Democratic Underground Latest Greatest Lobby Journals Search Options Help Login
Google

Who's More Violent in American Politics, the Left or the Right?

Printer-friendly format Printer-friendly format
Printer-friendly format Email this thread to a friend
Printer-friendly format Bookmark this thread
This topic is archived.
Home » Discuss » Editorials & Other Articles Donate to DU
 
theFrankFactor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:13 PM
Original message
Who's More Violent in American Politics, the Left or the Right?
Are we a society sane enough to even ask this question?

In my unprofessional opinion, judging by videos created by Jared Laughner and anecdotal evidence, I believe, he had psychological issues. What the pathology is, I don't know. If this were true, how does this impact the situation?

The rhetoric about the state of this nation's government seems to come from two basic sides.

1. One is what I believe to be propaganda that asserts that the nation is being taken over by Communists.
2. The other, that our government is controlled by a small percentage of the population that have access and influence because of their wealth. More specifically, multi-national corporate power.

My view is with number two.

Can you see a common denominator? I would suggest, the loss of visibility, voice and influence by those outside the perceived circle of control and for many, a sense of growing fear and frustration; a sense of alienation.

This alienation manifests itself in many different ways depending on the temperament of the individual. The motivating force, or at least a prime mover, is, I believe, fear. The prevailing sentiment is that the ideological Left and Right deal with their fears and frustrations in different ways.

In my opinion, the incessant propagation of the "Communist takeover of government by an alien, racist negro" meme, is a smoke screen to distract from the real problem, corporate influence. In other words, it's a lie. There is no Communist party movement, no Red Party movement armed and angry.

How does this relate to Jared Laughner? This young man was responding to a threat that doesn't exist and is wholly fabricated to marginalize and frustrate the connection of the People to their government. While he may be of an unstable mental state, his response need never have happened.

This rhetoric comes, not from a Liberal media bent on taking down a capitalist system so we can all be Communists but rather by a corporate media system that is seeking the highest possible cash profits at any expense. A free society is going to have many, many varying levels of mental stability within its populace and the occasional tragedy occurs. This is not a perfect world. But perhaps in this case responsible sane people should have behaved better. Unfortunately, in America at this point in time, sanity doesn't increase ratings and the bottom line.

Again, what's my point? This massacre as well as others since Barack Obama's election are the result of hyperbolic, incendiary, couched and blatant violent rhetoric from the right. In my opinion, when a right wing subject is frustrated, fearful and feeling disengaged, they more readily resort to violence as a remedy. I ask you to review the assassinations and shootings of politicians and activists in our nation's recent history. How many right wing assassination victims have there been?

I can't recall murder sprees by Democrats and Liberals during the hideously unconstitutional and freewheel-spending Bush Cheney years. Refresh my memory. I am fully amenable to admitting I'm wrong about this.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
Name removed Donating Member (0 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:14 PM
Response to Original message
1. Deleted message
Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.
 
tekisui Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:19 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. Bullshit.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Old and In the Way Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:33 PM
Response to Reply #1
5. We hated Bush/Cheney...but I saw no call to use 2nd Amendment remedies on DU...did you?
Edited on Sat Jan-08-11 10:49 PM by Old and In the Way
I'm betting, if they did, they were banned. We can "hate" politicians for their policies, hyprocrisy, etc. But we don't fantasize about killing those that we disagree with. We believe in the rule of law.

Here's a thought question to ponder - out of the next 10 violent acts against politicians (assassinations, office bombings, physical attacks*)...how many will be against Republicans? I bet money on no more than 2.

<Note: discounting attempted successful/unsuccessful face pies>.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Peregrine Took Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:34 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. +1
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DCKit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:36 PM
Response to Reply #5
8. Really? 2nd, not 3rd. We're better than that.
The Third Amendment (Amendment III) to the United States Constitution is a part of the United States Bill of Rights. It was introduced on September 5, 1789, and then three quarters of the states ratified this as well as 9 other amendments on December 15, 1791. It prohibits, in peacetime, the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent. It makes quartering legally permissible in wartime only, and then only according to law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Old and In the Way Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:51 PM
Response to Reply #8
9. whoops...my bad. Fixed. nt
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DCKit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 11:08 PM
Response to Reply #9
11. Yeah, but now you've got me thinking... the RW may want the gov to place soldiers..
in their houses to help pay those underwater mortgages.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Psephos Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 11:07 PM
Response to Reply #5
10. Don't fool yourself. Political hatred and violent fantasies about opponents infest both sides.
Ignore the bullshit verbiage; scroll down to the pictures. Don't give me grief about the blog, either. No progressive site would have compiled it. I got the link from a comment at HuffPo.

http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621

The extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum have more in common than either will admit, and many of those who are not so extreme still go to considerable lengths to cover for them. Until that changes, the lunacy will continue. No change can or will happen from the shrieking of opponents. It can only happen when responsible people on each side start policing their own, through rediscovery of the importance of nominal civility in political discourse to a working society.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Old and In the Way Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 11:22 PM
Response to Reply #10
12. Yeah...you're right. All those people just didn't like Bush -
had nothing to do with starting an illegal and immoral war that killed 100's of thousands of innocents. Obama hasn't ended our illegal occupation of Afghanistan that he inherited, but I suspect that had he just decided to commit a war crime by invading without a justifiable casus belli, he'd have gotten that kind of anti-war rhetoric from our side as well.

Now explain what Obama has done to justify the hostility of the Right? Fix healthcare? Address the deficit by reinstating the proper taxrate on the top 2%? or getting elected President while black? Sorry, I just don't buy the false equivalence between the 2 groups.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Psephos Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 11:32 PM
Response to Reply #12
13. Thus proving my point. n/t
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Lint Head Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:15 PM
Response to Original message
2. Democrats know when to get violent. WWII was won by a Democratic
President. Republicans know how to get college deferments and how to hire others to do their killing.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Anakin Skywalker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:16 PM
Response to Original message
3. Come on! The Left is full of peace-loving hippies! What peaceful groups have the rightwing got?
Edited on Sat Jan-08-11 10:18 PM by Anakin Skywalker
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DCKit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-08-11 10:34 PM
Response to Reply #3
7. I'd say paralyzed people, but then they're just verbally and emotionally abusive. nt
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Suji to Seoul Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-11 01:02 AM
Response to Original message
14. I'll answer your question by reverting to my Jewish past and asking questions of my own:
1: Who advocates killing doctors who perform abortions?
2: Who advocates blowing up pre-natal clinics?
3: Who advocated "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran?"
4: Who advocates "second amendment solutions?"
5: Who advocates assassinating Julian Assange?
6: Who advocates war against any country with a different opinion?
7: Who advocates "Operation Chaos," Limpballs?
8: Who advocates dissent against the President with racist, jingoistic and violent filled vitrol?
9: Who advocates showing up to political rallies armed?

Finally, who advocates tolerance, understanding, compromise and tries to use logic, facts, figures and intelligence in all political discussions with people who scream first, shoot second, try to win on emotion and never think of the consequences?

Give you a hint. . .you can find them in Freeperland and on Fixed Noise!
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
jtuck004 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-11 01:18 AM
Response to Original message
15. The very, very wealthy. n/t
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Igel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-11 03:06 PM
Response to Original message
16. You pick your time frame, you get your answer.
More important is the question, "Which identifiable group in the US is the most violent?" It's not a beauty contest between right and left, it's first a police and security matter and second it's a question of trying to identify if there are things to be done to make that group less violent.

Narrowing it down to right and left ignores the loons who are on either side because they have to be somewhere, as well as those on neither side. A lot of people "seek" some group to validate them, to say that they're right, whether because they're mentally ill, from wrecked homes, broken marriages, some sort of abuse. Their affiliations are personal and not political, whatever the groups they may be in. I was in a church that had 'seekers' come and go; they came not because they liked the doctrines, in fact they usually accepted them temporarily or marginally. No, they were after validation and support.

It's comforting to paint McVeigh as Xian because then he's in a group other than "ours." As though that were the chief point. "Well, then, what he did was horrible, but what's really important is that I can't be tarred with the brush that tarred him." We then get to decry the people we always wanted to decry. The various Muslim wanna-be homicidal maniacs aren't "right" or "left" by any usual metric and, because we want to avoid the taint of "Islamophobia" we find justification, a way to blame those actions on those we don't like.

Loughner was all over the place. It's been claimed he was well left of center before 2007, just as more recently he's been with groups right-of-center. People change, but he was weird then, too. And last fall, saying that a woman who got an abortion was a terrorist? Few groups that 98% of conservatives would recognize as "conservative" would go that far. And then there's this, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4689670, a link to a racist group. Broader labels are harder to make stick. A narrow label is easier to make stick, but just because we can assign him a label doesn't make it any easier--there's no evidence he joined the group, he just liked it. (I think back to the guy who joined a pacifist 7th-day church because one of its members, his acquaintance, was a big believer in zero-point energy, something unrelated to the church as such.) Similarly, a relative was diagnosed with calciphylaxis; a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief because it had a label. The doctors didn't; not even its symptoms are treatable. The label was, ultimately, meaningless.

I don't know if Loughner is right or left or if those labels are just a matter of our convenience because of some group he found some link, some hook, into. If we assume his target was Gilford, then we're happier than if we assume his target was Roll; if his target was Roll, we're happier thinking he was targed because of an immigration suit that went "our" way than if he was targeted just because he was a federal judge. We like saying Palin put a target over Gilford; we dislike saying Kos put a target on Gilford.

I assume that "right" and "left" are less important than figuring out why this guy bounced around, figuring out how to spot people with this kind of need, how to identify people who are going to snap and getting them the kind of help they need. I'm less concerned with making sure that his path to deviancy avoided any path I was on; with making sure that the vitriol and hate, if that was what actually fed his deviancy, was only of the sort that I like to deride as vitriol and hate. One saves lives; one salves consciences.

Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DU AdBot (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view 
this author's profile Click to add 
this author to your buddy list Click to add 
this author to your Ignore list Sat May 04th 2024, 04:05 PM
Response to Original message
Advertisements [?]
 Top

Home » Discuss » Editorials & Other Articles Donate to DU

Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators


Important Notices: By participating on this discussion board, visitors agree to abide by the rules outlined on our Rules page. Messages posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums are the opinions of the individuals who post them, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Democratic Underground, LLC.

Home  |  Discussion Forums  |  Journals |  Store  |  Donate

About DU  |  Contact Us  |  Privacy Policy

Got a message for Democratic Underground? Click here to send us a message.

© 2001 - 2011 Democratic Underground, LLC