Murder is Still Not a Political Instrument

As I type on the eve of yet another grotesque act of political violence in America, I cannot help but reflect on the long history of murder masquerading as politics. When I learned from my students about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s shooting as I walked into my afternoon Criminal Justice course, my mind immediately returned to a phrase often attributed to the German social scientist Theodor Adorno: Murder is not a political instrument.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk speaking at a public event.

Adorno’s influence peaked in the aftermath of the Second World War, and he passed not long after a white supremacist assassin took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Two years later, disillusioned students in West Germany formed the Red Army Faction (RAF), responding to Vietnam, Middle Eastern conflicts, and their sense of being abandoned by the state. Their most infamous act was the assassination of Hans Martin Schleyer, a former industrialist and SS officer.

Though the RAF only numbered in the dozens, Italy’s Red Brigades waged a more sustained campaign of terror during the “Years of Lead,” climaxing with the kidnapping and assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. 

At a similar point in history, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the famed (of infamous) British statesman, naval officer, and last Viceroy of India, was assassinated. While holidaying at his summer home, he was killed when the IRA planted a bomb on his fishing boat. The Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility, framing the attack as both retaliation against the British establishment and a symbolic strike at the heart of the monarchy and its imperial legacy.

At the time of this writing, the motives behind Kirk’s assassin remain unclear. Given America’s easy access to firearms and weak mental healthcare services, it’s plausible his murder was not politically motivated. Yet if history is any guide, the outcome is already obvious. The political record of assassination is one of failure. Civil rights progressed despite King’s murder; the German state did fall, but only in the East, and the Federal Republic the RAF sought to destroy now dominates both sides of the former Wall. Italy never became a revolutionary state; indeed, it now has a post-fascist party in government. Ireland’s political integration has been advanced not by bombs, but through Sinn Féin’s electoral victories on both sides of the border. Whatever message Kirk’s assassin sought to send will not succeed, but will instead galvanize the supporters of the ideology he represented.

As a scholar of violence, this pattern is so obvious that the most useful role I can play in this moment is to clarify the tendencies that lead to such self-defeating acts, and to highlight the deeper maladies afflicting Western democracy.

Unresponsive Pseudo-Democracy

Adorno’s most enduring critique is not only his indictment of fascism, but his recognition that many of the same authoritarian tendencies he witnessed under the Third Reich persist within Western democracies. Citizens of “free” states experience alienation from consumer capitalism, feelings of inadequacy when they cannot keep up with manufactured cultural demands, and estrangement in workplaces stripped of meaning and stable salaries. These critiques entered the mainstream long ago. But his lesser-known point, that democracies failing to live up to their own ideals plant the seeds of authoritarianism, is perhaps the most relevant for our current moment of polarization, nationalism, and radicalism.

Citizenship was imagined by Enlightenment thinkers as the identity that would abolish superstition and despotism, uniting diverse people under the banner of liberty. Yet in practice it has become hollow. Large swaths of Western publics express dissatisfaction with their governments, confirmed by decades of surveys and by the rise of populist parties across multiple continents. As the middle class has declined under corporate-driven globalization, (imposed without democratic consent and delivering most benefits to elites) it is little wonder citizens feel powerless to affect their lives, let alone transform societies that appear sick.

Under such conditions, Adorno observed, “one clings to action for the sake of the impossibility of action.” A fruitless act of political violence becomes seductive when meaningful democratic participation seems futile. What emerges is a pseudo-reality: citizens are told their societies are “great,” but they experience that greatness only fleetingly, in episodic bursts of patriotism, before returning to lives mired in debt, discrimination, shrinking social services, and a general sense of powerlessness. In America, the pseudo-reality is further warped by the ubiquity of firearms and mass shootings.

When greatness is only ever symbolic, resentment and uncertainty become the dominant mental states. In such climates, demagogues thrive. The pseudo-reality of greatness becomes “conjoined by pseudo-activity,” which in turn produces pseudo-discourse. What passes for thought is the affirmation of biases and the uncritical assignment of blame onto out-groups. In these contexts, action itself is fetishized, idolized, and detached from the actual situation. Conversation in the shadow of this action-ethic degenerates into arguments over “tactics” rather than rational debate over social change. At its most extreme, alienated citizens turn to the most futile tactic of all: murder.

Deformed Libertarianism and the Self-Defeating Group

My friends in the Libertarian Party will forgive me for employing the term, but by “deformed libertarianism” I mean something other than principled libertarian philosophy. Deformed libertarianism twists the ethic of “do-it-yourself” self-reliance into a false security, especially attractive when democracies fail to respond to citizens’ needs. This logic may make sense in personal economics when left behind by the state, but extending it to the political sphere is absurd in a pluralistic republic. History is clear: durable social change comes from mass movements sustained over time, not lone gunmen or prejudiced collectives.

Yet deformed libertarianism grows in precisely those contexts where people sense their influence is negligible through conventional means. Lone actors like those behind the Oklahoma City bombing or Jack Kennedy’s assination delude themselves into thinking spectacular violence can achieve what democratic politics cannot. A step removed are groups rejecting all legal authority. Even a handful of militants can convince themselves they are many in an age of information silos and confirmation bias. The RAF’s fifty students and intellectuals were sufficiently self-propagandized to imagine that machine-gun rounds might ignite revolution in a democratic country.

Here uncertainty-identity theory is especially useful. Social psychologist scholars like Van den Bos modern shows society often denies most people the chance for real self-fulfillment, leaving them to search for certainty in everyday life instead of creating deeper social-political meaning. When this happens, people are drawn to groups or subcultures that offer powerful stories and clear explanations, what scholars call “maps of meaning.” This is tied to what’s known as the “existential uncertainty effect”: when people feel unsure about themselves, they look for communities and narratives that validate their worldview and give them stability. In today’s world of distorted online realities, this tendency is intensified.

Group belonging gets tied to moral purity and cultural sameness, while social complexity is flattened into a simple battle of good versus evil. On the most basic psychological level, this is the mechanism that drives polarization at the macro-level and acts of terror at the micro-level.

The Myth of the Warrior Patriot

Until this week, the most notable political crisis in the West was the collapse of France’s government after Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a confidence vote. France, like the United States, is besieged by nationalism, populism, and misinformation. But in France, the expected response is a general strike or disruptive street protests, not assassination. Few possess the high-powered firearms necessary for targeted killings, even if they had the will.

America is different. In a nation that rationalizes the slaughter of its children by weapons of warfare inside of their failing classrooms, it is no surprise when controversial political figures come under fire. Militias like the Three Percenters fashion themselves as heirs to revolutionary struggle, but their actions are scattershot: from car bombing plots against Muslim communities to a thwarted scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during the pandemic. In practice, armed nationalists are individuals who establish an identity, the warrior patriot, in the absence of the relevant political context which would require a call to arms. Myths become vital in creating the dystopian society that would in fact necessitate armed resistance. Their rhetoric reveals a hidden desire for the doomsday that they prepare for. In order to sustain one’s self-image, new enemies and trespasses need to be constantly created to rage against, less the warrior element, characterized by a militant defense of guns and a broad defense of rights, becomes farcical.

Charlie Kirk embraced this myth wholeheartedly: “The Second Amendment is not about hunting…The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government.” He added, chillingly, that some gun deaths were  “...worth it. I think it's worth to have [sic] a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment…That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

No Charlie, your death was neither a “prudent deal” nor “rational”. Such rhetoric sustains itself by sheer force of insistence, rationalizing the absurd by making violence a condition of liberty.

The irony of Kirk’s words is tragic, but not unique. The belief that freedom requires firearms is widespread in America, despite the obvious counterexamples of freer democracies lacking America’s epidemic of gun deaths. In a democracy so hollowed of meaning, weaponry becomes more central to identity than neighborliness. The politics of revenge becomes permanent.

For minorities and dissidents, fears of government violence are not wholly irrational; American history offers ample proof of violent repression. Yet it is precisely here that the myth reveals itself. Armed citizens who claim to resist “fascism” and “communism” often cheer for state violence when directed against their real and imagined opponents. Their real commitment is not to liberty but to sustaining a besieged identity.

Solutions: The Uncompromising Critical Thinker

Any social or political prescription risks sounding like a list of do’s and don’ts, which I deeply dislike. It feels contradictory to dictate how one should be free; freedom should simply be lived, so long as its expression harms no one else. Yet in a world crowded with false prophets of violence, demagogic rhetoric, and hollow versions of hope, I think some scholarly guidance is helpful.

Ending Selective Outrage. In the social media age, one of the most common spectacles is an outpouring of grief when someone on one’s own side becomes the victim of violence, followed by silence, or more sinisterly, glee when the violence targets political opponents. This summer, two Democratic officials in Minnesota were assassinated, yet many who now grieve Kirk’s death remained silent, or worse, resorted to conspiracism to deflect any ideological connection to the conservative perpetrator. This type of selective virtue-signaling is as unconvincing as it is unhelpful. I write against the violence that killed a man who once suggested he would fear boarding a plane piloted by a Black person, as he would question their competence. Rhetoric like Kirk’s makes life demonstrably harder for people of color like me, both socially and economically. Yet still I defend his humanity. The only way to reduce prejudice is to model a cosmopolitan alternative, one that prefigures the future we seek: a world where political efficacy replaces the drive for exclusion and revenge.

Abolish the Warrior Patriot. One danger of romanticizing the past is the feeling of having been left out of the great struggles that supposedly made the nation “great.” This longing turns every present conflict into a sensationalized, once-in-a-generation battle between good and evil. Such thinking is the seedbed of extremism: citizens transformed into militants fighting the ghosts of the British Empire, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union. Deprived of romanticized struggles, the present feels diminished rather than hopeful. The self-styled warrior patriot becomes a statue in search of a pedestal, and in the meantime advocates gun policies that send thousands to morgues and emergency rooms, mocking both patriotism (love of community) and the warrior ethos (defending it).

The alternative is to replace the warrior patriot with the global citizen envisioned by the founders of modern democratic thought. Neither Locke, Rousseau, Washington, nor Paine imagined paranoid combatants-in-waiting poised to overthrow a republic made of “We the People”. They imagined a citizenry liberal and educated enough that their minds and participation alone would be the surest bulwark against tyranny. Jefferson phrased it most directly: an educated citizenry “is the only sure reliance of liberty.” Notably absent was any mention of weaponry. The militarized nationalism of many of today’s Second Amendment defenders would have been wholly foreign to the founding generation. Paine declared, “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” Adams wrote that he “always considered myself as belonging to the whole world, as a citizen of it.” Franklin echoed, “I am a citizen of the world, and have no narrow local attachments.” And Hamilton, in Federalist 63, reminded us that America’s image in the eyes of mankind tethered legitimacy to lived democratic practice. Americans must resist taking pride in a society where mass death by bullets has become a standard expectation. We must focus, firstly on a love of all American communities, which in turn extends to a humanism that encompasses the whole of humanity. 

Disarming Militarized Rhetoric: Militarized language is as overused as it is self-destructive. It is so common that it risks dullness, yet its very normalization creates a world where warfare becomes thinkable, even routine. Elites in particular must be held to account, as scholarship shows their discourse heavily shapes public rhetoric. While the president now calls for restraint, he and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly normalized division through martial language. Only last week, the administration defended the idea of going to “war” with American cities, likening Chicago to Vietnam. At the same time, left-wing memes celebrate Kirk’s assassination and lionize Luigi Magione. When politics is cast in the language of war, it is a short step toward producing actual battlefields. The ethical (and at times legal) consequences of such rhetoric must be urgently reexamined.

A Program: Adorno warned that authoritarianism was the festering wound of democracy betrayed. The democratic project was not born whole and strong; it entered the world with only a faint pulse. From the beginning, it has been forced to stumble under the weight of its contradictions. In weakness it has endured slavery, genocide, and the terror of states turned against their own people. It has been hollowed out by staggering inequality, and colonized again and again by the economically powerful. Yet she still breathes.

Reinvention requires the participation of all marginalized sectors of society, in whatever forms they experience alienation from the current system. Our collective alienation from the democratic ideal should be the unifying starting point of the conversation. By uncovering our shared social anxieties, we can begin to build a home for the politically homeless. We must resist the temptation to become fully integrated, content, or apathetic in a society that so many, rightly, recognize as ill.

Citizenship must become the highest identity, not a narrow badge of belonging, but the broad umbrella under which all other identities find recognition and protection. When citizenship is elevated to the highest identity, the umbrella identity which welcomes and encompasses all others, political violence and authoritarianism will be all that remains marginalized. 

Until then, murder is still not a political instrument.