What's scarier is that there is no centre, and no unifying force to stop the escalating tension. Weapons weren't used this time, but what happens when they are ?
The commander-in-chief will not condemn them, and the finger pointing will continue as Antifa arms up. Next come summary executions, and with that a family of violence that can't be contained with our existing police forces.
You don't need a crystal ball to see where this is going.
I will repeat an excerpt from a post I made elsewhere many months ago because I believe it's pertinent. There are very few of these far right people. As long as there are very few it's quite manageable.
Your argument reached me just as I was returning to the work of Karen Stenner, who wrote a book about the forces that tear countries apart. Some people, who she calls “libertarians,” strongly prefer freedom and diversity, she wrote, while others, who she calls “authoritarians,” possess a perhaps innate discomfort with difference. They prize sameness and unity, even if coercion is needed to enforce it. Countries devolve into conflict when the predispositions of the authoritarians are activated.
They hire fascists to do jobs that liberals won’t do.
In her telling, showily, absolutely insisting on unconstrained diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.” And once authoritarians are activated, the outcome depends in part on how its conservatives react. If they side with the authoritarians, repressive policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel reassured "regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled rules of the game.”
Thus my alarm. When it comes to immigration, many conservatives presently fear that there are no breaks on the pace of change, and that the rules of the game are being broken.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/debating-immigration-policy-at-a-populist-moment/518916/
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