It’s certainly true that the United States has noteworthy traditions of illiberalism and political violence. The 1920s suffered terrorist violence not only at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but also those of anarchist bombers who maimed and killed hundreds of people from 1919 to 1921. From the Civil War to World War II, American labor relations were more violent than those of most other industrialized countries. Four presidents have been assassinated; four others—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—only narrowly survived or escaped a bullet. Race riots have ripped apart American cities for almost as long as there have been American cities.
Donald Trump’s campaign for president certainly drew much energy from this long tradition of political violence. So too did some of Trump’s opponents: Protests in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s Inauguration Day did damage to property, sent two police officers to hospital, and led to 200 arrests. Smaller scale versions of this form of violent protest have targeted colleges—notably Berkeley and Middlebury—that have invited speakers whom rioters deemed sympathetic to Trump’s cause. [...]
Through most of the history of ideas, the great champions of equality have been xenophobes—not out of bigotry, but because they believed that only a tightly bonded society could suppress the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Let Jean-Jacques Rousseau speak for a tradition that commenced with the Greeks and continued to the Jacobins and beyond: The best leaders determine “that his people should never be absorbed by other peoples” and therefore “devised for them customs and practices that should could not be blended into those of other nations.” Ideally: “Each fraternal bond … among the individual members of his republic became a further barrier, separating them from their neighbors and keeping them from becoming one with those neighbors,” he wrote in his Considerations on the Government of Poland. As for more cosmopolitan societies, Rousseau had this disdainful comment in The Social Contract: “The people has less affection for the homeland which is like the whole world in its eyes, and for its fellow citizens, most of whom are foreigners to it.”
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