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the modal reality "politics in a multi-party democracy" and "rule of law" are meant to evoke is one where hard limits on the scope and scale of political conflict exist and are respected, and where law is capable of settling conflicts. That is not the world we are living in.
That's not how I remember most of my life in such a state. And I lived through the blessed 90s which I'm told were the apotheosis of such sentiment.
And yet in retrospect, all I can see of that period is a more covert form of what you describe. The mask used to be better, but all of it was just attempts to help friends and hurt enemies in whichever way the law allows or at least tolerates.
What I'll concede is that people had more faith in the power of debate then, but that's only because the underhanded tactics have proven themselves to work better to everyone now.
You saw 'proven' as if anything has settled, as opposed to there being regular ebbs and flows of various forms of underhanded tactics and political violence mixed in amongst other strategies. Any given tactic, underhanded or not, has diminishing returns.
It's not exactly hard to find evidence even in US history of when political violence was part of the public confrontations of the day. Your memory and/or awareness may be shaped by institutional efforts to downplay the existence- there is a reason that the American self-history of the civil rights movement hyper-focuses on peaceful protestor leaders like MLK while diminishing / downplaying / ommitting violent actors- but pick a 25 year period, and it's not exactly hard to find acts of terrorism mixed with general unrest or political controversy movements.
A lot of these are ignored / people are unaware of for a variety of reasons, including self-interest of partisans to downplay/disassociate themselves with ideological cousins or ancestors, but among the reasons is that movements that tried to capitalize on them often hit their limits and failed.
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