When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of cliches. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of a then-former president—instead, they condemned “political violence.”
“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former president Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender individual as merely “unnecessary.”
Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV. The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, there is a long history of Americans resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.
Since the January 6 riot that followed the 2020 election, the Left has persistently attempted to paint the Right as particularly prone to mob action. But as the online response to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates—with thousands of leftists openly celebrating the gory, public assassination of a young father—the vitriol that drives mob violence is endemic to American political discourse and a perpetual threat to order.
Our Founders understood this all too well.
In August of 1786, a violent insurrection ripped through the peaceful Massachusetts countryside. After the end of the Revolutionary War, many American soldiers were caught in a vise, with debt collectors on one side and a government unable to make back pay on the other. A disgruntled former officer in the Continental Army named Daniel Shays led a violent rebellion aimed at breaking the vise at gunpoint.
“Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them,” George Washington wrote in a letter, striking a serene tone in the face of an insurrection. James Madison was less forgiving: “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” he wrote in Federalist 55. Inspired by Shays’s Rebellion and seeking to rein in the excesses of democracy, lawmakers called for the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.
If the United States Constitution was borne out of political chaos, why does the current moment strike so many as distinctly perilous? Classical political philosophy offers us a clearer answer to this question than modern psychoanalysis. The most pointed debate among philosophers throughout the centuries has centered on how to prevent mob violence and ensure that most unnatural of things: political order.
In Plato’s Republic, the work that stands at the headwaters of the Western tradition of political philosophy, Socrates argues that the only truly just society is one in which philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. As a rule, democracy devolves into tyranny, for mob rule inevitably breeds impulsive citizens who become focused on petty pleasures. The resulting disorder eventually becomes so unbearable that a demagogue arises, promising to restore order and peace.
The classically educated Founders picked up on these ideas—mediated through Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Montesquieu, among others—as they developed the structure of the new American government. The Constitution’s mixed government was explicitly designed to establish a political order that would take into consideration the sentiments and interests of the people without yielding to mob rule at the expense of order. The Founders took for granted that powerful elites would necessarily be interested in upholding the regime from which they derived their authority.
Terror from the Top
History has often seen disaffected elites stoke insurrections in order to defenestrate a ruling class that shut them out of public life. The famous case of the Catilinarian Conspiracy in late republican Rome, in which a disgruntled aristocrat named Catiline attempted to overthrow the republic during the consulship of Cicero, serves as a striking example. In the 21st century, we face a different phenomenon: those in power are not only failing to enforce order, but also excusing and even actively promoting the conditions that undermine a peaceful, stable, and orderly regime.
The points of erosion are numerous. The public cheerleading of assassinations can be dismissed as noise from the rabble, but it is more difficult to ignore the numerous calls from elites for civic conflagration. Newspapers are promoting historically dubious revisionism that undermines the moral legitimacy of the Constitution. Billionaire-backed prosecutors decline to prosecute violent crime. For years those in power at best ignored—and at worst encouraged—mob-driven chaos in American social life, resulting in declining trust in institutions, lowered expectations for basic public order, coarsened or altogether discarded social mores, and a general sense on all sides that Western civilization is breaking down.
The United States has, of course, faced more robust political violence than what we are witnessing today. But even during the Civil War—brutal by any standard—a certain civility tended to obtain between the combatants. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address, “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” Even in the midst of a horrific war, a shared sense of ultimate things somewhat tempered the disorder and destruction—and crucially promoted a semblance of reconciliation once the war ended.
Our modern disorder runs deeper. The shattering of fundamental shared assumptions about virtually anything leaves political opponents looking less like fellow citizens to be persuaded and more like enemies to be subdued.
Charlie Kirk, despite his relative political moderation and his persistent willingness to engage in attempts at persuasion, continues to be smeared by many as a “Nazi propagandist.” The willful refusal to distinguish between mostly run-of-the-mill American conservatism and the murderous foreign ideology known as National Socialism is telling. The implication is not subtle: if you disagree with me, you are my enemy—and I am justified in cheering your murder.
Fellow citizens who persistently view their political opponents as enemies and existential threats cannot long exist in a shared political community.
“Democracy is on the ballot,” the popular refrain goes, but rarely is democracy undermined by a single election. It is instead undermined by a gradual decline in public spiritedness and private virtue, as well as the loss of social trust and good faith necessary to avoid violence.
The chief prosecutors against institutional authority are not disaffected Catalines but the ruling class itself. This arrangement may work for a while, but both political theory and common sense suggest that it is volatile and unlikely to last for long.
The Conditions of Liberty
Political order, in general, requires a degree of virtue, public-spiritedness, and good will among the citizenry. In Federalist 55 James Madison comments that, of all the possible permutations of government that have yet been conceived, republican government is uniquely dependent upon order and institutional legitimacy:
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.
In short, republican government requires citizens who can govern themselves, an antidote to the passions that precede mayhem and assassination. Without a populace capable of self-control, liberty becomes impossible. Under such conditions, the releasing of restraints never liberates—it only promotes mob-like behavior.
The disorder of Shays’s Rebellion prompted the drafting of the Constitution, initiating what has sometimes been called an “experiment in ordered liberty.” That experiment was put to the test beginning in 1791 in Western Pennsylvania. The Whiskey Rebellion reached a crisis in Bower Hill, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles south of modern-day Butler, when a mob of 600 disgruntled residents laid siege to a federal tax collector. With the blessing of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and Federalist co-author John Jay, President George Washington assembled troops to squash the rebellion.
“I have accordingly determined [to call the militia], feeling the deepest regret for the occasion, but withal the most solemn conviction that the essential interests of the Union demand it, that the very existence of government and the fundamental principles of social order are materially involved in the issue,” Washington wrote in a proclamation. “The patriotism and firmness of all good citizens are seriously called upon, as occasions may require, to aid in the effectual suppression of so fatal a spirit.”
Washington left Philadelphia to march thousands of state militiamen into the rebel haven of Western Pennsylvania. The insurrectionists surrendered without firing a shot.
Our new era of political violence rolls on, with Charlie Kirk’s murder being only the latest and most prominent example. Our leaders assure us they will ride out into the field just as Washington once did. Whether they will use their presence and influence to suppress or encourage “so fatal a spirit” remains an open question.