The “ink” wasn’t even dry on last week’s essay — “When Hatred for the ‘Woke’ Left Trumps the Love of Liberty” — and, well, here we are.
In the wake of the assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder, Charlie Kirk, it’s already customary to put one’s cards on the table. So, here goes: I cannot count how many times I disagreed with Charlie Kirk. But Kirk did not deserve to be murdered for his opinions. This is very much an either/or issue. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise. Either we stand for the rule of law and free speech norms — or we don’t. If we don’t, then all bets are off.
As my friend Ryan Neugebauer has said:
Openly promoting assassinations for just anybody espousing awful views, whether they have a large platform or not, is not conducive to cultivating a free and flourishing society. There’s a reason we have the concept of “rule of law” and that’s because we don’t want a society run on vigilante justice. … We are not at the level of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. We just aren’t. Trust me, you’ll know when we are. At that point, society is so beyond saving that it can only improve by total collapse or all-out war.
So many of you, at least rhetorically and in the safety behind your keyboards, seem to jump to violence very quickly. I don’t think you’re at all prepared for the reality of what that will entail if taken to its logical conclusions. … But our norms of freedom of speech and the rule of law are what buttress us against authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and stifling tribal conflict. They should be defended until they can no longer be maintained institutionally. And at that point, may the gods that be help you.
Alas, as my friend Thomas Knapp has pointed out:
The bulk of responses to Kirk’s assassination consisted of: 1) Sober condemnations of murder in general, or murder over speech, from most people, and 2) Opportunistic condemnations of “political violence” from the most politically violent creatures on the planet, politicians. But we also saw significant amounts of celebration among Kirk’s opponents, and baying for the blood of anyone not aligned with Kirk among Kirk’s supporters (some of whom on “the right,” it should be noted, were vehement critics right up until the instant the single shot rang out). Not good. More and more Americans seem more and more willing lately to countenance the “political violence” that most Americans (including its politician practitioners) still condemn.
Among those politician practitioners responding to the Kirk assassination is President Donald Trump. Not missing a beat, and even before Tyler Robinson was arrested for the crime, Trump blamed the killing on the “radical Left”:
This is a dark moment for America. … It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
This — coming from a man who demonizes everybody with whom he disagrees in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
He went on:
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.
This — coming from a man who regularly characterizes his opponents as “vermin,” “communists, Marxists, fascists, and … radical left thugs.”
He went on:
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today. And it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
This — coming from a man who seeks to stifle opposition by targeting judges, law firms, universities, the media, and various corporate actors, and who is now planning an all-out assault on so-called “far-left groups.” It remains to be seen if that assault will rise to the level of the infrastructure of violence that he has created to harass, detain, arrest, and deport countless numbers of immigrants without due process.
In other appearances, Trump doubled down on blaming the “radical left group of lunatics”: “If you look at the problem, the problem is on the left. … And when you look at the agitator, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that’s the left. That’s not the right.”
This — coming from a man who could not bring himself to mention a single act of violence committed by the forces of right-wing reaction, despite the fact that right-wing political terrorism has gifted this country its own unique brand of lethality.
Ironically, the last time I addressed the issue of political violence was the day after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. On July 14, 2024, I wrote:
I’m kind of old fashioned. I live by the mantra, “Ballots, Not Bullets.” I don’t believe that an assassination attempt on a prospective occupant of the White House is the way to resolve our political differences.
Yes, that mantra has a context. Even one of the greatest of America’s founders, Thomas Jefferson, famously declared in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And in hindsight, few of us would object to having taken out a Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao before they embarked on the path of mass murder.
Still, I don’t care what your views are of Trump or Biden. We’re not there yet, folks. And if you think that political assassination can simplify things, you’ve not thought through the unimaginable unintended consequences that might result. (And I’m writing this on Bastille Day … so beware the side effects of violence.) Granted, voting for either one of these guys might still have unimaginable unintended consequences. But if your side can’t win an election, this isn’t just about the strengths or weaknesses of Trump or Biden.
It’s about a political system that can’t generate viable alternatives and a political culture that is rotting to the core.
I’m not saying It Can’t Happen Here. I realize that this country has had enormous resilience through constitutional crises, a Civil War, a Great Depression, two World Wars, a Cold War (that encompassed several hot wars), political assassinations, and massive social unrest. Having been born in 1960, my first exposure to politics was the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. By the time I was 14, my real-time education took place in front of a black-and-white television, where I absorbed news about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the nightly reports from Vietnam, as 58,000 Americans and untold numbers of Asians were killed; the antiwar protests and the Kent State massacre; the demonstrations and riots throughout America’s cities in the fight for Civil Rights; and the corruption that spread into the highest office of the land, bringing down a presidency.
But past resilience is no guarantee of future success. Political violence is as much a part of the fabric of American life as is the voting booth. And in many cases, the voting booth is merely a means of assuring political violence on a systemic scale.
Whatever I said in the aftermath of the attempted Trump assassination applies with equal vigor to last week’s murder of Charlie Kirk. Indeed, there is no viable path forward for folks of whatever political persuasion who glorify violence as a panacea.
We are not likely to overturn the macro-aggressions in our politics by violently erasing those whom we believe are engaged in the micro-aggressions in our culture. Yes, culture matters. The toxicity in our culture is both a reflection of — and a driving force for — the toxicity in our politics, whether it is coming from the “left” or the “right”.
That said, political toxicity is nothing new. The political history of the United States has been bathed in blood. The very phrase “political violence” is almost a redundancy. Most political action entails violence. Still, a distinction must be made between those who engage in the ideological legitimation of political action, however harmful, and those who implement violent interventions in people’s lives. Murray Rothbard once used the phrase “court intellectual” to describe the former class. Such ideologues provide justifications for the policies of state actors, thereby forming an alliance with those in power, gaining wealth and prestige in service to the Establishment. They may even start out as critics of the Establishment, but once their favored political actors attain power, the court intellectuals are indispensable to the sustenance of that power.
From the time of those who promoted the idea of the “divine right of kings” to those who engage in apologetics for the modern corporate-warfare state, the court intellectual has played a key role. Indeed, we have witnessed this phenomenon across presidential administrations regardless of political party affiliation.
But ideologues of any stripe cannot be defeated by the bullet. Ideas sanctioning awful actions can only be fought with better ideas. Popping off people with whom we disagree is not likely to change the trajectory of the system. In most instances, it only gives those in power a pretext for scapegoating whole populations in punishment for the actions of a few.
In the current context, Ben Burgis and Meagan Day are especially attuned to this issue. Their cogent discussion explores why “Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is a Tragedy and a Disaster”:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right and provide Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent. Escalating political violence corrodes democratic norms and poses a unique threat to the Left. … The assassination of Kirk is a tragedy. Morally, it is unjustifiable. Politically, it is cause for serious alarm. A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left. …
No one should be killed as punishment for political expression, no matter how objectionable. In addition to our basic abhorrence of violence, we are also proponents of democracy, which depends on free speech and open inquiry. Without them, collective self-governance is impossible and tyranny becomes inevitable. Imposing silence on political opponents by brute force, whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.
Furthermore, the prospect of a descent into tit-for-tat political violence is an ominous development that threatens to narrow the space for meaningful political action. This augurs poorly for the political culture writ large, and in particular for the Left. We say things that others find extremely objectionable all the time, and we expect to be met with strenuous counterargument — not violent reprisal. …
Kirk’s murder will almost certainly work against the Left in other ways. First, the Trump administration could very well use it as a pretext to crack down on left-wing activists. Immediately after Kirk was shot, the Right began calling for precisely this response. Their demands to purge and censure the entire left in retaliation for Kirk’s murder were swift, ubiquitous, and severe.
Burgis and Day’s article was published in Jacobin, which some might view as a hotbed of ‘Marxist’, ‘leftist’, and ‘radical’ commentary. (And see Burgis and Day’s superb follow-up Jacobin piece: “The Right Is Using Charlie Kirk’s Murder to Attack Free Speech.”) I stress the word ‘radical’ here because there has been a major focus on the dangers of online “radicalization” in fomenting political violence. “Radicalization” is often defined as “the process through which a person adopts an extreme political or religious position.” In this sense, “radicalization” is another word for “extremism” — a closed-minded, obsessive, uncritical, unthinking fanaticism that often finds refuge on social media platforms.
“Radicalization” has nothing to do with radicalism. To be ‘radical’ is to go to the root, to make transparent the fundamental contexts upon which genuine social and political change can be built. For those of us who are committed to critical, radical, dare I say — dialectical — thinking, anchored by the ideals of human freedom and personal flourishing, the rehabilitation of social spaces is but one aspect of a larger project to reshape our culture.
Earlier in this essay, I suggested that the phrase ‘political violence’ is almost redundant. But politics is not synonymous with violence. The linguistic root of politics is the polis, that Greek word meaning the ‘city’ or the ‘city-state’ or, more generally, the community. When Aristotle said that man was a political animal (zoon politikon), he argued that humans were naturally social beings that had the ability to reason and communicate, and that they achieved their highest potential within the polis or community. Personal flourishing never takes place in a vacuum; it is embedded in the larger social context that shapes us, as surely as we shape it.
As I argued in last week’s essay, the reshaping of a culture is not a top-down task. It is a bottom-up project that requires and nourishes the free exchange of ideas. By its nature, it is a task that is anathema to violence, political or otherwise.
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This essay also appears on Medium.
Notablog 