Then...yes. There was absolutely no reason for calls to violence towards Obama. Honestly, I'm surprised he got through eight years without an assassination attempt from some backwards redneck.
I just don't remember there rioting on campuses, property damage during the inauguration of Obama.
But would you call those people enemies of the state, as you rather emphatically stated anyone making such threats ought to be?
And, just in case I was not clear before, I absolutely 100% do not approve of violent rioting, not at all, I was just asking follow up probing questions about your seemingly universal statement.
I will also add, and this is slightly a different discussion, a bit more political philosophy than political practice, but still relevant, that population that are in political ascendancy or potency very seldom riot, whereas populations lacking that are much more likely to, that is just historically true, that should not be a controversial statement.
Because the thing is that in this world, the ultimate authority is the authority of the tooth and the claw, the ultimate rule is survival of the fittest, politics in particular and society in general is more or less a long running gentleman's agreement to settle disputes through a non-violent process. We all have agreed for the mutual benefit to set aside the rule of tooth and claw and use politics instead, but as an Enlightenment philosopher once said (I apologize I can't remember which) rights and law and politics are not inherent to anyone or derived from anything other than consent of the masses. You do not have a right to free speech beyond the fact that you live in a nation with other people willing to grant it to you so that they will be granted it in return. If you find yourself in a land of people who hate what you have to say and commonly agree you should be hung for saying it, then your "Rights" effectively cease to exist and your ass is hung.
This is all to say that when politics does not work for a population. When they lack political power, lack the numbers or the influence or the wealth to actually achieve goals via political processes, when politics is not a viable means to wield results, and the issue they are upset about is dire enough, then the law of tooth and claw begins to re-emerge and violence becomes more frequent.
To use an extreme example that almost every morally healthy person can agree with, in Venezuela right the is political chaos and famine. Right? You've probably seen the headlines. The current administration controls every branch of government with an iron fist, shut down elections, simply ignored a valid law abiding petition to recall, you know, normal dictator stuff. Now the problems the people face are dire, they are starving, they are poor, they are eaten up with crime, these are desperate circumstances and the political route has proven to be fruitless. Now either those people can just accept that they've lost this political fight, and just endure the status quo, but of course when you are starving you can't very well do that. So it is all by inevitable, when the political process has utterly failed them, that the people will turn violent. They will start to riot, there will be uprisings.
But on the other end of the spectrum if some group of bankers was all mad that they lost the fight for a 25% tax rate as opposed to 30%, then they would seem petty and foolish for rioting. Their situation is not dire, it is completely endurable, they should accept the political loss and move on.
Those are two extremes that most people can probably agree with, but the real world isn't usually made of extremes, it's usually made of in betweens. I mean it's not like White Conservative folk haven't rioted and committed major violence before when they lost a political fight and felt they had no other option. Plenty of broken windows and burnt churches and hung necks belonging to black folk from the reconstruction through the 70s can attest to that. Hell the deadliest war we've ever fought, our own Civil War, was fought because the abolitionist northerners seized a super majority in congress and the presidency and the supreme court and the South saw that they were never going to be able to win a political battle in the foreseeable future, and hundreds of millions died because they considered that plight to dire to simply accept and move on.
So what about the rioters of today? Well it's always hard to judge these things in real time as it's happening. How will history view these events, I can't say for sure. But what I can say is that if I was a latino immigrant, or a muslim immigrant, I would sure as hell feel like there was no political option open to me and I was left with either accept my fate and move on or resort to violence. Now I am not a violent person, so I personally would probably accept the fate and move on, but you cannot deny that is an extremely tough pill to swallow.
