becomes more acceptable among the extremes, you’ll see more of it.
We could have just two to three years before we see routine, sustained political violence. For as long as I’ve been writing about LIC, I’ve warned of the effects of the next recession and financial crisis on the political and cultural climate. (I now believe that the next recession and financial crisis have an above average chance of happening simultaneously.) Class and race warfare, I believe, will worsen as we move through this period of economic and financial uncertainty.
High youth unemployment is a universal indicator of civil unrest and violence. What I’m seeing in America’s future are social bases charged by race, class, and/or politics, who also lack economic opportunity and the hope of a better life that comes with it. That may be because artificial intelligence has taken their jobs (or their parents’ jobs), or because they can’t afford higher levels of schooling (or because they lack an education altogether), or because unemployment is so high that there are just not enough jobs to go around. Maybe it will be all three.
What concerns me — and, again, I don’t see any of this as imminent, but I do believe it’s coming over the next few years — is what I see as a convergence of a ‘perfect storm’ scenario with radicalized social bases, a dim economic outlook and loss of hope, political leaders who give a green light or at least tacit approval to political violence, and a belief that violence is the preferable solution. These prerequisites for organized political violence are developing.
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