In the lull between Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and the suspected killer’s belated reveal, speculation over the motivation was swiftly overtaken by the ugly scenes of celebration, as American liberals — “normies” rather than politicians — ululated over the death of a foe. Yet rather than another grim milestone on the country’s slow descent towards civil war, these unseemly scenes of online jubilation seem more clearly to mark the opposite: the rhetoric is so outlandish precisely because the stakes seem so low. If those celebrating his death on TikTok or Bluesky genuinely believed they were descending into a fascist dystopia, they would be more hesitant at displaying their excitement at the death of an enemy so closely embedded within the reigning political regime. The calculation, clearly, is that the ephemeral benefits accruing from social media attention outweigh whatever real-world consequences, if any, lie in store for them.
Back in 2020, the US witnessed the spontaneous mobilisation of mobs and the confrontation of opposing armed groups — all within the context of a Washington elite fractured between at least two rival factions — heading into an election that was likely to be, and soon was, contested. None of those factors is true today: there are no mobs of citizens, armed or otherwise, confronting each other; the country’s governing administration is firmly in power and its political opposition is fractured and demoralised. It is entirely in the hands of the Trump administration how to respond, a mark of the electoral collapse of America’s Left. How it chooses to do so depends on whether or not it chooses to take its online opponents, exulting in political murder, at their word.
There are two possible scenarios. The first is that these people are not serious, and that this is all the empty performance of callous children. There is much evidence for this hypothesis: the loudest calls for political violence, displayed on social media, come from those who would be more obviously the victims than the perpetrators of the outcome they demand: the physically weak, the mentally fragile, the beneficiaries of a stable society they proclaim the wish to overturn. Just as with the deification of Luigi Mangione, the assassin whose most prominent journalistic groupie is a woman of indeterminate age frightened to go outside without a Covid mask, I have seen calls for political violence coming from a paraplegic woman unlikely herself to be manning checkpoints late at night or digging graves for her vanquished enemies. The bloodcurdling rhetoric of these silly and unworldly people, demanding further assassinations on Bluesky as if ordering food from a delivery app, is discordantly removed from the reality of the political violence that would surely cull them first. The spectacle is so absurd that it seems almost demeaning to take it seriously.
In his groundbreaking book The Logic of Violence in Civil War, the Greek political scientist Stathis Kalyvas makes the case that the particular brutality of civil conflict is the dark flip-side of social intimacy; whatever the ostensible causes of the war, local and personal grudges soon drive violence as neighbours turn against each other for their own petty reasons. What is visible today is the opposite: a society too atomised to engage in true civil war, in which predominantly young women, seek the vicarious thrill of unknown others doing violence on their behalf from the safety of their smartphones. It is not too different, in its essential attributes, to the curious sociopathy of the sofa-bound ghouls sharing drone snuff videos from Ukraine. Indeed, online Leftists, justifiably horrified at the slaughter in Gaza, reveal themselves as just as performatively bloodthirsty as the most repellent Israeli TikToker: when it comes to their own domestic enemies. For them, it’s all just pixels on a screen, a game in which you win points for callousness from your online friends, and enrage your online enemies: Clash of Clans for those whose enjoyment of violence rests on the certainty it will never reach themselves.
In a similar way, the immediate calls for bloody vengeance from the online Right have swiftly ameliorated into the doxxing and sacking of provincial liberals, until now happy enough to post paeans to political violence under their own names. The poles have partly reversed since the alt-Right heyday of the early 2010s: the online Right now has institutional power, which it employs in removing its political enemies from employment, while the normie liberals, in the political wilderness, enjoy the edgy thrill of trolling their political masters and glorifying their own Dylann Roofs. The tools of cancellation and institutional censorship introduced by liberals have already been eagerly taken up and refined by the Right against the Left: if this is something less than war it is also already something less than a democracy. Yet ultimately both still want others to do their violence for them: there is no civil war brewing here. Where they differ is that the Right actually possesses power, and how it may employ it is simply by taking its opponents at their word.
“The normie liberals, in the political wilderness, enjoy the edgy thrill of trolling their political masters and glorifying their own Dylann Roofs.”
Let us assume, instead of the above prognosis, that those now advocating political violence are not empty-headed fantasists, but truly mean what they say. Immediately, this puts them outside the boundaries of liberal democracy: they are enemies of civil order, and of the state, to be removed from the political system, just as any other terrorist must be. It is for this reason, and not empathy for Kirk himself, that such a magazine as Jacobin, which once sold guillotine posters to its impressionable fans, can now accurately warn that “A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left”, for two reasons. First because, “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.”
It is better for the country that the Right calls for the manager than takes up arms: but it is better for the Right that the manager happens to be Trump. As Jacobin’s second, more immediately relevant point makes clear, “A new wave of political repression could be particularly disastrous at a time when we’re only beginning to rebuild our forces”, with Kirk’s murder “hastening the coherence of a militant right-wing political bloc that will be an obstacle to our own project for decades to come”. America’s online Left, already prone to bickering and internal denunciations, would be trivially easy for a competent security state to infiltrate and dismantle. America’s Democratic establishment, already increasingly fearful at the militancy of a voter base that took its apocalyptic rhetoric too seriously, may not complain too strenuously at the removal of a radicalised and volatile faction which threatens its own power base and could, in time, turn its violence as well as abuse against them too.
This is the dynamic the prominent dismantler of liberal institutions Chris Rufo refers to when he writes that “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos”. Similarly, when Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller writes of the “Postings from those in positions of institutional authority — educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees — revelling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee”, the political conclusion is apparent: “The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.”
There are, in the final analysis, two options available in determining what is to be done with those publicly advocating political murder: the first is that they are simply callous, empty-headed children, whose “almost competitive lack of empathy” and “anti-moral posturing,” as Jacobin puts it, is already politically disastrous for the Left.
The second is to take them absolutely seriously: they are exactly what they profess to be, and must be dealt with as such in the way that any functional state would, coldly, calmly and deliberately, in a manner that firmly re-establishes the state’s monopoly on violence. Even if the truth is the former, the political logic for the latter is obvious. In the long term, there is no democratic polity to be found where political murder is no longer taboo. In the short term, the murder provides an efficient means to remove impulsive tribal liberals from the state’s bureaucracy, and cow those that remain.
As the advocates of political violence themselves proclaim, there is no longer a debate to be had, and without it no liberal order to defend, even should you wish to. What is instead in play are the contours of an already post-liberal order, entered into more by accident than design. Politics is not, in the end, merely an online game but an unequal contest between those who wield coercive power and those who merely fantasise about doing so. Kirk’s assassin, whose no-doubt inchoate mix of internet brain-poison already appears to possess enough Left-wing characteristics to keep the narrative of the past few days alive, has gifted the Trump administration the future existence, or not, of America’s political Left.
