I am hearing more and more people on the progressive side of issues talking about resistance and violence (and we have seen the threat of violence on the right in the Tea Party and people bringing guns to presidential town halls).
More and more Americans see the avenues of change — elections, legislatures, courts and media — as dominated by concentrated corporate power so significantly that they no longer work. The result is government dysfuntion so bad that it cannot deal with the most pressing problems of the day. I am not an advocate of violence as I see it as a losing and costly approach, but my guess is we will begin to see more of it as frustration, disillusion and poverty increase. Sadly, violence has always been part of change.
At this point we need more than reform as the corruption of the system has become so systemic. If there is violence, dysfunctional government caused by corporate power will be the cause.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The above was a comment on a draft of a soon to be published comparison of the prelude to the fall of the Roman Republic with the current state of our own Republic. As the comment writer knows and deplores, it was violence that precipitated the fall of the Roman Republic.
History has proven that civil violence almost always originates from large groups of people who are economically and/or socially downtrodden. As the disparity in incomes between the well-off and everyone else continues to grow rapidly, riots could be inevitable.