I've just started reading Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The book has gotten a lot of publicity for propounding the (to some) counterintuitive notion that modern society is a far, far more peaceful place than what came before.
A major cause of the decline in violence has been what Pinker calls the civilizing process, which basically refers to the replacement of feuding warlords (the knights of old) with a strong central government that treats violent crimes as offenses against the state rather than affronts to families or clans that must be avenged.
But there's a big catch...
Actually, there are two catches, and both of them should serve as warnings to Republicans who want to gut government and destroy the middle class:
1. The civilizing process only works if the populace comes to accept the central government as legitimate. And, as we've seen demonstrated so dramatically, various different stripes of right wingers have their reasons for denying the legitimacy of the government, in particular the Federal government. If people don't believe in government, and don't trust it to enforce justice, they will soon take matters into their own hands (militias, anyone?).
And perhaps even more cautionary:
2. Historically, the civilizing process in the West began with the aristocracy and slowly spread downward through society. At this stage of its progress, it has reached into most, but not all, segments of society. Most of us have accepted the authority of the state and have learned how to behave civilly under it.
Who's left? Crucially, it's the very bottom segments of society. If you look around, you'll see that it's the most economically and socially disadvantaged who are most skeptical of the authority of the government, and who don't believe they can get justice from it (of course, all too often they're right).
Pinker points out that perhaps as many as 90% of all homicides aren't for any "practical" purpose like silencing a witness or robbing a bank. Usually they take place in pursuit of a sort of "self-service justice": retribution for an insult, or punishment for an unfaithful lover, for example. And of course, these kinds of killings are far more common among the lower classes.
This should give Republicans something to think about: if you (a) destroy the legitimacy of the government, and (b) banish millions of formerly middle-class citizens to the underclasses, you are probably looking at a major breakdown in civil order.
I guess if you're a One Percenter, this doesn't worry you because you can always build the walls higher around your gated community and hire more private cops to protect you.
The rest of us?