Jacobin

09/11/2025

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. While political violence has always existed around the fringes, this has mostly proven to be a reasonable expectation. It seems we have been living through a fragile consensus: in our otherwise extraordinarily violent culture, political leaders and commentators went mostly unharmed. Now the consensus appears to be unraveling, with chilling implications.

Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable people. While this type of violence originates from all across the political spectrum, the Right has been responsible for vastly more of it than the Left for several decades. In the last few years, assailants increasingly seem to hail from the politically muddled, mentally disturbed, and heavily armed elements of the American populace whose general paranoia and disorientation have become enmeshed with an incoherently but viciously polarized political culture. Even garden-variety American mass gun violence has an increasingly political valence to it; where the school shooters of old were given to a kind of totalizing, depoliticized nihilism, today they scrawl contradictory political slogans on their weapons.

The killing of Charlie Kirk already seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. This toxic combination threatens to badly corrode democratic norms and extinguish any hope of left-wing progress.

The fundamental premise of left politics is that ordinary people are capable of self-government, at their workplaces and in society as a whole. That goal is only a coherent one if we trust our fellow citizens to be exposed to every point of view, even the worst ones, and to make up their own minds. And our democratic goals can only be achieved by democratic means. We seek to overturn deeply entrenched structures of wealth and power. There’s no realistic way to do that except by winning over the vast majority of the population to our side. What we have going for us is precisely that the working-class people who would benefit from our platform make up the bulk of the population. In other words, the compelling ideas and the numbers are both on our side.

But the inevitable effect of the introduction of tit-for-tat violence into politics is to dramatically reduce the salience of both of those factors. In scenarios dominated by factional bloodshed, it no longer matters who has the most appealing political program or the largest potential constituency — only who has the most militant and heavily armed ideologues with the least reluctance to kill. The Left will not win that battle.

Additionally, 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.