New essay: ON SPARKS BEFORE THE PRAIRIE FIRE https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-sparks-before-prairie-fire.html

Many worry about the possibility of election violence--and what that violence might escalate to.

In this essay I consider what warnings the history of American political violence might provide us today.

The essay begins with a concept I have written about before ( https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disorder.html). In that past treatment I framed the issue in terms of Chinese dynastic history; this time I start with old Thomas Hobbes, philosopher of order and violence.

Hobbes understood that insecurity does not require evil. It requires uncertainty. In a world where someone *might* strike you first (and the consequence of being struck is theft, injury, or death), even a normally kind and peaceful person will face strong incentives to arm.

Once one side of a social conflict resorts to violence, it is hard for the other side to opt out. They instead tend, as Hobbes logic would suggest, to become violent themselves, attacking lest they be attacked.

But how do you get to that world? Here Hobbes was wrong--lack of

legitimate government authority is not enough, by itself, to create this sense of uncertainty and insecurity. You need an event that lets all sides know that the rules have changed and that violence is now fair game.

If you are familiar with Iraq's fall into civil war c. 2004-2006 you will know exactly what I am talking about.

So the real violence to fear is not small violent acts themselves, but the spiral of action and counter-action they might lead to. That is the moment to fear.

Will we have it? A first look at our history suggests we will not. We forget it now, but America's history is incredibly violent. Mobbings, burnt presses, bombings, revolts that seize state capitals and force out city officials, labor strikes gone awry... between the colonial

era and the 1970s there are hundreds of incidents (including dozens of partisan election day street brawls or shootouts). But only twice did this violence threaten the stability of the country as a whole or threaten the integrity of its institutions.

Why did none of this violence kickstart the Hobbesian logic?

Probably because we were so used to it. Violence was understood as a natural excess of popular democracy. Small atrocities occurred so often that they lost their ability to cause widespread fear.

And that is what matters. It isn't individual acts of violence that overthrow civil order so much as the *belief* these acts create--the belief that your enemies have abandoned all restraints, and that nothing will protect your side now but abandoning all restraints yourself.

Because social violence was once so commonplace, the threshold for this moment was very high.

But America has now lived several generations with civil peace.

Just how high is the threshold now?

Read the full thing: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-sparks-before-prairie-fire.html