Left and right have merged in America

“Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” So wrote Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin in a text message to his roommatewhich investigators have now revealed.

It’s the closest we’ve come to hearing a clear rationale for the murder so far, but it’s also more comprehensive than that. It’s a broad principle: a starting point whose natural ending is violence. Once we deem something to be intolerably hateful, and conclude there can be no negotiation with the people who espouse it, there is nothing left to do but vanquish them.

That’s a bloodcurdling thought in the wake of a politically motivated murder. But political violence almost always sits atop a broader phenomenon. It’s the exceptional expression of a larger malaise. Here, we must acknowledge that this idea – that some of our fellow citizens are evil and unworthy of engagement – is an increasingly common one in our age. We’re applying it to an ever-expanding list of deplorables, according to our various political tastes: racists, fascists, communists, sexists, capitalists, homophobes, feminists, Zionists, Islamists, globalists, nationalists. Of course, we reserve the right to categorise people as loosely as we wish, whether they accept such descriptions or not, which is partly why terms such as “fascist” and (especially in the US) “communist” are thrown around so wantonly.

This is apparently how we show our moral seriousness now. Not through restraint, patience or the discipline to deal fairly – even with our foes. Rather, it’s through emphatic, non-negotiable condemnation. This is righteousness through excommunication, through militant posturing. The result is an ever-growing circle of people with whom there can be no negotiation, no democratic deliberation, and ultimately no democratic future. The aim is not to find a way to go on together. It is to achieve total victory.

The more politics becomes a series of do-or-die existential battles in which the ends justify all manner of means, the more it moves from democracy towards war. That is currently the United States’ direction of travel. So much of its political life – from its most partisan media outlets, to its succumbing to social media algorithms, to its parties’ frequent gerrymandering of electoral districts – is geared for total victory. That doesn’t mean everyone will suddenly embrace violence, of course. But it does mean that violence becomes a more viable option. And when it occurs, it will not reset things or trigger introspection. Instead, it will be conscripted immediately into the political war.

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Thus, we see Jimmy Kimmel suggest Kirk’s alleged shooter is a member of “the MAGA gang” when the little available evidence we have suggests the opposite. That he did this during a monologue against “finger-pointing” and “political point-scoring”, with no sense of irony, emphasises just how deeply the disease has seeped.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance immediately characterised his murder as a consequence of radical left extremism, even though there was no clear evidence to support that theory at the time. To be fair to them, their description may turn out to be true on this occasion. It is also true that left-wing political violence in America is an established phenomenon, evidenced by the attempted murder of a conservative Supreme Court judge or the shooting of the Republican House whip during a baseball practice session of Republican congressmen. But the aim here isn’t merely to describe the facts. It’s to prosecute a partisan struggle, with Vance pledging to set the justice department onto “radical left lunatics” as the administration sees them.

That’s why there is no sense for Trump and Vance that when Minnesota’s Democrat House Speaker and her husband were shot to death in their home in June – allegedly by a registered Republican – it was a consequence of some right-wing equivalent. Or when there was an arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania’s Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro. Or when a man broke into then-Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, and when he couldn’t find her, took to her husband’s skull with a hammer instead.