On political violence and political pretext

Oh, to live in less-interesting times...

My graduate strategic political communication class meets on Wednesday nights. We always open with a discussion of what happened in the news this week. Conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk was murdered two hours before class.

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve found myself standing at the front of a class full of people still processing what’s going on. We are cursed to live, as the saying goes, in interesting times.

Every political event — especially every tragic political event — has layers. There are a lot of layers to how we process Charlie Kirk’s death. I’m not going to get into all of them—I don’t intend this to be a long post. But there are a couple of points that I want to set down on paper, just to properly clear my head:

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(1) Structural power versus rhetorical power

Usually in the aftermath of major political events (including, especially, shootings), what we witness is contestation over how the event is framed. Each ideological coalition tries to make sense of the conflict, offering an explanation of what it was fundamentally about. (This is classic Schattschneider. Longtime readers know my affinity for Schattschneider.)

So in normal(ish) times, you would see Fox News etc blaming the “loony left,” and the Washington Post/CNN declaring that “both sides tone down the rhetoric,” while progressive media looks about furtively and says *ahem* is now an appropriate time to talk about gun reform?

That frame contestation matters. It influences how the political event is remembered over time. As Schattschneider wrote in 1960, “the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power… (s)/he who determines what politics is about runs the country.”

As I tell my class every semester, framing is best understood as a specific type of power. We often encounter its limits. In a battle between structural power and rhetorical frames, structural power will generally win.

And it strikes me that these are not normal(ish) times any longer. Last month, Edward “Big Balls” Corsetine got beaten up by a couple of 15-year-olds in Logan Circle, DC. The Trump administration then declared “well from now on, the U.S. military gets to occupy all the cities we don’t like.” That’s structural power in action.

There is a real possibility that Charlie Kirk’s death will serve as a pretext for authoritarian purges. As Dave Weigel noted on Bluesky this evening, Trump has already released a video promising to "find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it." They haven’t even caught the shooter yet, and Chris Rufo is already declaring that it is time to “infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate” their political opponents.

Our political culture does not know how to handle this sort of thing. Mainstream reporters and politicians are used to frame contestation, not authoritarian consolidation.

It all adds up to an exceptionally dangerous moment.

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(2) The Alinsky Test

There’s a passage from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that I think about a lot. I teach it every semester, though we haven’t reached that point in the syllabus yet. Alinsky is discussing Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience and he kind of flips the whole thing around. For Alinsky, nonviolence is less a moral philosophy than just solid strategy. To paraphrase, Alinsky basically says “Of course Gandhi chose nonviolence… the other side had all the guns!”

There are many reasons why I abhor political violence. Societal collapse is easier to fantasize about than it is to live through. Our existing social order is flawed, and fracturing, and has never lived up to our ideals. But we will very much miss it, if and when it is gone.

And certainly one of the reasons why I abhor political violence is that precisely zero of my political resources are of any use in a violent confrontation. I have never thrown a punch and I don’t intend to start now. The best I can do is bring sparkling dialogue and cutting observations to a literal knife fight. Societal breakdown is bound to go quite poorly for people like me.

Elon Musk and his cronies have taken this moment to declare that “the left is the party of murder.” They have convinced themselves that the defining feature of American public life circa 2025 is that the leftists are violent and dangerous. This is absurd and ahistorical on too many levels to count. (In Elon et al’s rendering, the leftists are violent because we say “that guy is a nazi” after Elon throws a couple nazi salutes.)

But it is also fails the Alinsky test. Of course the American left will overwhelmingly choose nonviolence. The MAGA/QAnon political coalition has all the guns.

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I can’t honestly see how things don’t get worse from here. It is a tragedy, a terrible moment amidst a terrifying time period.

None of us chose to live in these times. It will be up to all of us, together, to find our way through.