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.