Street gangs and politics

When Shirer wrote of the Collapse of the Third Republic he described a political culture where gangs of thugs protected your own rallies and disrupted your opponents, and sometimes clashed on their own account. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. 'the inquiring candidates wanted to know: "Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?" ' Alliances between politicians and gangsters go back a long way in Chicago.

And in other places too. If you don’t have the power of the government to do your political enforcement, you either have to persuade or buy or enforce. Buying support is expensive and means actually paying attention to your constituents, and persuasion is difficult and never quite permanent. So…

It has always been a problem. Some of us remember reading about the Sons of Liberty. "Frequently, cooperation with undisciplined and extralegal groups (city gangs) set off violent actions. Even though the Sons seldom looked for violent solutions and eruptions, they did continue to elicit and promote political upheaval that tended to favor crowd action."

We've been fortunate to have so little of this sort of thing, so far. But it does crop up. Then what should the rest of us do?