Good piece from @AlexYablon on the usefulness of incorporating the Years of Lead into our analogical thinking about US political violence. A few things to think about worth drawing out from this https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/30/america-years-of-lead-political-violence-trump-election/

Firstly the massive availability of weaponry in the US puts relatively disorganized people at an advantage for initiating high-intensity violence, but also short-circuits the "learning"/growth process many groups from this era had to go through to build up combat power

Gaining access to govt or external sponsors, or steal/buy large caches of illegal weapons, required greater organizational cohesion and embeddedness in wider social/political infrastructure. Most groups were groups before they were armed groups, the reverse of process here.

Lower-level street clashes with police and rival groups was an important part of group formation - militant organizations drew on legacy of organized parliamentary and extraparliamentary activism, splintered off bc of conditions created by repression and localized violence.

So what? Well, there's an assumption shared across much of the political spectrum that a comprehensive but neutral effort to crack down on Bad Actors causing unrest in the streets will prevent escalation into higher levels of political violence. This did not work well in Italy.

Intensified protest repression at lower levels of violence did not succeed at preventing groups from forming around or shifting into more organized or intense forms of violence, and there's good reason to think repression helped promote it, not just bc of "strat of tension"

But because under some conditions protest repression can also promote processes of clandestinization and organizational learning that actually leave groups simultaneously more pessimistic about "normal" politics and better situated to launch and sustain intense violence