Leftist Street Violence Isn’t New, and It’s Not Going Away

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Probably closer to the truth than intellectual reasons.

People can feel more valuable in a group.

One Norwegian's thoughts on AntiFa:

There were a bunch of parties much like uk. Notice how in USA congress is either republican or Democrat, there’s not 3rd or 4th party that has seats and there probably never will be. If antifa became a party they’d never get any seats non less dream of getting enough seats to become relevant.
The Nazis however did gain enough seats that adding hitler to the run wild garner the other party a majority seats. In america that can’t happen, so some 3rd party radical will never achieve what hitler did.
From what I understand European politics are more complex due to having serious 3rd party options.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_Ge ... l_election

So there's an extent to which I think this is true (context on Spain for people who were just as unsure what it was like as I was: before Franco they had a monarchy with political parties predictably alternating rather than elections, then six years of dictatorship, and then three free elections in six years with very big political swings between each one - so safe to say it wasn't a stable democracy) but I worry that it's a case of failure of imagination. We think a stable democratic state won't collapse because it hasn't happened yet, but we just aren't considering the full range of possibilities.

The polarisation does seem to be getting worse. A few years ago I got the impression that on the whole "the right" thought the left were misguided whereas "the left" thought the right were morally defective. Nowadays there is plenty of sentiment from elements of the right that anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor, an enemy, someone to be purged - it's just got so much more heated and I can't help but think that we're living in unprecedented times.

I'm watching one of John Vervaeke's lectures, he's a bit of a nut in humorous ways but he brought up something really germaine and useful to the topic at 57:30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqsUDNkBt-Q

One set of concerns in getting from an initial state to a goal state is called path constraints. His example was cooking lunch - he could burn his house down and that would solve the problem of cooking lunch - it would be cooked, the trouble is that causes far more problems than one needing to cook lunch. I think both radical left and radical right seem to not grasp that concept as well as they could.

Yeah, very logical of them all right. /s

It's now harder to distinguish between American liberals and far-leftists, socialists or progressives.
And it's a wonder to people why more people especially leaning right are engaging more with the far-right.

I think the narrative is a half-truth and has been skewed some degree.