What Is Political Violence ?
Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself.
After Charlie Kirk was killed, commentators immediately condemned the act as “political violence.” Editorial boards and late-night shows wrung their hands about America’s overheated climate, warning that unless we “bring down the temperature,” democracy itself might begin to unravel—as if it has not already. The Trump administration and its allies condemned Kirk’s killing as an exceptional form of violence requiring an authoritarian crackdown on an amorphous “radical left” that they claim is responsible while conspicuously ignoring another near-simultaneous school shooting in Colorado. This joined over one hundred school shootings already perpetrated in the United States in 2025 alone, coming just months after Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were targeted and shot by a far-right gunman—an event with which self-proclaimed “law and order president” Trump recently claimed to be unfamiliar.
The selective and enforced outrage over Kirk’s murder reflects a fundamental truth: violence is never judged only on the basis of lives lost or individuals harmed. It is judged—and narrated—according to whether it sustains or threatens a particular social order. What counts as “violence,” and what counts as “order,” are always political determinations made by those in power. The fact that so many Democratic politicians and influential liberal commentators have rushed to parrot the Trump administration, without the slightest hesitation about the uses to which Kirk’s posthumous and state-sponsored sanctification is being put, underscores how little they grasp—or how insistently they deny—this most basic political truth. By uncritically accepting the Trump regime’s definition of “violence,” many Democrats are actively legitimizing and deepening the very authoritarian order they claim to oppose.
Georges Sorel, writing in 1908, gave a very different account of violence in his classic, Reflections on Violence. Violence is not simply an act, he argued, but a myth: a story through which societies interpret force, project meaning onto it, and either mobilize or demobilize political communities around it. A strike is not just a withdrawal of labor; it is a myth of collective uprising. A riot is not just chaos in the streets; it is a myth of insubordination that terrifies elites and inspires the oppressed. Violence matters less for its immediate effects than for the imaginative horizons it opens or closes. “Myths are not a descriptions of things,” Sorel writes, “but expressions of a will to act.”
For Sorel, the work of such myths was above all to enable the working class’s development of a story for its own emancipation. “Men who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images of battle in which their cause is certain to triumph,” he reflects, and that picture that in turn motivates action arises out of the myths that support it. But, as is particularly salient in our age of billionaire-controlled media that saturates nearly every aspect of our lives, political elites, too, make intensive use of myths around events like Kirk’s killing in order to shore up their authority and power. At stake is not only the working class’s capacity to articulate its own interests but also the ability of any subordinated group—immigrants, women, racial and sexual minorities, colonized people—to generate counter-myths that contest their subjection. Myths of violence compete against one another either to build or to fracture solidarities, to enable or short-circuit shared struggle against oppression and exploitation across social differences.
Walter Benjamin sharpened this insight in his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.” For Benjamin, a Jewish intellectual who would later take his own life as he anticipated deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, law itself is founded in violence—a primal conquest that inaugurates legal order. Once founded, law preserves itself through violence: police power, punishment, coercion. “Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence,” Benjamin writes, while “law-preserving violence” maintains a given power structure. What liberal societies call “peace” or “law and order,” then, is not the absence of violence but its routinization. Whether or not one shares Benjamin’s implicit vision—that in an ethical social order, law itself might wither away—he makes a crucial observation. Violence does not disappear when order is established; it becomes diffuse or even invisible through its law-preserving functions, no matter how unjust, arbitrary, and cruel the law may be.
If Sorel shows how violence becomes myth, and Benjamin shows how law conceals and perpetrates violence, Sigmund Freud helps explain why people cling so tightly to the most fundamental myth of every ruling order: that the operation of the law is always just. Psychoanalytically, the distinction between “order” and “violence” can function as a collective defense. It reassures us that our world—and the symbolic authority through which it coheres—is stable, that our aggression is justified, and that the cruelties carried out in the name of the law, in our name, are not really cruelties at all. In Freud’s terms, civilization builds and sustains itself through the repression and redirection of aggression. “Civilization . . . obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression,” he writes, “by weakening it, disarming it, and setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” To identify as civilized requires that this aggressiveness be dissimulated or concealed.
The most pervasive means for doing so is projection onto an excluded other. “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love,” Freud wrote just three years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, “so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” The demonized other is marked for retribution through which one’s own mythical identity is stabilized and maintained. This is the elementary structure behind racisms, nationalisms, and xenophobias of all stripes, including the white Christian nationalism that Kirk represented and propagated so successfully. Aggression, in this form, is not repressed so much as dissimulated, conceived as the righteous reaction of civilization to an existential threat.
But a similar process can be seen even among those who recoil from such cruel and explicit othering. Many people come to be deeply invested in condemning the disruptive act that threatens to upend order—whether it be Kirk’s killing or a protest in the streets—even as they eagerly accept the far greater violence that structures their daily lives. In this case, what is repressed is the violence of order itself; what is disavowed is our own entanglement with it and ethical responsibility to confront it. What cannot be acknowledged, because it is too incriminating or compromising to one’s identification with order, is projected outward onto the system itself. In this scheme, “political violence” can only be what threatens this system, not what the system itself does.
Prominent reactions to Kirk’s killing appear to be operating in precisely this way, dwarfing the national reaction to the assassination of sitting Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June. From the White House to every single medium of mainstream media, it is Kirk’s death that has been narrated as singular proof that political rhetoric has gone “too far,” that democracy is collapsing under extremism, and that only “civility” can save us. The bipartisan vigils that followed—replete with solemn calls for unity, a unanimous Senate vote to make Kirk’s birthday a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk,” and a bipartisan House vote to honor Kirk’s “life and legacy” as “a courageous American patriot”—were less acts of mourning than rituals of political stabilization, gestures designed to shore up the legitimacy of the current order. Melissa Hortman didn’t get an executive order from the president “honoring” her “memory,” a congressionally approved day of remembrance, or a New York Times column from Ezra Klein proclaiming that she was “doing politics the right way.” This across-the-aisle mythmaking turns Kirk into a martyr and the far right into a respectable vehicle of reasonable disagreement while erasing the virulence of their rhetoric and the far greater violence that Kirk himself championed.
The flip side of this exceptionalizing is to further erase and excuse the slow and less spectacular violence of American political life itself. When ICE agents raid homes, when Medicaid is stripped from millions, and when unhoused populations are criminalized by Trump or Democrats like Gavin Newsom, both politicians and media speak of “policy,” not “violence.” The deportation bus, the eviction notice, the denied hospital bed, the forced pregnancy enforced by an abortion ban: all vanish into the myth of law and order. It is only when someone disrupts that order—whether through protest, resistance, or, in an extreme example, an attack on a public figure—that the act appears as “violence,” a breach of the civic peace and deserving of unequivocal condemnation and universal opposition. Sorel shows how such disruption becomes mythologized. Benjamin explains why the state insists on this distinction: its legitimacy depends on hiding the violence it does in its supposedly normal operation.
As is evident throughout U.S. history, the state has always depended on myths of violence to secure order and delegitimize dissent. After Reconstruction, white elites across the South fashioned the figure of the violent Black man to justify the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the stripping of Black voting rights, the imposition of Jim Crow, and the eventual development of our still-growing, intensely racist U.S. policing system. The issue at play has never been about actual violence committed by Black communities; it was and remains about rendering Black freedom itself a threat to “order.”
The same logic animated the Red Scares of the twentieth century. Strikes, union drives, and antiracist organizing were routinely narrated as outbreaks of dangerous disorder requiring repression. COINTELPRO made this aim explicit, labeling groups from the Black Panthers to ministers like Martin Luther King Jr. as violent extremists whose mere organizing justified state surveillance, infiltration, and assassination. More recently, the bipartisan War on Terror inaugurated by George W. Bush, aggressively extended by Barack Obama, and now redoubled and repurposed under Trump, continues this tradition. The attacks of September 11 were turned into a narrative of perpetual looming threat that provided cover for torture, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, drone warfare with repeated mass murders of foreign civilians, and two decades of occupation abroad—all acts of overwhelming state violence that have never properly been counted as “violence” in official U.S. discourse.
Instead, violence is projected onto fantasies of Muslims and Palestinians, Latino immigrants, antifascist protesters, drag queens, trans people, or anyone said to belong to the infinitely fungible category of the “terrorist”—the term of choice in J. D. Vance’s and Stephen Miller’s vows to exact vengeance in Kirk’s name. In each case, what is condemned as “violence” is not what kills or inflicts harm. It is what threatens oligarchic control or challenges national mythologies upon which established order depends. The Kirk episode belongs to this lineage, where righteous outrage secures authoritarian stability by allowing for the transfiguration of all resistance into violence and violence into order.
King saw the same dynamic in his own time. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he famously chastised white moderates who are “more devoted to order than to justice.” They prefer “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice,” he wrote. For King, as for Sorel and Benjamin, the problem was never simply violence’s existence. It was that social myths and legal categories transfigured the daily brutality of racial segregation and public abandonment of the poor into “order” while casting the struggle against them as disruptive violence. Unlike Sorel or Benjamin, King rooted his vision in nonviolence as a moral and strategic imperative. Simply suppressing conflict without addressing injustice, King argued, entrenches violence and makes future unrest inevitable.
We can see this double standard as well in the case of the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last December. The act was instantly condemned as horrific, unacceptable violence, implicitly in contrast to the supposedly acceptable violence of the U.S. health care system. The official myth that crystallized around the event exhibited the same logic of all defenses of the liberal order in conditions of injustice: the executive became a symbol of violated order, while the industry he represented, which systematically denies lifesaving care to thousands of people every year to maximize profits, only briefly flickered into public view before vanishing again into our taken-for-granted national condition. The point is not that the killing was morally permissible. It is that one kind of violence gets portrayed as unequivocally wrong while another, far more frequent and banal kind gets condoned as simply a policy disagreement—not a form of “political violence” at all.
The stakes of these myths are not abstract. In response to Kirk’s death, Trump announced that he would designate “antifa”—an amorphous label for loosely affiliated antifascist protesters—as a “major terrorist organization.” There is, of course, no centralized antifa to designate: no leaders, no offices, no membership lists, no budgets. The closest the administration ever comes to naming a specific target is when it refers to George Soros—an antisemitic trope evidently designed to distract from the far right’s vast network of funders, including Charles and David Koch, Richard Uihlein, and the late Bernard Marcus (the latter two among the donors to Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded). The vagueness is precisely the point. By naming “antifa” as a terrorist threat, Trump invents a useful specter and authorizes the state to decide at will who counts as an enemy. Any protester, labor organizer, or anti-genocide activist can suddenly be branded a terrorist and criminalized accordingly.
This is how the myth of political violence works: the far right elevates isolated, disruptive acts—whether Kirk’s killing or a protest that turns confrontational—into proof of radical chaos threatening the nation while simultaneously obscuring the far greater structural violence carried out daily through policy, policing, deportation, or war. To declare “antifa” a terrorist organization is not to name an entity that exists but to invent a mythological enemy whose supposed violence justifies the state’s own.
This tactic has been especially salient during Trump’s second term. His administration has overseen massive Medicaid disenrollments, expanded ICE to unprecedented levels and authorized its agents to enact violence with near-total impunity, destroyed USAID, deployed troops against U.S. residents, ordered—in violation of international law—repeated bombings of Venezuelan boats in summary executions of supposed “narcoterrorists” without provision of evidence to even pretend to justify such acts, and—like Joe Biden before him—given a green light to Israeli genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, where the label “terrorist” is deployed to license the systematic murder of children and the destruction of an entire people. These are acts of immense violence, with death counts almost certain to be in the hundreds of thousands, and likely millions globally.
While competing mythologizations of violence are nothing new, those operating today are increasingly monopolized by politicians and journalists who—in their devotion to political balance, regardless of the fascist norms they accept along the way—are complicit with it. When Kirk was killed, only that act was held up as proof that “political violence” threatens democracy and that “violence has no place in this country.” For the right, Kirk becomes proof that conservatives are under siege and that the repression they are leading, styled as self-defense, must intensify. For many liberals, hostility toward the prevailing order becomes suspect, while civility and restraint are deemed the only respectable path to saving democracy. Both myths point in the same direction—back toward order, the acceptance and normalization of systemic violence as the price of stability.
The stories we tell about violence matter immensely. When targeted, interpersonal attacks are the only acts identified as political violence, state and market violence vanish from view. The powerful kill with impunity while vulnerable populations are persecuted simply for speaking out against injustice. Political violence includes the lone gunman, yes. But it also includes the congressperson and bureaucrat who sign off on Medicaid cuts that will kill thousands. It includes the ICE officer who rips a child from her mother. It includes the president who deploys troops against civilians or signs off on yet another shipment of arms to enable genocide abroad. And it includes the corporate executive who designs insurance policies that deny lifesaving care working hand-in-hand with the politicians who allow such practices.
In this regard, it is unsurprising that historians, social scientists, and independent journalists—and now even comedians—are high on the list of the Trump administration’s declared enemies: they all work to undermine the ruling class’s myths by exposing their hypocrisy and incoherence. When a virulent figure like Kirk is canonized as a truth-telling patriot and emblem of democratic virtue while his critics are denounced as violent extremists, we are gaslit on a massive scale; the field of political meaning-making narrows until only submission to an authoritarian order appears reasonable. Counter-myths work to widen that field, calling our attention not to the martyrs of white supremacist empire but to its victims, not to those who uphold an oppressive order but to those who are its targets. Every refusal of the dominant myth, however spectacular or mundane, tells a different story: neither law nor order are necessarily right; violence is not always what the state says it is; and justice is not reducible to the preservation of a false peace.
If we want a democracy worth defending, we must insist upon identifying and opposing political violence everywhere it appears. To condemn it only selectively and conveniently is to align oneself with the far greater violence of our time. True peace will not come from denying where the high temperature of our political order is coming from. Nor will it come from specious appeals to civility or rational debate, as if support for fascism is built on reason and respect rather than resentment and rage. It instead requires identifying, confronting, and dismantling the ubiquitous political violence that our present order is designed to conceal. In other words, it will come from naming violence honestly and building the power—and the myths—that make justice imaginable and achievable.
▻https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-is-political-violence
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