Ahead of Election Day in the United States, security preparations are underway as the specter of political violence looms. As my colleague Amy Mackinnon reported, nonscalable fences have gone up around Washington, and office buildings near the White House have been boarded up. Across the United States, election offices have ramped up security in the past four years.
These measures can be seen in part as a response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the assassination attempts against former U.S. President Donald Trump this year. But Nick Bryant, the BBC’s former correspondent in Washington and New York, believes that we should look back further to understand the deep polarization—and normalization of violence—in the United States.
As Bryant wrote in July, “Political violence is a core part of the U.S. story, although much of this history has often been buried and concealed.” Drawing from his recent book, The Forever War, he argues that Jan. 6 was the culmination of a centuries-long belief in the legitimacy of political violence.
Read it here: America’s Democracy Was Never That Healthy
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