I was around 15 years old the first time I was forced to think about political violence, when I realized that the stick poking me awake as I slept in my seat near the back of the bus was not a stick at all, but the barrel of a rifle. Fabrique Nationale, bullpup style, held by a man in a balaclava demanding to see my passport. Suddenly, I was wide awake and wondering if this mission trip to the mountains of Peru was about to take a dire turn. Thankfully, it did not: the armed men – members of the Shining Path insurgency, I figured out later, based on when and where we encountered them – were maintaining a checkpoint in their ongoing struggle against the central government, and we had blundered into the middle of it. Eventually, they let us go on our way, but I have never forgotten waking up to the barrel of a rifle.
There has been a lot of talk about political violence in the last two weeks, since an assassin shot and killed conservative agitator Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University, and sparked a sustained conversation which was somehow avoided when Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her home earlier in the summer.
Amidst all that talk about political violence, though, I have been surprised at how shallow an understanding of the subject matter has been displayed by commentators, congresspeople, and other chatterers in the process. In falling all over themselves to praise Kirk and keep their FCC licenses intact, most of the major networks have simply condemned the vague notion of “political violence” and moved on – showing no detailed knowledge of what political violence actually is, where it arises from most often in the United States, or the uncomfortable reality that there are certain circumstances in which many condone it. Perhaps most importantly, they have wholly sidestepped any discussion of the kinds of violence which permeate our politics daily.
I think those parts of the conversation are worth having.
When I say that the chattering class has broadly failed to explain or understand what political violence is, I do not mean that they have somehow misread the dictionary definition. I mean that they talk about it as a specter, as some amorphous shade of unknown origin arisen to afflict us, an aberration whose very nature defies a lofty if ill-defined notion of what politics should be. They decline to look at its roots or to find its place in the woven tapestry of society. And, in doing so, they make it more likely – not less – that our politics will beget violence again and again.
Violence is not foreign to politics; it is inherent to it. I have often wondered if many contemporary political problems in the developed world don’t emerge from the distance we have succeeded in placing between ourselves and the stakes. We have achieved, on average, a state of resource security and general safety which would have been the envy of our ancestors, and we have maintained it long enough to forget that it did not arise naturally. That it is the product of politics.
Before politics, in our Hobbesian state, resource security and physical safety were not addressed by election and deliberation. They were addressed by the biggest men with the biggest sticks. In the end, whichever side had more big men with more big sticks secured the resources and a modicum of safety. The others died or became slaves. This is what politics replaces – not just in the past, but every day. It is nothing more or less than a series of interlocking systems we developed to break out of, and stay out of, the cycle of big men, big sticks, death, and slavery.
I say this not as a lesson in anthropology, but to explain what I mean when I say that violence is inherent to politics. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz is often paraphrased as saying that war is politics by other means, but I believe the opposite holds no less true. Politics is war by other means – and that’s a good thing. For all the modern complaints about political tribalism, our current status is far preferable to that of actual warring tribes, which is what we would be without politics.
The intrusion of violence on politics, then, is not an aberration, something that arose from unknown origins. It is simply a failure of containment, letting the threat which has always lurked in the background peek through. If we fail to understand what our politics holds at bay, we can expect the threat to peek through more and more often, with worse and worse consequences.
Understanding that threat is also why I have been dismayed to see so much of the mainstream media equivocate, in the weeks since Kirk’s death, about where political violence in the United States primarily comes from. On one hand, sure, it comes from the fact that the termite-eaten scaffolding of our rickety 18th century political structures is visibly rotting, serving fewer and fewer needs for fewer and fewer citizens. And that is important to understand. But, when I talk about where political violence in the United States primarily comes from, I don’t mean structurally. I mean proximately. And that question only has one answer.
The vast majority of it comes from the political right.
If you have been on the internet at any point since Kirk’s death, you have likely seen the opposite of this claim. In fact, quite literally before his blood had dried, a host of conservative activists, agitators, and influencers who had claimed to be his friends attempted to use Kirk’s death as a rallying cry against “the left’s political violence.” Even Donald Trump weighed in, claiming that “most of the violence is on the left,” and using Kirk’s death as pretense for an ongoing crackdown on his political opponents.
According to a large dataset maintained by the libertarian Cato Institute, which includes political murders between 1975 and 2025, 63% of politically motivated attacks in the United States in the last half century (excluding the 9/11 attacks) have been committed by right-wing terrorists, amounting to 391 deaths. Per Cato’s methodology, the definition they used to categorize right-wing terrorists includes ”those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.”
The same dataset, meanwhile, finds that left-wing attackers accounted for only 10% of politically motivated attacks over the 50-year window from 1975 to 2025, amounting to 65 deaths – less than one-sixth the number committed by right-wing attackers.
You don’t have to take Cato’s word for it, though. Recently, sociologists Art Jipson and Paul J. Becker, who study political violence in the United States, wrote that their research shows “right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.” Left-wing extremist incidents, meanwhile, “have made up about 10% to 15% of incidents and less than 5% of fatalities,” Jipson and Becker wrote.
Those who claim otherwise – the hyenas attempting to use their friend’s death to stoke violence against their political opponents – have almost certainly seen these statistics. In fact, we can be certain that higher-ups at Trump’s DOJ have, since they have now started removing official data showing that right-wing extremists commit the overwhelming majority of political violence. The reason the hyenas and higher-ups are claiming differently is not because they are ignorant. It’s because they have goals, and the truth does not suit those goals in this moment.
However they want to fudge the data, the disparity is on clear display. Earlier this summer, when Democratic politicians were attacked and murdered in their homes by a far-right extremist, Republican elected officials made jokes. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, nearly every Democratic member of Congress has posted some version of “political violence is never acceptable.”
And while I appreciate the sentiment, they are wrong about that, too. The thing few want to acknowledge when discussing political violence is that many believe in their hearts that certain circumstances warrant it. In fact, they believe that certain circumstances demand it, and that rising to those circumstances is an act of heroism.
To be perfectly clear: shooting an unarmed pundit on a college campus is not one of those circumstances. Kirk’s murder did not achieve any policy goals. It did not save any lives – if anything, it risked them.
But what about D-Day? Our grandfathers did not peacefully take those beaches. They ended lives in the process. Or, if you think using an example from war is kind of a cop-out, let’s increase the difficulty by removing war from our definition of political violence (though, to be clear, many definitions do not exclude war).
What about the protection of innocents or the opposition to injustice, both of which have traditionally been carved-out as exceptions to society’s blanket condemnations of violence – and rightly so. We rightly abhor violence targeted against the weak and the innocent, but we have broadly embraced violence in their defense. The widely accepted cultural morality is, in many ways, built on the legacies of those who embraced violence as a last resort against those who wielded it first.
What about the Sons of Liberty? The Colorado Coalfield War? The Battle of Blair Mountain? What about the slaves who rose up against their masters? Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler?
What about John Brown?
One of America’s greatest sons was not a peaceful man, but he was a good one. Appalled by the inhumanity of slavery and unwilling to watch the evil practice extend further and further into the Kansas Territory, the Presbyterian pastor did what he believed was right: he killed five slavers. Then, with his friend Harriet Tubman, he planned something else.
Today, we remember Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry as the spark which lit the powder keg of civil war, eventually ending the institution of American slavery and freeing millions from a form of bondage in which their lives were all but forfeit. At the time, well-meaning Northerners condemned Brown’s violence – even if they had never condemned the violence of the institution he fought against.
As it always was, violence is a part of politics. In the best circumstances, politics ameliorates the violent impulse. In the worst, it exacerbates it. But whichever way it is trending, political violence is ever-present, and we all make choices to live with it every day – to live with the policies which starve some, bomb others, and leave others still to die in the cold. It seems that it’s only when a political celebrity experiences violence that we are willing to consider the lives lost to politics.
The elephant in the room when it comes to discussions of political violence is what we don’t include in the definition.
In the definition I have been using here, deaths of despair are not categorized as political violence. Nor are the deaths of children killed by American bombs on the other side of the world. Or patients dying in HIV wards since USAID funding was revoked. Or those dying on our own streets because the choice was made not to help them. These things, the standard definition says, are not “political violence” – but are they not the violent effects of our politics? And, if so, what else are we supposed to call them?
And what would it look like if we showed as much concern for those lives as we do for the lives of the powerful?
The reason commentators and congresspeople and other chatterers have been able to afford the abstract, self-aggrandizing discussion we have seen in recent weeks of political violence as a disembodied specter is because they are not at risk of suffering the day-to-day violence of our politics. They are not at risk of privation, or systemic violence, or the elements. They have full bellies, uncalloused hands, and a bone-deep certainty that the system will continue to work for them long after it has stopped working for us. To them, violence intruding on politics really does seem like an anomaly. To them, it can be Red Team vs. Blue Team, an abstraction, simulacra – right up until the moment another member of the chattering class, a man who made millions by opining, is struck by an assassin’s bullet. Then, and only then, does it become real for them – and only because they take a moment to think “could I be next?”
When members of the commentariat condemn political violence in the shallow way they have for the last two weeks, they do not mean the kind of violence politics might inflict on you or me – nor the indignity, despair, and poverty, every penny of which can afford to be alleviated – they just mean the kind of violence which might be inflicted on them. Not the violence of slavery, as it were, but the violence John Brown did to slavers.
That, they say, must always be condemned. But the rest? The rest is apparently fine, as long as it’s only happening to other people.
