I could go on about this approximately forever, but let's do it with just one example from here:
During the early 1930s, an extraordinary wave of farmer bankruptcies devastated Iowa and its neighboring states, and farmers were horrified to see their friends and neighbors losing their farms in circumstances that were often beyond their full control. At the same time, a state inspection program intended to control livestock disease began to take cattle without compensation. Farmers began to resist. They convened on condemned farms to delay foreclosure auctions and to chase off state inspectors, for example, and closed roads in protest to keep milk from reaching city markets. The resulting conflict between farmers and government officials was violent, and the violence persisted.
But here's the part that really fascinates me: IIRC, no one died, or came close. And no one died because every party to the violence tacitly agreed to a set of rules. At a massive fistfight on a farm, a sheriff's deputy drew his gun; the farmers disarmed him and shamed him, and the other government officials at the farm watched them do it. Everyone involved understood that there would be violence, and everyone involved -- except for Barney Fife -- knew where it would end and how far it could be allowed to go. There are many examples of that exchange in American history, and there are also many examples of violence that didn't follow those rules.
This latest round of morally insane violence -- the pointless murder of a soldier in Arkansas, the pointless murder of a physician in his church, the pointless murder of a security guard at a museum -- is something else altogether. James von Brunn was merely a dumb and evil piece of shit, and his example has to be placed in its proper category.
(See also.)
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3 comments:
It's the difference between pre-modern and modern violence: there's an extensive international literature on the "moral economy of peasantry" including their uprisings, into which the Iowa resistance clearly falls: it was communal, measured, often symbolic and mildly redistributive without being transformative.
The assassinations and drive-bys and suicide missions we've been seeing are a more modern violence: ego-driven, individualistic. Not to mention the use of firearms, the quintessentially modernist tool....
I'm pro-James Scott, and I'd like to see historians of the U.S. integrate that scholarship into our stuff a lot more. I do think there's some space for that apparently pre-modern violence to persist, and I think there are communities that sometimes think in something like those terms, but I doubt very much that the state would ever play along, now.
For the most part, the state is no longer part of the community: even when the individuals themselves come from the community, the mental divide created by the almost medieval personal power which most functionaries believe they possess is too great.
So, yeah.
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