Article Excerpt:
The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it.
In recent days, journalists and other observers have worked to uncover the motivations of the accused killer. This is a worthy exercise when trying to understand a single, shocking event. But when attempting to understand how brutality spreads across society, studying individual ideologies only gets you so far. As violence worsens, it tends to draw in—and threaten—people of all ideologies. So if in the early stages of a violent upswing, law enforcement can see clearly that the greater threat comes from right-wing extremists, which has been the case in the U.S. in recent years, as the prevalence of violence snowballs, the politics of those who resort to it get messier. That’s in part because periods of heightened violence tend to coincide with social and political reordering generally—moments when party or group identities are in flux, as they are in America right now. As I’ve written for this magazine, eruptions of violence are not necessarily associated with a clear or consistent ideology and often borrow from several—a phenomenon that law enforcement calls “salad-bar extremism.”