America is in the middle of its third great era of political violence.
The first came after the Civil War, when thousands of Black Americans were lynched and murdered. The second was the 1960s, marked by political assassinations and the murders of civil rights activists. Both of these eras had racial animosity at their heart.
The third era is now.
It began with the widespread deaths of young Black men at the hands of law enforcement — agencies infiltrated by far-right groups. It expanded into outright political murder. The death of Charlie Kirk is only the most recent entry in a grim chronology.
Kirk’s killer’s motives remain murky. His ideology seemed drawn more from video games than anything recognisably left-wing. If he was “of the left,” that would be unusual: most American political killers have come from the right.
And yet he was familiar: another skinny, sad-looking white boy, barely out of adolescence, clutching a gun too big for him. Another name in a long list that includes Dylann Roof and Kyle Rittenhouse.
Whatever their stated ideology, these killers emerge from a culture that glorifies violence, worships easy access to guns, and frames politics as an existential battle between good and evil where compromise is impossible and all means are justified.
This culture was built by the American right. It has been nourished by right-wing politicians, influencers and TV channels until violence became an accepted part of political life.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has systematically stood down law enforcement from investigating right-wing domestic terrorism, and scrubbed reports on the prevalence of far-right violence from government websites.
The hypocrisy over the sacking of Jimmy Kimmel, the lies around Kirk’s death, the weaponisation of tragedy to heighten division — none of this is accidental. It is a display of raw power. A demonstration that the authoritarian right is so dominant it can make hypocrisy into virtue, lies into truth, censorship into free speech.
Orwell put it bluntly:
“The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power….. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is “Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me,”
For decades, the American right has marched away from reality into fantasy. Goldwater’s paranoia, Nixon’s racism and criminality, Reagan’s blurring of the cinematic and the real, George W. Bush’s reinvention as a Texas oilman, and finally MAGA’s embrace of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts.”
The internet intensifies this. It makes lies feel vivid and exciting compared to the humdrum reality of daily life — particularly for those who came of age before the web and lack the skills to spot manipulation.
In this world without a line between reality and fantasy, there is no line between truth and lies, good and evil. The US far right is powerful enough to force everyone else to live inside its magic kingdom — with harsh penalties for those who dare speak the truth.
This is naked power, authoritarian to the core.
But the bigger question is: when does violence become civil war?
Historians still debate when the first US Civil War began — the Dred Scott verdict, John Brown’s raid, Fort Sumter, the formal secession? Events that seemed discrete at the time now read as a chronology of an inevitable march to war.
We should ask the same of America today.
The assault on the Capitol on January 6th, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the death of Charlie Kirk. At the time they were isolated incidents. In retrospect, they look like milestones in a descent into civil conflict.
What is clear is that when confronted with its own John Brown or Fort Sumter moment, the current US administration will take any path but reconciliation. It has federalised the National Guard, deployed them in opposition cities, and floated aloud the idea that conflict could justify cancelling elections and entrenching power indefinitely.
Nearly 50,000 Americans will die of gun violence this year. We don’t yet know how many of them will be counted as political casualties.
But it may be that the first deaths of America’s next civil war have already been buried.
“Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected it, or intended it.” — Henry Adams, 1861
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/far-right-terrorism-united-states
https://www.prio.org/projects/1152
A depressing read but one that cannot be avoided in the current climate. Is the UK heading in a similar direction? The early shoots of division and despair are familiar. The rise of Tommy Robinson, Reform, English nationalism, Brexit to name but a few and all turbo charged by social media algorithms that prioritise clicks over truth and facts and client journalism. Unless a leader rises to the challenge of creating a brighter more unifying vision of what our country could be then I despair what the future may hold.
There is a huge amount of time and money being expended pushing British politics in the same direction. Both country’s politics are dominated by negative partisanship – people vote against parties they hate, rather than voting for policies they love. Both are being flooded by masses of social media content to drive extreme viewpoints, particularly on the far right. The UK however doesn’t have guns, and it’s institutions are still intact unlike the US.
In the online space in America it seems like there are no moderates, everything is so polarised. You’re not left unless you believe a,b,c,d, and you’re not right unless you believe w,x,y,z. I can only hope this isn’t the case in the day to day lives of Americans.
Then you have Supreme Leader Trump, stoking the fire every chance he gets. Elon Musk proclaiming the left as the ‘party of murder’ – despite evidence mostly linking political deaths in America to the right and in the UK (correct me if I’m wrong) the only politically motivated murder was Jo Cox, by a right wing extremist. Still, on a positive note, he managed to get through his London speech without giving it the ‘ol Sieg Hail.
It’s “the big sort”. Right wing Americans live in different places to Liberals, watch different TV, follow different sports, eat different food, die younger of different illnesses. The political polarisation has become geographic. Gerrymandered boundaries have made this worse, but the real problem is the electoral system. 24% of the US population have 6 senators to represent them. The system is rigged in favour of white rural voters.
Back in the 1970s most terrorists were left wing, but now there is hardly any left-wing political violence, especially in the US!
The overwhelming majority of politically-motivated murders are by the far right, and those that aren’t are mostly by jihadists.