Political Violence and the End of Liberalism

What happens when our rules no longer apply

No one just wakes up one morning and decides to murder an elected official; there are a whole series of thresholds that are crossed and hurdles that are overcome along the way before that last terrible step.

Political violence—the real thing, where being a political figure is dangerous, not googly eyes stuck onto a campaign sign—isn’t new in the United States, but at least in my lifetime it hadn’t previously felt like some sort of ordinary fixture of our societal landscape. It was absolutely shocking when someone shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, but then two different people attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in two months in 2024 and we pretty much kept posting right through it. For most of my life, to find examples of rampant political violence, it felt like we’d need to go back to the tumultuous 1960s or to look outward to shocking events in other, less stable countries. But part of the unsettled feeling that many people have today stems from the fact that this sense of distance has been steadily eroding over the past two decades, and now, with assassination attempts both failed and successful, the question before us is no longer whether our democracy is vulnerable to violence, but whether it can survive it.

Liberalism rests on a delicate foundation: we all agree that political disputes, no matter how serious, will be resolved through debate and deliberation, regular elections, and the rule of law rather than through coercion and violence. When that promise breaks down, the entire liberal democratic edifice that’s been built over hundreds of years threatens to crumble.

As I’ve said over and over again in these posts, liberalism isn’t a governmental structure; it’s the background rules that shape not only our governing institutions but also our society more broadly. At its core is the idea that we can disagree in deep and maybe even irreconcilable ways while still managing to live together in one political community with a common legal and governing structure. One crucial way we’re able to do this is by agreeing to submit our conflicts to institutions rather than resolving them by force. Legal and political fights, yes, street fights and assassinations, no.

In recent years, though, American political discourse has become increasingly toxic. If we listen to the rhetoric of everyone from elected officials in the highest offices to the most vapid social media influencers, we’ll hear political opponents described in the worst possible ways. We’re not just wrong or misinformed anymore; instead, those who don’t think like us are “Satanic,” “groomers,” “enemies of the people,” “traitors,” and “vermin.” Once that kind of language enters the mainstream, it becomes easier first to imagine and then to justify violence. As Hannah Arendt observed, totalitarian regimes begin by assaulting language and ultimately reality itself, blurring the line between the truth and propaganda and between disagreement and betrayal.

This isn’t merely abstract. Going back only as far as the Obama presidency, the number of credible threats and assassination attempts made against the president and other elected officials should shock us all from complacency into action. Not only is there an extensive list of threats against Obama alone, it’s impossible not to remember the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in Arizona and 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise at a Congressional baseball practice. In the immediate run-up to the January 6 insurrection, and in the years since, the number of credible death threats made against members of Congress has skyrocketed. In 2022, an armed man was arrested near the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after traveling from California to assassinate him. And, during the pandemic, local public health officials and school board members were routinely harassed and even physically attacked. We’ve been watching the barriers to violence fall, piece by piece.

The shootings of state legislators in Minnesota just a few weeks ago can’t be treated as a bizarre anomaly. They’re part of a larger story of a political community under terrible stress, and the way in which that stress threatens all of the guardrails for a liberal democracy. I already know that some will say this post is alarmist and I fervently hope they’re right about that. But I worry they’re actually downplaying the seriousness of what we’re experiencing because we know very well that liberal democracies don’t just descend into civil war or tyranny all at once. They erode gradually, as violence becomes familiar, cynicism feels like good old fashioned common sense, and participation in public life becomes increasingly dangerous.

Psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have been warning us about the consequences of political tribalism for a long time. When people begin to define themselves primarily by what they oppose or what makes them angry, and when their media consumption reinforces only their own views, they begin to see others not as wrong-headed political adversaries but as evil, existential threats. Liberal democracy can’t survive this kind of dehumanization.

This should come as no surprise to people who know the context in which liberal ideas found their way into print and then into society. Writing in the aftermath of waves of religious and political violence in England, John Locke argued that people built rule-based political communities with the specific intention of preventing the unending cycle of violence that occurs in their absence. By creating a government through mutual consent, individuals gain the protection of neutral laws and institutions. When someone uses violence to impose their will, rather than appealing to those laws and institutions, they’re explicitly rejecting this social contract and calling into question the legitimacy of using persuasion and compromise to achieve our political aims.

While all of this sounds good in theory, in practice it’s actually pretty flimsy. While there are institutional structures, like constitutions, courts, checks and balances, that are meant to hold the system in place, so much of the weight of liberalism is ultimately held up by a shared set of norms. In the case of how we settle disputes, those include the idea that there’s always another election if this one doesn’t go the way we’d like, that our political opponents might be totally wrong in their beliefs but are nonetheless legitimate and decent human beings, that the same rules apply equally to everyone, and that there is no disagreement that can be solved with violence. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve seen those norms bent to the breaking point in recent years and, most alarming of all, the response to this repeated assault on liberalism feels more like a whimper than a full-throated defense.

As I wrote last week, when compared to illiberals’ ruthless and relentless drive, liberals might seem too self-critical to properly defend themselves and their principles. But we don’t have to be. The power of liberalism is actually found in its persistent commitment to following the rules, to human dignity, and to the peaceful but vigorous contest of differing ideas. It’s precisely because it refuses to dehumanize others and because it insists on persuasion over force that it’s worth defending.

And that defense is now extremely urgent.