Americans are slowly becoming more radical as a reaction to economic pressures. With each side's policies alien to the other, compromise becomes impossible. Eventually one side will have to win out and then things will get very interesting.
Well things are pretty violent already, with the deadly class war the police is fighting against the population (~1k in 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...) plus the countless arrests, macing, tasering and other violent actions of police against peaceful demonstrators, plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism). Add in the huge number of weapons circulating in the US... when the poor people (or the armed rednecks) finally feel desperate enough that will be quite a bloodbath.
If you want another comparaison, look up dog shooting in the US and in Europe, unless you really believe dogs are somewhat more dangerous in the US, the inescapable conclusion is that American cops enjoy the power trip of gunning down living creatures...
And why shouldn't they, it's almost risk free for them, which is the root of the issue.
There's two problems with this.
1) if you define "justified use of force" like Americans do, then yeah, of course it's justified, a guy pulling up his pants while being dragged on the ground is now "reaching for a weapon" so an officer is fully justified to shoot him dead. He was practically asking for it, and it shows up as such in all official statistics.
2) It doesn't explain how is it that other countries can get through the entire year without police murdering a single person, despite having the same or worse crime rates as US.
But definitely way, way more likely than in any other civilized country in the world, and that's the problem.
plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism)
"all of the violence", you listed one death. One death is a tragedy, but it's not a massively systematic problem unless we act like it is and turn it into one. You also act like there isn't such a thing as left-wing domestic terrorism. That terrorism killed more people in a single event, 7/7/16, than that nutjob running someone over did. What about the mob of nazis and anti-facists getting into fights in Berkeley? If you're not committed to one of those groups, it's just as bad. It's mob violence either way.
Nazis suck, but please try to be objective. When you frame the argument as you are, you are setting up flamebait. Some nazi will use your exaggerations against you.
It is a systematic problem. 150 incidents between 1993 and 2017, an average of 6 terrorist incidents a year or once every two months. 255 people died, 603 people were injured. Source: https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/dark-constan...
Note: this is just the violence that got counted as terrorist violence, not your ordinary Nazi running around and slapping PoC.
ordinary Nazi running around and slapping PoC
There are a lot of bigots and racists doing thaT, but unless we're being really loose with the term nazi, we don't actually have that many nazis running around.
Their worst acts were in the mid 1990s (OKC). Hell, in 1999 in Jasper, some racists lynched a man. 1999! Those people have always been around, they always will be around. There's always going to be some number of incidents. That does not mean they have real power nor should people act like they do.
This is a decent read:
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533255619/fact-check-is-left-...
I would also posit the majority of recent political violence is from the Antifa folks who believe they can shutdown their opponents through pure and simple violence.
In fact there was one act of violence attributed to all the "tea party" protests during the Obama era and that was instigated by an anti-tea party person.
For two generations political protests were virtually 100% violence-free until the current crop of kids took to the streets with their anti- trump activities.
Makes me sad really...
Meanwhile the next town over is being raped and pillaged by bears, lions, pirates and wildfires.
Two generations? So 60 years? Political protests were virtually 100% violence free? [1][2][3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Conve...
Hell, even trying to call the OKC bombing "right wing" might be a stretch. They were anti govt separatists!
Simply apply this old quote whenever you hear an "alt-righter", a "white nationalist" or a "teabagger" talking, and replace "duck" with "nazi": "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."
It's not exaggerated rhetoric when you call out that the core ideals of these groups equate those of Nazism (or fascism, but the distinction is really nitpicking). It's simply new words for old hate. These groups and their friends and supporters are as dangerous as Hitler was before rising to power!
Third parties don’t thrive in countries with first-past-the-post voting and without a tradition of coalition-making. In order for the USA to reach a point where it could have more than a two-party system, it would have to completely remake its governmental structure, and “very interesting” is an appropriate euphemism for what things would be like if it ever came to that.
This is just an symptom of economic inequality. If you do not belong to the same economic class anymore, then what might make the country better for you, might make the country worst for the other person. There is no way to avoid this.