When Political Violence Feels Like Virtue
On the difference between hating politicians and wanting them dead.
I’m against violence, on the whole. It’s ugly and nearly always unnecessary. It’s ubiquitous because humans are ubiquitous, but it’s the worst of us. I don’t wish to see violence visited on anyone except people I vehemently dislike – rapists, for example – in whose case I welcome violence as long as it’s delivered solemnly, after a fair trial and preferably by firing squad.
But then again, even capital punishment makes me uneasy. What if they have the wrong person? What about forgiveness and redemption? But this is a different matter from violence outside the state’s monopoly: the lone shooters and wannabe assassins who emerge when certain elements in our society have become so radicalised that they are willing to act on their feelings of hatred, although it's just as likely to be feelings of self-righteousness, even justice and heroism. Their self-aggrandising manifestos usually tell us their act of violence is for the greater good, that they’re ridding the world of an evil only they see clearly, and only they have the courage to eliminate.
It’s the same rationalisation, by the way, that any decent person would likely make if transported back to Weimar Germany. You find yourself with a gun in a deserted alleyway, a young Hitler approaching from the other end. Who wouldn’t shoot him for the greater good? Who would dare not to assassinate the man who caused so much human misery on such a scale, given the chance?
And here lies the problem, because Hitler belongs in a category all by himself. My political adversary isn’t Hitler. Shooting the British Prime Minister (say) would be unthinkable. I would never endorse violence against him, let alone have a direct hand in it. Keir Starmer may be a useless political android – and if he had an off-switch, I might consider flipping it for a bit – but even I concede he’s a human being in the final analysis. And I don’t think he’s motivated by evil intent but simply mistaken and deluded on matters of huge significance. It’s become common for some on the right to complain that Britain can’t vote its way out of its current mess, but at the edge of that lament are some who would act on that impulse if they could with violence. I want nothing to do with them.
But I know what it feels like to loathe people in politics. I’d be willing to bet you do too. Take podcaster and former Conservative MP Rory Stewart. He’s everything I dislike about the modern-day UK politician, a ghastly homunculus in the body of centrism, the Golem of Eton as I think of him. And then there’s his cohost, Alastair Campbell, a creature so unaware of his flaws that it’s become his primary flaw, his unawareness compounding all other flaws in an infinite loop. I’m not alone on this. JK Rowling recently described the pair as “exceptionally arrogant” and “dripping with classism and misogyny”.
Or take Tucker Carlson (if an autolobotomy had a YouTube channel), now apparently batting for Qatar or Putin or whoever’s funding his bizarre outbursts. Or Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and others. Awful people, all of them. And these are just the podcasters. I could add many politicians to the list. As Chesterton remarked, it’s terrible to contemplate how few of them are hanged.
This is what makes mockery so useful in a free and open society – not as a way to dehumanise people, but to puncture their vanities and ridicule their ideas where reasoning with them failed. It’s the civilised alternative to the other thing, and it’s what I’m trying to do here.
Because the truth is, I don’t want to kill any of them. I don’t want others to do the job either. Yes, they are egotistical, narcissistic, greedy and selfish – so is my cat. These are character flaws, and we all have them; some of us have them in abundance. But it’s the ideas that matter. I simply want my political adversaries to lose the argument publicly – perhaps with a few laughs along the way – because I believe their arguments are terrible and often harmful. But I don’t believe they’re evil; at least not in the way the Jihadist is evil, or the rapist. And even then, I want a court of law to adjudicate the matter and justice to follow, as I’ve already said.
I mention all this, of course, because political violence is upon us again, and the appetite for more is growing. I have an awful feeling we’re only just beginning to understand what happens when a civilisation raises its children inside machines designed to capture attention, distort status, and monetise insecurity. The next have-a-go assassin is likely already submerged in the worst of it, morals formed and deformed there, his next and final act one more piece of content enjoyed by millions.
Three days ago, we saw the third attempt on Trump’s life in under two years. A few months before that, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. These horrible events quickly lit up our newsfeeds and were cheered on by the same ghouls who told us to #BeKind – a hashtag that evidently stood for “be kind of cool if the people I don’t like were dead.” Before Kirk, there was Luigi Mangione, who shot a man in the back, immediately spawning a fan club of people who thought the murderer was the hero and the murdered had it coming.
And this week, we saw Hasan Piker, the millionaire communist Twitch streamer who, when he’s not hoping that “the streets soak in [landlords’] fucking red capitalist blood,” is apparently telling audiences that someone should assassinate the president. “Someone has to do it,” he said. “See, when I say that, everyone knows exactly what I mean”.
Piker’s enemies aren’t Nazis, though, as much as he wants them to be. Charlie Kirk wasn’t Goebbels, and Trump isn’t Hitler – he just isn’t. It takes considerable historical ignorance to make the comparison, the sort of thing a politician might say who reads “World War II” from her notes as “World War Eleven”.
Yet much of the political violence we see today is being enacted by people who import the moral framework we usually apply to Hitler and apply it to people who, whatever else they are, do not belong in that category. This is the move that licenses the ultimate act of political violence. Once your opponent is Hitler (or comparably evil), you don’t need to argue with him. There’s no obligation to vote him out. You can just shoot him in an alleyway or at a rally. Or even at a free speech event.
What the shooters’ manifestos nearly always reveal is sincerity. The killer really, actually believes this stuff. He’s done the moral calculation and arrived at a conclusion that feels, to him, like moral clarity instead of what it is: self-righteousness born of ignorance and certainty.
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Reminds be about Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who shot the archduke and started World War II. Four years later, ten million people were dead, and Serbia, the worst hit country, had lost a quarter of its population.