His killing saved America’s elite institutions
Was violent chaos inevitable in America in the summer of 2020? If it was not inevitable, it had at least been predicted. In a 2017 review of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, an account of left-wing terrorism in the Seventies, the historian Peter Turchin suggested that a new era of civil disorder was on the verge of consuming America.
Writing in the early months of the Trump administration, he prophesied that at any moment, a “symbolic event” involving a “sacrificial victim” might ignite the powder keg of political violence and plunge the nation into bloody strife. Turchin cited the 1969 FBI murder of Fred Hampton, which inspired the insurgency narrated in Burrough’s book, and the 2011 self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, credited with setting off the Arab Spring, as examples of such an event.
