My colleague Graeme Wood, who has spent much of his career studying the people and societies that resort to violence, has made the case for a greater degree of sanguinity about political violence in America, given how much worse off many other countries are. In Latin America, Wood wrote earlier this year, “the violence reaches levels where even a successful assassination is barely news.” The thing is, you can’t fully understand the extent to which a society has become inured to violence by counting individual attacks or grotesque social-media posts. You have to assess the whole culture, and its direction over time. A society’s propensity for violence may be ticking up and up and up, even as life continues to feel normal to most people. A drumbeat of attacks, by different groups or individuals with different motivations, may register as different kinds of problems. But take the broad view and you find they point at the same diagnosis: Our social bonds are disintegrating.
Another word for this unraveling is decivilization. The further a society goes down this path, the fewer behavioral options people identify as possible reactions to grievances. When every disagreement becomes zero-sum and no one is willing to compromise, violence becomes more attractive to people. And when violence becomes widespread, the state may escalate its own use of violence—including egregious attacks on civil liberties.