Something More Dangerous Than Rhetoric Is Fueling Political Violence

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It could be purely performative of her, but when I read that Sunny Hostin from “The View” was aghast that 18 million people in America were perfectly fine with the idea of using physical violence to stop Trump, I couldn’t help but believe her surprise. Like a person who started walking, deep in thought, only to find themselves a good distance from where they started, I think Hostin had a moment where she finally looked up and saw where she had taken herself. 

(READ: Sunny Hostin Has Brief Moment of Clarity, Condemns Number of People Who Back Violence Against Trump)

The immediate reaction is to point at people like Hostin and blame them for the rhetoric that caused people to make attempts on Trump’s life. To be sure, the rhetoric really doesn’t help, but let’s not let that buzzword blind us from the real issue at hand. Rhetoric is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the complete picture.

Over the past few decades, a very noticeable shift happened in our culture. We talk about this shift a lot, but I’m not entirely sure if we’ve wholly grasped how far we’ve come, especially the younger generations that have no experiential reference. The amount of acceptance of ideas that we would have fully rejected just 30 years ago is mind-blowing when you truly stop to think about it. A handful of decades ago, the idea that someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could have been elected to Congress would have been laughed at. 

But we’ve seen a shifting Overton window that moved leftward at a steady pace, and now fringe ideas that would have been dismissed out of hand for being far outside the realm of common sense are considered legitimate, and not taking them seriously could result in very real consequences for you. Now that fringe is mainstream, and a global culture war has taken the place of real wars. 

One element that has caused this radical shift is the internet, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Never in the history of the human species have we been so capable of instant communication yet so disconnected from one another. We can apply pressure to situations from across the country, never interacting with the people who are actually having to deal with an issue, then move on a few days later and forget we ever spoke about it. Small groups that would otherwise have no real pull in society can find ways to make themselves appear far larger and dangerous than they actually are, and bend even major corporations to their will, and people can do this with utmost bravery, knowing full-well they’ll never have to answer to the person or people they affected on the other side of the screen. 

Moreover, the internet brought with it a desensitization of a sort. Things that would and probably should shock us are now things we see come across our screens with regularity. Your brain will naturally normalize these things until they don’t shock you anymore, and while a little desensitization is a good thing, too much of it can harden a heart. For the young, this can skew morals, making fringe ideas seem a less weird than they actually are. In fact, you’ll find that quite a few groups count on that fact, which is why they often go after children. 

Then, of course, there was the abuse and corruption of institutions that were meant to hold society together. I’m not just talking about government. The media, legal institutions, scientific institutions, and even many federal law enforcement agencies have all fallen into corruption. Even legacy brands that were once celebrated with the Western identity, like Disney, have fallen into the fringe. These things that used to be guiding lights for the country are gone, and their reputations demolished, leaving everyone else to find a new way to find the truth on the fly. 

This is all, ultimately, a sign of a great civilization shift that is still figuring itself out, but we had to do this because of the radicalism that became so normalized over just a short time. 

Radicalism is a sign of cultural decay, and it’s only natural that political violence would come out of that. Instability is the soil needed for revolutions, which is what these radicals have been trying to bring about for some time. We’re fighting over that soil now, even if many people don’t realize it. This election is a huge front in that battle, but it’s really only one part of the landscape. 

At some point, we’re going to have to do a few things to get back on track. 

One, clean up and restore faith in our institutions. Whether you want to admit it or not, many of these things are part of our Western identity. They’ve been torn down from the inside and must be rebuilt. New rules must be put in place to make sure they stay the course and not fall into disrepair again. 

A sense of community has to be restored as well, and I don’t just mean online. In fact, I mean very much offline. We’re interacting with pixels, not people, and that does not help someone understand humanity any better. It’s hard to remember how to act normally with other people when you don’t spend time around them, especially those whom you disagree with, because humanity is finding shared values even among those who disagree with ideologically. 

The internet will not help us do that, at least not to a great extent. The internet encourages people to retreat to their corners and encourages the aforementioned rhetoric to get more and more radical. Whoever says the most interesting thing the loudest wears the fattest crown. 

If the violence is to stop, and the rhetoric is to tone down, we need to normalize normalcy. We need to restore trust and calm. If people like Hostin truly are taken aback by how we got here, then they need to start self-reflecting on what they support in terms of societal standards, not just what they say. 

Because if something doesn’t change and peace isn’t restored, this country and its people will backslide into a place we really don’t want to be in. 

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