Emmett Rensin: “From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America”

The question of political violence:  “Politics are the channels of power, and violence is the byproduct of their imbalance. The world changes violently, and violently it tries to hold itself together. It works toward equilibrium but cannot find it. Power breeds violence in its obligations and in its absence, in the lust it inspires within the wicked and the yearning it summons in the oppressed. The question is not how politics became violent. It is whether we can conceive of a world where it is not. We’ve never seen one. The world is not as it should be, and the chasm grows wider with every tectonic upheaval; the problem of political violence, then, is the problem of turning continental plates. Is this an impossible task? If it is not, then we have our final question: What is to be done?”