The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a reminder that political violence has been rising in recent years. Though we are nowhere near the levels of the 1960s, there is still cause for alarm. Without resorting to extreme measures—a surveillance state, suspension of our Second Amendment right to bear arms, restrictions on free speech and activism—how can this trend be halted?
Fruitful solutions will depend on accurate diagnoses of what is causing the rise in political violence. To my mind, the chief cause lies in the realm of ideas, and especially in the practices to which specific ideas give rise. We have increasingly come to understand politics as a form of war—as opposed to, say, a form of cooperation or rule-bound competition. An indication of this is the extent to which American citizens view their political rivals today as “enemies” and as fundamentally unjust. Another indication is the assertion of moral superiority and asymmetry: “you do not deserve basic respect because you are wrong and, at the end of the day, wicked.” If politics is war, and opponents are enemies, then distinct political practices follow. Assassination is one of them.
We have come to view politics as war because we are influenced by ideological systems that explicitly present politics as war. Marxism, for instance, promotes this view. “Political power, properly so called,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, “is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Or as Mao Zedong more bluntly put it: “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Of course, the line between politics (so understood) and war is porous, to say the least.
By “ideological,” I do not mean merely a set of ideas. I mean, instead, something more critical: Ideologies are flawed systems of ideas designed to galvanize mass political action—flawed because they make political-interpretive claims that exceed the limits of human knowledge. They treat hypotheses as foregone conclusions; they are reductive in denying the existence of rival interpretations of reality and rival goals for politics; and they are determinist in drastically limiting the role of free human agency and choice.
On the political right, Carl Schmitt (the German jurist and political theorist who wrote The Concept of the Political in 1932) presented politics ideologically as war: Schmitt maintained that our social world consists of radically different, mutually antagonistic ways of life. To protect our own “way” from the encroachment of others, we need to recognize that politics just is about existential conflict with an “other” that wants to destroy us. Any politics not framed in these terms is not “politics” in the strict sense. Politics is, by definition, the identification of “friends” and “enemies” with an eye to violent conflict.
Americans needn’t know that they are borrowing ideas from Marx and Schmitt in order to hold and act upon them. Ideas spread in uncanny ways. But sometimes they are explicitly taught, as the American educational system has taught soft-Marxism since the 1960s. A quick glance at Google’s Ngram for “Carl Schmitt,” which charts the frequency of references over time, shows that we have been paying more attention to him recently, too.
Another reason American citizens have come to view politics as war is that our long history of freedom in this country has resulted in what political philosophers call deep pluralism. Pluralism is a sociological phenomenon where people live radically different kinds of lives because they hold divergent ideas about what is good and most worth pursuing. Some people treasure religious freedom and the religious life. Others treasure economic freedom and the life of moneymaking. Still others prize expressive freedom and, say, the bohemian life.
I have enumerated nine distinct families of freedoms around which American factions tend to form. The problem is that freedoms are not always compatible, and yet Americans often regard their rights to specific freedoms as absolute. The result is a perception that people who differ from us pose an existential threat. The mere fact of pluralism does not necessitate a politics of war, but we seem to be increasingly uninterested in trying to accommodate ourselves to others.
An entire political ethics needs to be articulated and gradually put into practice—one that takes seriously our fundamental commitments to freedom and political equality.
A third reason we view politics as war is the ever-expanding scope and sweeping power of the American government. The Founders intended the national government to be narrowly limited in scope, with power divided and checked in ways that would frustrate the rise of factions to high office. Today, the scope of national government is so vast that hardly any sector of society is untouched by it. Under these conditions, a people that is deeply pluralistic and polarized into two opposing parties will necessarily view elections in “winner-take-all” terms. Who can afford to lose? Add to this the recent tendency of victors to use their political power to punish and humiliate their enemies, and you see how the increased scope of government fuels the politics of war.
Finally, I must mention social media and our unabashedly biased news sources. The distorted view of political reality created by these sources has led to what researchers call the “perception gap.” People tend to think that the “other side” holds views much more extreme than they actually do, and likewise that there are more extremists on the other side than actually exist. Interestingly, the perception gap increases significantly as people become more educated and politically active. The result is tragic. Those who play the most active role in political life turn out to be the least well-informed about the qualities of their opponents. They make war when war is not necessary.
Given the nature of these causes, the remedies are easy to describe but difficult to bring about. (1) Stop being the dupe of tired ideological systems with their half-truths that put us at war with each other. (2) Recognize that sociological pluralism is not a threat to our personal existence and, above all, do not make yourself seem like an existential threat to others. (3) Scale back the things we try to do with national government. Rediscover the practices of federalism and voluntary association and the philosophy of subsidiarity that underwrites them. And (4) take responsibility for your view of political reality. It is a disservice (to say the least) to your fellow citizens to willingly brainwash yourself with media that have every incentive to distort reality.
Again, this is all easy to say, but how do we even begin to bring about such change? My own view is that, if it’s possible at all, it will take time. I’m thinking in terms of decades, not years. That’s because it will involve the same kind of educational revolution that (negatively) got us to this point in the first place. Starting with K-12 and proceeding through the college years, we need to do better at teaching what ideology is and what the precise flaws of specific ideologies are. This will, of course, require teachers who are capable of doing this and are not ideologues themselves, which means graduate-level programs in education will need to be transformed. Currently, they tend to be hotbeds of leftist ideology.
I support the new centers for civics education springing up on college and university campuses around the country. But they will need to include in their curriculum something that is perhaps not an “easy sell” with conservative donors and lawmakers. They must explain why sociological pluralism is natural and even reasonable, given human nature, and offer strategies for living successfully in a pluralist society.
Pluralism is not equivalent to relativism. If it were, it would not pose the profound problems it does. Pluralism is problematic because the adherents of rival moral orientations believe deeply in the truth of their views. They are not at all relativistic about it. Thus, one of the virtues that a good civics education will need to inculcate is the frequently misunderstood virtue of toleration. Toleration isn’t a mere happy willingness to live and let live. It means a frequently unhappy and begrudging willingness to live politically with people you really can’t stand, and to refrain from taunting and molesting them.
To scale back our expectations of national government requires nothing less than a radical rethinking of what politics essentially is. An entire political ethics needs to be articulated and gradually put into practice—one that takes seriously our fundamental commitments to freedom and political equality. We must come to terms with the fact that forcing highly controversial laws and policies on a deeply divided citizenry is unjust, a violation of freedom and equality. We must realize that a serious commitment to freedom and equality implies a politics of cooperation where cooperation is possible and “standing down” where it is not. This leads to a politics where many things can’t be done at the national level because of our deep pluralism. To put this in the form of a law: For a society in which freedom and political equality are fundamental values, the more pluralist we become, the less national government can and should do.
To my mind, the fourth and final kind of change will be the hardest to achieve. How could one encourage American citizens to take more seriously the challenge of citizenship itself, especially of accurately and sympathetically understanding others? Programs such as Braver Angels are doing this well on a small scale, but we need large-scale change. Moreover, how do we get Americans to do a better job of eschewing propaganda and ideological siloes, and taking responsibility for how they form their own political judgments? It’s a daunting problem, especially because so many incentives seem to discourage us from even trying. I do not pretend to have anything resembling a solution here.
But I do believe the assassination of Charlie Kirk has brought these questions into sharper focus. And I hope that people seeking explanations and genuine political wisdom will consider what it might look like to live politically in a way that rules out assassination as a tactic. In the politics of war, assassination and a host of other brutal tactics are par for the course. But how might we better live out our commitments to freedom and political equality in a society where people differ radically and yet need each other for the many goods that our political association brings? That is the question of our age.