The Duck of Minerva

Historical perspective

by Dan Nexon

11 January 2011, 1248 EST

As James Poulous reminds me, 2010 ain’t got nothing on 1968, let alone the long 1960s.

Violent rhetoric?
Worse.

Societal polarization?
Worse.

Political violence, including assassinations?
Much worse.

It is something of a testament to how far we’ve come that what outrages us now is relatively tame compared to the spewings of the far left and the far right less than half a century ago.

I still don’t have much use for claims that center-left politicians are trying to destroy the United States, or that center-right politicians are fascists. I still think that most of the political elites accusing their opponents of trying to institute tyranny and implying the need for armed revolt are lying weasels. But let’s not wax nostalgia about some golden past of American politics, okay?

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

10 Comments

  1. LFC
    LFC on 11 January 2011 at 14.59 EST

    Of course there was more violence in 1968 than in 2010-11. But taking “the long 60s” as a whole (defined say as c.1963 to c.1974), I'm not at all sure there was more societal polarization than today. It was a highly polarized era, but so is this one. (And although it's perhaps not all that relevant, I note that, [presumably] unlike James Poulos, I have first-hand memories of the earlier period.)        

  2. dnexon
    dnexon on 11 January 2011 at 15.01 EST

    LFC: fair enough, but think about race relations and civil rights.

  3. Vikash Yadav
    Vikash Yadav on 11 January 2011 at 17.51 EST

    The difference to use Todd Gitlin's phrase is that those days of rage were accompanied by years of hope, utopian though they may have been.  We now have only spasms of rage.

  4. Chris Brown
    Chris Brown on 12 January 2011 at 08.47 EST

    A bit of a comparative perspective wouldn't hurt either – in recent years political assassinations have taken place on most of the stable northern European democracies; a couple of years ago a British MP was attacked with a samurai sword at a constituency surgery and very badly injured. Random shootings take place every so often in the UK in spite of our strict gun laws, with a dozen dead and 25 injured in one incident last year, and both Finland and Norway have had the same phenomena, repeatedly in Finland, where guns are readily available. Sensible for Americans to be concerned about the impact of political rhetoric, but don't assume that this is just a US problem. 

  5. dnexon
    dnexon on 12 January 2011 at 11.43 EST

    Good point, Chris. I'm surprised I haven't seen more political science work on the growth of the trans-atlantic right over the past decade, its mutations, and its transnational ties.

  6. Chris Brown
    Chris Brown on 12 January 2011 at 12.29 EST

    Actually most of the assassinations, where the perpetrator has been identified, are associated with Muslim extremists rather than the right, and the worst outrages are committed by the usual lone nutters, but certainly right-wing groups are responsible for much of the street violence, and do indeed have a kind of international.

  7. dnexon
    dnexon on 12 January 2011 at 13.18 EST

    Didnt mean to imply otherwise.

  8. LFC
    LFC on 12 January 2011 at 21.12 EST

    Re the transnational Right: Charles Lindholm and Jose Pedro Zuquete's recent The Struggle for the World looks at transnational 'liberation' (the authors' word) movements of both left and right; haven't read it but heard them give a talk some months ago. (Lindholm is an anthropologist.)  

  9. Norwegian Guy
    Norwegian Guy on 13 January 2011 at 19.03 EST

    Don't know what incident in Norway you are talking about. Young men going on shooting sprees is a recurring phenomena in Finland, though. In 2002 there was even a young Finnish boy who blew himself and several others up with a homemade bomb in a mall.

  10. Norwegian Guy
    Norwegian Guy on 13 January 2011 at 19.42 EST

    Don't know what assassinations you are talking about, but neither Olof Palme nor Anna Lindh were killed by Muslim extremists, and Lord Mountbatten wasn't either. In fact, militant Islamists only accounted for 1 of 294 terrorist attacks in Europe in 2009. By far, most terrorism is done by nationalist separatists, with left-wing extremists (mostly Greek I guess) a distant second.

    I would also say that religious extremists are by definition right-wing.