"The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/thoroughly-respectable-rioters/617644/

"[The mob was] there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule."

"They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen."

"There’s ample precedent for this. When the KKK formed during Reconstruction, its leadership 'included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers.' "

" ‘The most respectable citizens are engaged in it,’ reported a Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau agent, ‘if there can be any respectability about such people.’ ”

"Respectable people can be very dangerous."

"In truth, ...it was when Black and white laborers formed alliances—such as the Readjusters in Virginia—that the white supremacists were most effectively resisted."

"They became mayors, governors, congressmen, and senators. They erected monuments to the Confederate Army + its valor in defending the institution of human bondage...

...both to celebrate their accomplishments + to dissuade Black southerners from ever again contemplating political equality with white people."

"They told the world that what they had done was heroism rather than terrorism, and, in the name of reconciliation and unity, the white North acquiesced."

"By 1909, a decade after the massacre in Wilmington inspired a wave of new Jim Crow legislation across the South, Repub Prez Taft praised Democrats for having excluded 'ignorant, irresponsible element'— Black voters—from the polity. The respectable people were in charge again."

"Of course, it was their success in seizing power and disenfranchising their political rivals that allowed them to maintain their respectability."

"Had they failed, had the South’s brief experiment in multiracial democracy succeeded, they would have been seen as the bandits, assassins, and terrorists that they were. "

"Watching the mob ransack the Capitol last week, Trump is reported to have been initially enthusiastic about the riot, but later disgusted by 'what he considered the ‘low-class’ spectacle of people in ragtag costumes rummaging through the Capitol.' ”

"Now we know the truth. They weren’t 'low class.' They were respectable. They almost always are." /

quotes from great piece by @AdamSerwer in @TheAtlantic

[piece linked at top of this thread] //fin