Beyond the high-profile assassination of Charlie Kirk, the amount of political violence has greatly increased. What causes political violence to become “popular”? Fortunately, libertarians have drawn attention to this violence, political division, and government-caused chaos, and they also explain the causes and how Austrian economics provides the remedy.
I have talked about domestic political violence on this podcast for a while and in interviews too. I have focused my attention not on sensational assassination events but on the increasingly common violent disputes between citizens and their government. I can tell you that audiences do not appreciate talk of war and citizen violence; it’s a real downer. In addition, hard-core Trump supporters think I am attacking the president and “conservatives,” but let me assure you that this is a bipartisan issue. Just as many people hate Republicans as hate the Democrats. Political violence is bipartisan!
Along with the increasing dissatisfaction and political division in America, according to the statistics, there has been increasing political violence in quantities greater than you would think. The situation suggests to me that political violence could be a prominent story with the mid-term elections, the seating of the new Congress in January, and beyond—real stress tests for America. Unless diffused, it could be the most serious threat in history to the American way of life.
Professor Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago’s prestigious political science department has just published a book on this subject: Our Own Worse Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism. The well-respected author has published on topics such as military strategy, particularly the role of air power, national security, and terrorism, but you are more likely to know of him as a leading guest expert on multiple top shows regarding the war in the Persian Gulf.
This article will give you a quick overview of the book, most of which is based on empirical political science that establishes that political violence has been normalized in the American “public conscience.” This implied shift of ideology gives us the theme of “violent populism—when political violence becomes an accepted instrument of democratic struggle.” I will then review one chapter in particular to draw out the Austrian and libertarian answers for the dilemma posed, giving us both the cause and the highly plausible cure.
Any type of “liberal,” whether libertarian or even progressive, once would have considered physical violence to achieve political ends as unthinkable, but now it is normalized for a significant minority, Left and Right. Much of it comes from the educated, middle-aged, middle-class suburban areas, not the so-called fringes of the poor and uneducated of urban and rural society. I myself have been horrified by the advocacy of political violence from my otherwise content friends on the Left side of things.
Of course, the usual cast of characters play a role: demographic change, minorities, immigrants, and all the government policies, directly or indirectly attached to those issues, such a welfare, immigration policy, public education, taxes, subsidies, political parties, politicians, and opportunity in government jobs and state universities, economic dislocation, as well as political mechanisms, including voting, redistricting, and the courts. Professor Pape concludes that the evidence shows we have entered another era of political violence, as an increasingly acceptable “persistent feature of American political life” for both Left and Right.
The demographic polling data presented is very illuminating as are the case studies examined. The two prior periods of political violence that we will reexamine are the 1920s and the 1960s.
Professor Pape sums up the problem in the phrase “fractured legitimacy” and calls for moderates to reestablish legitimacy. I would explain the problem as a result of the ideological shift and expansion of big government, beginning in the decades prior to the 1920s—the Progressive Era and WWI. The Progressives shielded their agenda by constitutional amendment and prior state-level legislation—legitimacy. The last century has been a relentless growth of government economic violence against people and property through taxes, regulations, inflation, mandates, etc.
Most prominently, the power of the presidency has grown exponentially and has resulted in ongoing wars, the federal government takeover of education and medical care, discretionary monetary policy, and so much more. Each government intervention is essentially violent. Yes, there are often beneficiaries beyond the politicians, but there are obviously a multitude of losers too and because government cannot produce anything that it has not already taken, the losers automatically outweigh the beneficiaries, especially so when you include the massive cost of bureaucratic “red tape.”
I would argue that political legitimacy in America was based on the ideological consensus that the central government should remain small in size, power, and budget, and also limited or proscribed by legal and republican constitutional constraints. This was the consensus of people under the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention. This consensus is based on the idea that government activity of any kind is, by nature, violent and abhorrent in a moral sense. It should therefore be legally restricted. For those who realize government is coercive by nature and morally wrong, they are nonetheless willing to concede and put up with the constitutional republican form of government to achieve consensus and stability: Government that governs least, governs best.
Bad anti-“American” ideologies have eroded this original ideology, the general consensus, and the legitimacy on which the government rests. By any measure, the size, scope, and power of government—particularly the centralizing federal government—is much larger, encompassing, and commanding than before the Progressive Era and the Spanish-American War. Indeed, it reaches deeper into the pocketbook and details of life than ever before, and it exercises more discretion and oversight while giving the impression of having almost no concern about representing their constituents or defending the Constitution and the rule of law. Consequently, libertarians do not endorse—but are not surprised at—the rise of political violence as a civilian response to big government.
Professor Pape cites two previous periods of violent populism—the 1920s and the 1960s—both of which have historical details that conform very nicely to economic analysis. Prior to the 1920s, protectionism for American industry helped induce a massive immigration of European Catholics and WWI induced dramatic migration flows of rural southern blacks to industrial centers in the north. The centerpiece of the wave of violence that sprang forth was the second Ku Klux Klan as a powerful political force and source of popular violence against blacks and immigrants.
In contrast, the populist violence of the 1960s was Leftist in orientation. It was a combination of black protest riots and white Vietnam War protest riots. Like the 1920s, this period was seen as great economic progress, but Pape suggests that political representation failed to keep up with population changes and movements. There is a typo on page 164 which states that blacks made up 1 percent of the population in 1965 when, in fact, it was closer to 11 percent, but blacks held only six seats in Congress.
No doubt, political institutions of all sorts are naturally static and slow to change compared to the rational dynamism of all forms of voluntary organization and cooperation in the marketplace. We can rely on free markets to regulate themselves, but government “regulation” of markets and organization reliably creates increasing chaos, whether that is in finance, healthcare, education, or national defense. This is why the original consensus worked so well from 1790 to 1890: government was small and limited, and it could do a tolerable job controlling the Post Office, West Point, and collecting customs.
The real problems of the 1920s and the 1960s, as well as our bigger problem today, have a common cause and a proximate cause that does not invalidate the political science mechanisms put forward by Professor Pape. The common cause is the breakdown in the original consensus and the resulting unleashing of continuous government expansion. That represents increased government violence of various sorts with each type creating winners and losers and inducing violent response tendencies.
The proximate cause is the elephant in the room, right under our noses, and hiding in plain sight: the Federal Reserve. Establishing a central bank in 1913 was the centerpiece legislation of the Progressive Era and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. A central bank makes all kinds of government expansion possible, including wars, vast increases in spending, vast increases in national debt, and even the elimination of unpopular but rational taxes.
The 1920s, the 1960s, and the current experience represent the Federal Reserve in its most active and inflationary periods to date. For the 1920s, the Fed had just been founded, and it rapidly expanded the money supply to finance WWI and then greatly expanded money and credit in the 1920s, leading to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and thus helped usher in the Progressivism’s Great Depression under Hoover and Roosevelt. The 1960s were the “go-go years” of Keynesian economics in terms of both an expansionary fiscal policy—of both “guns and butter”—as well as monetary expansion, causing a drain of gold and the leaving of the Bretton Woods gold standard by President Nixon in 1971.
I have analyzed and discussed our current economic experience at great length. Like the previous two periods, there has been a great expansion of both money, credit, and government spending. The expansion of money leads to higher prices, and the suppression of inflation-adjusted wage rates; the expansion of credit is advantageous to the holders of wealth and assets and is a boon to the rich, and government expansion increases its often-subtle violence, creating winners and losers in the process. Monetary inflation is the ultimate cause of the rise of political violence. These are the predictable results from economic theory and in particular the Austrian School’s business cycle theory which explains all the primary aspects as an integrated pattern.
It also gives us the political solution to the problem, a policy agenda of returning in the direction of the original American consensus, beginning with a return to sound money.
