“The Violent Underpinnings of American Life: How Violence Maintains Social Order in the U.S.”
The Violent Underpinnings of American Life asserts that violence—far from going against American ideals—is as American as apple pie, central to the country’s social order and the dominance of its most powerful groups. Drawing from extensive research and from analysis of key social, political, and cultural events, Liam Downey investigates the myriad ways that sexual violence against women and police and political violence against Black people maintain the American way of life. Specifically, Downey identifies four main ways in which these and other forms of violence produce and maintain the American social hierarchy: they create divisions among non-elite social groups; reinforce dominant discourses in multiple social arenas; align individuals’ subjectivities and identities with dominant institutional practices and external social and power relations; and selectively promote the interests of specific, non-elite groups. Downey further argues that violence is both a negative, coercive power and a productive power that helps produce not only social order but also consent, discipline, discourse, identity, subjectivity, and embodied knowledge, among other things.