Guest Thinkers — January 10, 2011

Violent Rhetoric Not to Blame

Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue, says the conservative columnist Ross Douthat.

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Chances are that Jared Lee Loughner’s motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination. Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue—a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast. This is the world that gave us Oswald and Bremer.

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