Where do riots come from?
This is not a facile question. But it is one in which we have become curiously uninterested. Not so long ago this was because political violence was accepted by our opinion-making classes and the older of our two major political parties as an unremarkable feature of American civic life: “People will do what they do,” as Nancy Pelosi put it last year.
This was always as ludicrous as the opposite reaction, the reactionary fantasies of grapeshot and citizen militias. While I have a certain amount of sympathy with arguments insisting upon a univocal condemnation of rioting, it is only because they are consistent.
