The United States was founded in a violent reaction against an imagined plot to impose tyranny. With the English threat removed, Americans immediately turned their wary suspicions on one other. And they have never stopped hurling monstrous accusations against opponents they tacitly acknowledged as legitimate. There is no more deeply rooted American practice than smearing other Americans as supporters of tyranny—be it “monarchist,” “communist,” or “fascist.” What air is to fire, James Madison wrote, liberty is to “the violence of faction.” But the intemperate freedom with which Americans habitually assail one another has been an unlikely source of resilience, the rhetorical excesses a cathartic outlet for dangerous discontents. To paraphrase Homer Simpson’s toast to alcohol, freedom is the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.
As a matter of abstract logic, it seems reasonable to suppose that when a public official calls his opponents “fascists” or “communists,” he is opening the door to violence. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote, “a page of history is worth a volume of logic.” Hyperbolic rhetoric is a constant in American political life. It explains a sudden surge in murderous violence about as well as the presence of oxygen explains the outbreak of a fire.
This is no reason to dismiss the threat political violence poses. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the latest ghastly incident to highlight the dark forces swirling at the foundations of our civil society, surging and receding from one moment to the next. But historical perspective on this intractable problem should discourage a recourse to either simple solutions or radical despair.
Violence in almost every category has declined drastically since the 1960s and 1970s, to say nothing of even earlier eras. The most ominous difference today is not the scale or frequency of violence, but the absence of any unifying consensus to mitigate its corrosive effects.