Mob Violence

In his weekly column for USA Today, Glenn Reynolds looks at the forces taking America toward a "soft civil war."

Will it get worse? Probably. To have a civil war, soft or otherwise, takes two sides. But as pseudonymous tweeter Thomas H. Crown notes, it’s childishly easy in these days to identify people in mobs, and then to dispatch similar mobs to their homes and workplaces. Eventually, he notes, it becomes “protesters all the way down, and if we haven't yet figured out that can lead to political violence, we're dumb.”

Political mob violence was one of the hallmarks of the Weimar era in 1920-30s German politics. Adolf Hitler's Nazi brownshirts battled with Rosa Luxemburg's Communist bullyboys, right fought left in the streets and beer halls. Eventually the Nazis won out. Do we really have to live through what our grandparents experienced? Have we learned nothing about the descent into madness?