White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller

An arresting fact about American violence, and one of the keys to understanding its history, is that very little has been insurrectionary. Most of our violence has taken the form of action by one group of citizens against another group, rather than by citizens against the state…. One is impressed that most American violence—and this also illuminates its relationship to state power—has been initiated with a “conservative” bias. It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.[109]