News - World: Extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland. These radicals acted without restraint or, in many cases, humanity.

In early July, when then-President Donald Trump deployed federal law-enforcement agents in tactical gear to Portland—against the wishes of the mayor and the governor—conditions deteriorated further. 

What had seemed from the outside to be spontaneous protests centered on the murder of George Floyd were in fact the culmination of a long-standing ideological battle. 

Some four years earlier, Trump supporters had identified Portland, correctly, as an ideal place to provoke the left. The city is often mocked for its infatuation with leftist ideas and performative politics. 

That reputation, lampooned in the television series Portlandia, is not completely unwarranted. Right-wing extremists understood that Portland’s reaction to a trolling campaign would be swift, and would guarantee the celebrity that comes with virality. When Trump won the presidency, this dynamic intensified, and Portland became a place where radicals would go to brawl in the streets. 

And the magazine reported that "what happened in Portland, like what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was a concentrated manifestation of the political violence that exists in the country now," noting that "more Americans are taking up arms for political protests."

It also noted that "people build their political identities not around shared values, but around hatred of their opponents, a phenomenon known as passive partisanship," and went on to say that an increasing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, causing many to leave politics.

The magazine also stated that by almost all measures, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was five years ago.

According to "The Atlantic", three facts indicate that the current era of political violence in America is different from what happened before, and make dealing with it more difficult, namely:

First, the obvious is everyone's access to weapons, including military weapons.

Second, today's information environment is more complex and more fragmented than ever before. In 2006, analyst Bruce Hoffman argued that "contemporary terrorism has become dangerously amorphous". He was referring to groups like al Qaeda, but now we're seeing what he calls "homegrown American extremists."

As Hoffman and others argue, "the defining characteristic of post-9/11 terrorism is that it is decentralized, in that you do not need to be part of an organization to become a terrorist."

Third, the new reality goes to the core of American autonomy: as the people refuse to accept the outcome of the election, national leaders feed off the suspicion and capitalize on it for their own ends. In periods of termination, violence often becomes part of a governing strategy.

Source: The Atlantic