"What Was True in Hofstadter's Time Is All the More Urgently True for Ours"

"Vigilante violence, unfortunately, is a movie we've seen before. In the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, Richard Hofstadter wrote, 'What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples.' This historic violence, Hofstadter noted, was not initiated with a desire to subvert the state, and therefore didn't usually result in the undermining of authority. It was violence by and for the establishment and its preservation, unleashed at different times 'against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.'"

Alexander Hurst at The New Republic warns against pro-Trump violence in 2020.