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A new post then. Below @samiam linked to a National Review piece that mocks a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise".
The Atlantic is a center-left institution of American journalism. The not-magazine is capable of pushing certain signals over the hill into respectability status. This signal: it's okay to acknowledge left-wing violence as a problem, because we can remind ourselves the right's stochastic terror was successfully defeated, but not forgotten. How significant is it that a couple CSIS think tank goons can send this signal, and how much impact can they have?
In the previous paragraphs the authors set-up their prescription of "programs and expertise" only this time aimed leftward. They justify this by granting the Biden admin (and probably themselves) credit for throwing the book at Oath Keepers and Proud Boys following their January 6th doings. If memory serves the Proud Boys were a group of capital P-atriots who showed up to protests, dared their opposites to do the same, then engaged in fistfights. This is political violence and its escalation can be a concern, but it's not the same risk as a growing number of political assassinations. Assassinations seemingly perpetrated by culture warriors first, not ideologues.
The programs and expertise of think tank goons are unlikely to bring about an effective reversal in cultural trends. Disaffected radicals aren't in the habit of being persuaded by them. I offer two actionable alternatives:
Idea #1: Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools. Sell this one as renewed civic literacy and try not to pollute it too badly with culture war. Federally fund it as an opt-in for states to participate.
I suspect we do a piss poor job of teaching civics, politics, or anything in the shape of political philosophy in K-12. We do a poor enough job educating kids on subjects we care enough about to measure. We do not even attempt to teach kids to think about social fabric. Instead, we water it down to be meaningless or replace it with with diversity-isms and sin. Then we are surprised the kids go on to be demoralized by short-form videos which they accept as valid belief generators.
Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.
If the alternative of New Deal conscripts is instead waiting to figure out how to best Balkanize I say we give it a go. What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?
I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.
This seems like a terrible idea. At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way. I abhorred the draft when I was 16, and I am happy to say that I still abhor the idea decades later.
Besides, if you are worried about political violence, then the last thing you would want is to give a lot of people technical and psychological training in shooting other humans.
This is a vacuous claim. I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation. Some would see the J6 efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as quintessentially anti-American instead.
That's not what i've been told by various leftists, wasn't there a "hitler-jugend-like" school excercise one teacher ran and had to put the breaks to it because the kids were too much into it once? Perhaps it's not whom the information comes from but how it's presented. Zoomers would be marching and yes chadding if what they are doing is associated with power, influence and coolness to their peers and more importantly the zoomettes.
The Third Wave but that was in 1967.
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