Every bit as much as the violence that began in Minneapolis in response to the death of George Floyd - that sublime moment when a hastily agreed-upon public health consensus about outdoor transmission of a virus exploded - the events of last week cannot be understood outside the context of lockdowns, of an illusory economic recovery whose main beneficiary has been Wall Street, of enforced isolation, and of all the already existing horrors that these things have exacerbated in the last year: social atomization, epistemic disjuncture, addiction, domestic violence, above all, perhaps, an inchoate feeling that something is very wrong and that ordinary means of addressing the crisis are insufficient or simply unavailable. It is absurd, as Dickens once put it, to talk of such an event What I refuse to concede is the inhumanity of the costumed hundreds - a fraction of the total number of those who had traveled to Washington to hear President Trump speak. I am insisting upon a different sort of consistency, one that rejects easy explanations and accepts that occurrences like the breaching of the Capitol on January 6 are as complex as any other part of human life. But consistency is as unhelpful as mindless equivocation if it means being consistently wrong. While I have a certain amount of sympathy with arguments insisting upon a univocal condemnation of rioting, it is only because they are consistent. This was always as ludicrous as the opposite reaction, the reactionary fantasies of grapeshot and citizen militias.
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Not so long ago this was because political violence was accepted by our opinion-making classes and the older of our two major political parties as an unremarkable feature of American civic life: "People will do what they do," as Nancy Pelosi put it last year.
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But it is one in which we have become curiously uninterested.