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The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the high-profile conservative activist, is apparently the latest in a string of terrifying acts of political violence in the United States. Real America’s Voice, which aired Kirk’s show, announced his death. He was 31.
Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University, just north of Provo, Utah. After initially saying that the police had arrested a suspect, the school now says that there is no suspect in custody, and the shooter’s motive is not known. Videos of the shooting posted to social media by onlookers are nauseating. President Donald Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday.
The two attempts on Trump’s life last year, one of which left him bleeding from the ear, are only the most prominent recent instances of political violence. In June, a Minnesota state representative and her husband were killed, while another state legislator and his wife were wounded. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reported in a 2023 cover story, scholars have warned for years about the growing presence of violence in American politics. Extreme rhetoric has become common, and it too often leads to action—usually not by organized groups but by individuals responding to the broader culture, in which more Americans say they approve of political violence. “The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies,” Adrienne wrote.
All murders are horrifying, but political violence brings its own special challenges. A society that resorts to violence to solve its problems starts to surrender its claim on being a society. A grim irony of this case is that Kirk was appearing on a university campus, a place that is supposed to be set apart specifically for the testing and debate of ideas—a place for discourse and conversation. Kirk was a frequent visitor to university campuses. He was shot while sitting under a tent, as he typically did, that said: “Prove Me Wrong.” He has been willing to face off against overtly hostile opponents, such as students in the venerable debate clubs of Oxford and Cambridge. Kirk achieved political prominence by winning over and motivating young conservatives, who have been crucial to Trump’s electoral success.
But employing force is actually an admission of defeat. A person who resorts to violence has concluded that he cannot change the terms of debate with words or arguments. Might may not make right, but it can end the conversation. Scholars have noted that assassinations occur most frequently in countries with “strong polarization and fragmentation” and that “lack consensual political ethos and homogeneous populations (in terms of the national and ethnic landscape).”
That’s a good description of this moment. American politics today are dangerous not merely because they are polarized but also because they are so closely divided. No party or side is able to win an enduring political advantage, which produces a constant back-and-forth—what the scholars John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck have called “calcification.” Partisans on both sides believe that the stakes of each election are existential—for their way of life and perhaps even for their actual life. Conspiracy theories, including claims of election fraud, are common.
People who have concluded that they are powerless to stop politicians and policies they oppose are killing, trying to kill, or threatening to kill CEOs, Supreme Court justices, judges, members of Congress, Jewish people. Although political violence and support for it have been a larger problem on the right for the past few decades, in recent years, there have been a number of prominent acts of left-wing violence.
The impulse to solve political problems through violence would be a danger to any society, but it can prove particularly lethal in the United States, where firearms are common and easy to obtain, legally and illegally. Kirk himself was a major proponent of the Second Amendment, and gun-rights advocates frequently point out that most people with guns don’t use them to hurt anyone. That is, however, what many guns are designed to do. Widespread access to guns means that any conflict can easily become fatal.
Political violence is terrifying in part because it is self-perpetuating. Even before anyone had been arrested, much less identified, in Kirk’s shooting, social-media users were quick to denounce suspected motives. Such attributions tend to fly fast after any incident, well before real information is available. Attacks inspire copycats and reprisals. They also draw government responses, which is particularly worrying with a president who disdains the rule of law, overrides checks on executive power, and wants to remove some civil liberties. As Adrienne wrote last year, “Periods of political violence do end. But often not without shocking retrenchments of people’s freedoms or catastrophic events coming first.” There’s little reason to expect that this period will end differently.
