Quote:The last week of October was a traumatic one. An attack on a church full of black parishioners was narrowly thwarted, forcing the gunman to make do with the murder two African-Americans outside a convenience store. A deranged pro-Trump drifter executed a hapless plot to bomb and terrorize Democratic officials, officeholders, and donors. And an anti-Semite executed the worst mass murder of American Jews in history at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Observers cannot help but see our dysfunctional political culture reflected in these events, and they’re correct. But history did not begin yesterday. America’s influencers and elites spent the better part of a decade summoning up forces they could not control. The demons they aroused are upon us now.

Large-scale political violence had been a dormant force for over a generation at the dawn of this decade. Episodes of fundamentalist terrorism and senseless mass shootings shattered the relative calm typified by historically low rates of criminal violence, but masses clashing with police in the streets and the anti-government bombing campaigns of the last century seemed a thing of the past. So, when America’s political and thought leaders allowed themselves to be tempted by passions so intense and uncompromising that they manifest in savagery, it may have seemed a harmless indulgence. But it was not.

Political violence did not make a return to the streets overnight. The exhumation of this scourge was a joint effort involving both parties over seven years.

Even before the Occupy Wall Street movement burst out of its archipelago of urban encampments, destroying property and “seizing” public facilities, the lawlessness that prevailed in the camps didn’t prevent establishment Democrats from wrapping their arms around the movement.

Occupy demonstrations frequently clashed with police, producing what Democrats apparently thought were sympathetic images of mass arrests and protesters being sprayed with chemical irritants. On October 5, 2011, throngs of Occupy protesters attacked a police barricade, and were repelled by officers wielding batons and pepper spray. “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the next day. “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” averred President Obama ten days later. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Obama said, these protests were being unduly “vilified by many.” Just hours before Obama made these remarks, an Occupy franchise in Rome erupted as anti-capitalist rioters set cars and government buildings on fire, injuring 70.

In New York City, hundreds were arrested in the attempt to “seize” the Brooklyn Bridge. A mob overpowered guards in the attempt to capture the National Air and Space Museum. A riot erupted in Denver amid the effort to break up that city’s squalid encampment. After receiving the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and United Auto Workers, the Oakland, California branch of the Occupy movement sacked an abandoned port facility, setting buildings on fire and engaging in running battles with police through the streets.

Though he was more cautious in moments of real tension than many of his comrades, even Obama adopted the rhetoric of his party’s most reckless members. He called Republicans the “enemies” of Hispanic-Americans. Vice President Joe Biden insisted that Republicans sought to consign black Americans to renewed bondage. Their apologists insisted that these rhetorical flourishes were innocuous, rationalizing that everyone privy to the articulation of this existential threat would see it the same way. But the civility that Republicans were accused of abandoning had become a source of irritation for the left. “Abandoning civility,” The Atlantic’s Vann Newkirk wrote in 2016, is not just righteous but part of a noble American tradition of ideological combat that is “as fierce” as it is “ultimately effective.”

Republicans understandably resented the double standard. They were accused of inspiring violence in people who were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally disturbed, and their supporters were deemed violent and bigoted for advocating traditional conservative policies. To many on the right, adhering to a code of conduct reserved only for them seemed a form of unilateral disarmament.

Donald Trump catered to this sentiment.