Your own Girardian frame applies cleanly here. Democratic politics functions as a ritualized form of the scapegoat mechanism: each policy identifies a class whose interests must be sacrificed for the common good, and the procedural form of the sacrifice — votes, hearings, regulations, "stakeholder input" — conceals the sacrificial structure under the appearance of administration. The mechanism only works while concealed. Acknowledging that voting is authorizing violence would expose what the ritual exists to hide. So the language migrates: we don't have violence, we have enforcement; we don't have victims, we have non-compliance; we don't have factions, we have policy. The therapeutic-managerial vocabulary of late liberalism is precisely the dialect needed to keep the sacrificial substrate invisible.

And mimetically, of course, no in-group can see itself as the aggressor. Your side's policies are justice, the other side's are violence — and the bilateral version of this blindness is structural. The libertarian and anarchist traditions (Spooner, Rothbard, Huemer, the early Nozick of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) have been pointing all this out for a long time. Their marginalization isn't because the argument is weak. It's because once you grant the premise, you have to either justify the violence on its own terms — which liberal theory finds embarrassing, since it prefers to deny that violence is what's happening — or move toward some form of anarchism, which is a non-starter for almost everyone. So the question gets foreclosed before it can be asked.

The deepest reason, though, is that acknowledging it would impose real moral weight on the act of voting. It would make the ballot a serious thing with serious victims rather than an expression of values or identity. Democracy works in part by distributing moral responsibility across so many anonymous participants that no one feels the weight of any particular act of authorized violence. Pull on that thread and the whole legitimation falls apart. So the thread doesn't get pulled.

#b Anarchy, State, and Utopia

#b The Problem of Political Authority

Worth flagging that left-anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker) agrees the state is violence but adds that concentrated private property is too. The solution there is federated mutual-aid associations, cooperatives, communes — markets without rent and privilege, or in Kropotkin's case, post-market entirely. Different vocabulary, same anti-sovereignty premise.