Women's boobs on TV = Millions of dollars in fines.
Espousing violent rhetoric when discussing your political opponents = rock on.
I think Moore's right. We are a violent country, and our politics is about to get even more violent. Welcome to The Fourth Turning. Interesting book. Not woo-woo, but generational-cycle stuff. And according to the authors, we're on track fora new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake. I think there's a non-zero chance we could the the break-up of the United States before I die.
P.s. Your spelling could be some sort of "I'm in Ur protest, spoofing Teabagger morans!"
I don't know, I thought that was going to happen around 1994 or '95.
Right now, I have a really hard time believing that our politics are about to become more violent than they were in the late 1960s, let alone those other times.
I'm recounting this from memory and I'd like to find the original, but I remember hearing or reading something that said sort of the opposite. Something about how racial integration in the late 1960s provided common ground for parties to work together (either in support or opposition), and that this means the last 50 years has been less violent and less partisan than American politics has been historically. We're basically regressing to the mean, which looks like an unprecedented increase to us since most people who remember how bad it was in the old days is gone now.
Again, just recounting this with scant support from a flawed memory. I wish I could find the interview where they cited facts and stuff.
There's been a remarkable decrease in general violence in American society since sometime in the early 1990s, which is not fully explained to everyone's satisfaction. I once thought the explanation was "we brute-forced it by putting unconscionable numbers of people in prison", but that actually began long before the violence started dropping, so I don't think it's the whole story. To some extent it's a worldwide trend. I also thought the trend might reverse as a consequence of the economic crisis, but on the whole, it hasn't as far as I can tell.
There's been an uptick in political violence, because the wacky right's riled up. But it's starting from an overall low level, and the main thing moderating it is that the wacky right currently trends older than the general population. Mass political violence tends to come from young punks and terrorist soldiers. If you don't have a youth movement it's hard to bust a lot of heads. Young people are currently more liberal than the general population, and they're not inclined to street violence.
I've heard of the thesis you're describing, and I think it adequately explains why partisan polarization is increasing now.
...anyway, I'd distinguish violence from partisanship. The late 1960s were not a time of great partisan polarization, because the big splits over race and the Vietnam War were inside the Democratic Party. But they were a pretty violent time. Just as one example, several major political figures got assassinated, and that's really, really rare today.
One problem is that good old statistics are hard to find. This Wikipedia article suggests that crime before about 1970 was seriously underreported, but I don't know how they determined that.
Depending on what you believe about that, either violent crime was less pervasive than today in 1970 but rose until the early 1990s, or it had been at a high plateau for a long time before the early 1990s. At any rate, it's fairly clear that in the late Sixties, violence was on the rise and people were afraid that it was rising. Whereas more recently, it's been dropping and people are still afraid that it is rising.
On the off chance you're not familiar with it, I thought I'd mention the controversial hypothesis of the guys who wrote "Freakanomics" -- that the decrease in violent crime in the early 1990s can be explained in large part by Roe v. Wade.
I sometimes think the walkman (introduced 1979), then the CD walkman, then MP3 players, have caused a decrease in violence. More people listen to music they want, when they want, and "Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast."
But I sometimes think it's just apophenia. Culture = chaos.
Glenn Beck fantasizes openly about choking Michael Moore to death on the air and poisoning Nancy Pelosi, and nothing.
Women's boobs on TV = Millions of dollars in fines.
Espousing violent rhetoric when discussing your political opponents = rock on.
I think Moore's right. We are a violent country, and our politics is about to get even more violent. Welcome to The Fourth Turning. Interesting book. Not woo-woo, but generational-cycle stuff. And according to the authors, we're on track fora new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake.
I think there's a non-zero chance we could the the break-up of the United States before I die.
P.s. Your spelling could be some sort of "I'm in Ur protest, spoofing Teabagger morans!"
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Right now, I have a really hard time believing that our politics are about to become more violent than they were in the late 1960s, let alone those other times.
Reply
Again, just recounting this with scant support from a flawed memory. I wish I could find the interview where they cited facts and stuff.
Reply
There's been an uptick in political violence, because the wacky right's riled up. But it's starting from an overall low level, and the main thing moderating it is that the wacky right currently trends older than the general population. Mass political violence tends to come from young punks and terrorist soldiers. If you don't have a youth movement it's hard to bust a lot of heads. Young people are currently more liberal than the general population, and they're not inclined to street violence.
I've heard of the thesis you're describing, and I think it adequately explains why partisan polarization is increasing now.
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Reply
Depending on what you believe about that, either violent crime was less pervasive than today in 1970 but rose until the early 1990s, or it had been at a high plateau for a long time before the early 1990s. At any rate, it's fairly clear that in the late Sixties, violence was on the rise and people were afraid that it was rising. Whereas more recently, it's been dropping and people are still afraid that it is rising.
Reply
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But I sometimes think it's just apophenia. Culture = chaos.
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