What would be the point in rioting if your candidate doesnt win?

[Andy F]

If you get to the point where you think voting just doesn't matter -- if you start to believe the legal political system is permanently rigged against you and everone like you -- isn't rioting a logical response?

I'm not saying it's good, but it is logical.

And historically in the US, people of many different backgrounds & races & political ideas -- left AND right, black AND white AND Hispanic -- have turned to rioting on some occasions.

In the early 1960s, of course, it was white southern racists who did the most rioting, sometimes beating and occasionally even killing black and white civil rights workers who wanted integration.

Do a web search for "Anniston, Alabama" and "Little Rock High School" and "University of Mississippi / integration" if you need evidence for about the white racist riots of that age.

In the later 1960s, of course, it was mostly black residents of segregated Northern cities who were rioting, out of anger & frustration that the benefits of "integration" weren't improving life in the North. In 1968 in Chicago, radical antiwar students and brutal Chicago cops both rioted out of frustration with the normal political process.

In the 1860s in New York City during the Cvil War, it was white Irish mobs who rioted against Lincoln's draft law.

In 1919 in Detroit, it was both black and white people who engaged in bloody riots over what kind of racial arrangments would prevail after WW I.

To quote Bob Dylan in "Like a Rolling Stone," "when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose." Rioters are usually people who have "nothing to lose," or who think they do.

In the 1700s in London, when the working class was excluded from voting for Parliament, the so-called "London mob" repeatedly rioted -- because they saw no other effective way of communicating with their upper-class masters. When the British working class finally got the vote, the frequency of London riots declined.

That's one good reason to keep our political system as open as possible, even to minority positions, even to hate-mongers.

If people of left, right & center -- of all races & creeds etc. -- think they have a chance to be heard through nonviolent means, they're less likely to use violent ones.

-- democratic socialist / not a fan of riots, but a student of history