The United States, thank goodness, does not have armed citizen militias carrying out regular attacks, as those other countries did. “Violent talk can, at minimum, encourage lone-wolf violence,” Steven Levitsky, Ziblatt’s co-author and a Harvard political scientist, said. “It can also slowly normalize political violence, turning discourse and ideas that were once unsayable and even unthinkable into things that are sayable and thinkable.”These risks are not just hypothetical. In the Bright Light Watch survey of political scientists late last year, only 49 percent said the United States did not tolerate political violence, a notable decline from earlier levels. It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism.

Source: New York Times March 17, 2019 23:03 UTC