The Year Rage Took Over: New at Reason

As politics takes over more of everyone’s every day life, the debates become increasingly high-stakes.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Looking back, it was the summer of ’17 when the wheels really came off.

Some people say things started the year before, during the presidential campaign, when the man-child’s popularity grew with every insult, every crude remark, every sullen poke in the eye of a calm and rational world. And sure, there were some incidents—at his rallies, mostly. Punches thrown. Bigoted taunts shouted. The man-child himself wishing aloud he could bash somebody in the face. Things like that.

Even so, the country pretty much held it together that year. The guy who sucker-punched another guy at a rally for the man-child apologized when they met in court, and the second guy even hugged him. The man-child won the election, and a lot of people cried. But nobody went postal over it, not even after the inauguration.

Then the warm seasons came and everything seemed to blow up.

It started on the campuses. Sheltered children of privilege started acting like cultural revolutionaries, rioting against ideas they didn’t want to hear and assaulting people who expressed them. They’d never heard of the “struggle sessions” in China under Chairman Mao, but that’s exactly what they were up to. It was a kind of madness.

And it was contagious. People showed up at town-hall meetings with congressmen just so they could boo and heckle and scream “F—you!” From Berkeley to Boston, opposing political tribes got into repeated, violent confrontations. At one of them, a professor attacked people with a bike lock. A senator’s son was charged with three misdemeanors related to mayhem at another political rally in Wisconsin.

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