Interesting
Richard Fernandez asks what is going on:
The vitriol makes one wonder on what common ground the left and right can still meet. In a recent speech, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that intemperate language was driving the country toward extremism and violence. So is the answer better decorum, as exemplified for example, by the left? Is “hate speech” causing extremism or is something else going on?Fernandez then proceeds to discuss a study of civil wars -- are they caused by grievance (as most think) or greed?
This raises the possibility that, despite Nancy Pelosi’s fears, the real cause of increasing animosity isn’t heightened rhetoric: on the contrary, the heightened rhetoric may itself be the result an intensified competition for power. It’s a symptom and not the cause. My guess is that the effect of concentrating wealth and power in government hands has created a prize which is distorting civil relations, like some singularity which is warping the space around it and pulling everything into its maw. When the pot of gold is indivisibly concentrated in one place, a winner-take-all game ensues, or as Collier and Hoeffler put it, “a simple rational choice model of greed-rebellion” is enforced. The trash-talk follows.