What is behind the wave of extremist violence? Some thoughts

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to opinion essay by Times editorial columnist David Brooks, “The ideology of hate and how to fight it,” August 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/opinion/el-paso-dayton-shooting.html#commentsContainer&permid=101852247:101852247:

So:
-Mass killers are not only driven by bad ideas, but very stupid ones. Indeed.
-At the core of these bad ideas are forms of identity politics. This means, or is based on, the idea that demographical categories name essences. And these qualities are essentially distinct from one another, theoretically well-bounded.
-The true soul of America is liberal, democratic, open, diverse, pluralistic. Sure.

The second point warrants further reflection. What happens when politics becomes the madness of civil war---now carried out by fringe sects consisting of loosely coordinated networks of loners inspired by ideological advertising spots of like-feeling kooks? It is a new form of terrorism, earlier practiced by ISIS. Sites advocating extremism and violence need to be taken down, since relying on the free speech ideal of an educated and rational citizenry is unrealistic.

Policing administrators with any sense should know the difference between that and all kinds of art or argument. Hate-mongers should face charges.

The idea of such war (like Hobbes's of all against all) is indeed linked to notions of identity, closure, and individualism that are in turned linked to property. It is a possibility of capitalism run amok.

These insane killers are men with broken lives; for each there are a thousand others who just suffer needlessly, in a broken society that thinks people are the origin of their problems. We would fix the persons when we should change the society.

(Don’t bet on it, though. There will probably just be more policing, and most of it will be directed at very different targets. If our government and its leaders feared violent crimes like this as much as other things, including maybe any real non-violent opposition, would all of this still be happening?)