Adrienne LaFrance’ cover story “The New Anarchy” (The Atlantic, April 2023) provides an historical perspective on the nature of violence in our country and how it cycles through history. This particular passage, centered on the early 20th century anarchist Luigi Galleani, resonated with me:

The conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence are complex but well established: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. All of those conditions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are present today.