The Bullet and the Ballot: Is Violence Becoming The Dominant Language of Politics?
There’s not a lot to say in terms of reporting the events. This isn’t a voyeuristic true‑crime retelling. We all saw the video. If we didn’t see the video, we saw the photograph: hands reaching to close an already gaping wound. Within hours, the footage was everywhere, framed as another sign of “unprecedented times”. But America has been here before. Many times.
American politicians have long insisted that the ballot must triumph over the bullet. But how can it with such a catalogue of assassinations - Lincoln, Kennedy, King, and now Kirk. In truth, the nation’s political story has been built and punctuated by the bullet. In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, the establishment of America has claimed that political violence is “un-American,” yet it has repeatedly used it to settle disputes and redraw the boundaries of power. The question now isn’t whether violence has a place in America’s political voice, it always has. The real question is this: what happens when violence becomes the dominant language of politics?
This political violence is not a uniquely American affliction, moreover it is not unprecedented historically. In the last decades of the Roman Republic, political violence had become a recognised instrument of power. Reformers like the Gracchi brother were cut down in the street. Clodius Pulcher was hacked to death on the Appian Way and, most famously, Caeser was stabbed twenty-three times by men he had once called his friends. Each act was justified as a defence of the Republic. Each one eroded the foundations a piece at a time. Once the taboo on political violence was broken, it was used not only against enemies but against allies who had become inconvenient.
In less than two years, four high-profile shootings have struck at the heart of American civil life. Donald Trump narrowly survived a rooftop sniper, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel, and Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in their home by a man posing as a police officer. And, now, Kirk has been killed mid-speech on a university quad. The motives span partisan politics, ideological purges and economic grievance, but the function is the same: to show that ballots, boardrooms and legislatures are no longer the only arenas where feelings are made known.
This logic is eerily familiar. Trump’s failed assassination was quickly framed as the work of an external enemy, fuelling a siege narrative that helped lead him to the White House. Thompson’s killing was framed as vigilante justice against corporate greed. Hortman’s death was a targeted purge. The theories surrounding Kirk’s killing are muddied at the time of writing and may prove to be the act of internal discipline within the same ideological camp or the act of an ideological enemy. In Rome, the same republic could produce the murder of a populist tribune, the assassination of a consul, and the lynching of a corrupt tax farmer within a generation. The actors and justifications vary; what binds them is the slow transformation of violence from an exception into a political habit.
Political violence is never just an act; it is a performance. In Rome, Caeser’s murder was staged in the Senate itself, a symbolic reclaiming of the Republic’s heart, while Cicero’s severed head was displayed in the Forum as a public lesson. In America, the theatre is unavoidable; think of Trump’s bloodied fist raised to the crowd and Kirk’s rooftop killing captured on livestream. The goal is not only to kill but to send this message: any and every potential target could be next.
The ambiguity around Kirk’s killing is not a neutral space. In the absence of confirmed facts, the story becomes whatever your politics require it to be. For some on the right, it is proof of a violent left; for some on the left, it is the right devouring its own in an “every revolution eats its own children” fashion. In Rome, the murder of a Tribune could be spun as saving the Republic by one faction, and as tyranny by another. In America, the same split plays out in real time, accelerated by social media’s appetite for instant certainty. The danger is that the narrative hardens long before the truth emerges. Even more worryingly, once hardened, the truth becomes irrelevant and instead the chosen myth becomes the justification for next act of violence. Increasingly, it is also becoming justification for something else. Who gets to speak at all?
After Sulla defeated his rivals, he issued his proscriptions: a public list of enemies whose lives and property were forfeit. Supporters and opponents alike were targeted. In 1933, an Austrian chancellor used the Reichstag Fire to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties and deploy state forces against political opponents. In America, the details differ, but the reasoning is familiar. This summer, President Trump ordered the National Guard into Memphis to “stamp out crime”, despite the city’s Democratic mayor pointing to falling crime rates. Announced in the Oval Office alongside Tennessee’s Republican governor and senators, the deployment embedded Guard troops within federal agencies like the FBI, DEA and ICE. It is part of a wider shift in which the use of force in civilian life is no longer exceptional.
This same impulse to control is now being applied to the airwaves. Days after Kirk’s assassination, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC following pressure from the Trump administration, after he suggested on air that Kirk’s killer might have been a Trump supporter. The FCC chair, appointed by Trump, praised the suspension and warned other networks to “change conduct” or risk losing their licences. The First Amendment should prevent such retaliation, but the effect on other broadcasters is plain: speak against the official narrative and you may be next.
Political violence in America is not anything new, it’s a recurring feature of democracy in the United States. The Founding Fathers had their duels, antebellum saw canings on the senate floor and Reconstruction brought the assassination of Lincoln and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan; a politically violent paramilitary that used lynching, arson and mass intimidation to decide elections and enforce white supremacy. The Klan’s violence was systemic, aimed at controlling who could participate in politics. Only a century later, Malcolm X told his audience they faced a choice: the ballot or the bullet. For him, the bullet was the last resort of the oppressed when the ballot was denied. Charlie Kirk spoke to a different crowd. One that sees itself as the custodian of “real America,” threatened not by disenfranchisement but cultural change. Malcom’s bullet aimed at dismantling a hierarchy. Kirk’s America flirted with the bullet to preserve one.
In Rome the forum and the streets were both arenas of control. In Germany emergency powers were used to police not just the public order but public speech. Today in America, the same pattern is emerging. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is being used to justify both the deployment of troops into cities and the disciplining of dissenting voices in the media. Physical space and narrative space are being secured in tandem. The more the public accepts this as normal the more the nation drifts towards a system where politics is enforced not just at gunpoint, but by the narrowing of what can be said at all…
If America is goose‑stepping towards becoming a totalitarian state with the largest nuclear arsenal on earth, the prospect is horrifying. But history tells us such states are not permanent. Rome did not collapse in a single coup; it bled out, one knife at a time. Germany’s democracy did not fall overnight in 1933; it signed away its freedoms in a series of emergencies. America’s wounds are fresher, and they are bleeding profusely. Once violence becomes part of the political grammar, it is very hard to speak in any other language. The danger is not simply that more bullets will be fired, or that they will become a normal part of the conversation, it is that America has always been this way.
When this collapse comes, and collapse it will, historians will not be stunned by the greed of the elite or the violence in the streets. Empires always rot at the top and unravel with blood. What will haunt them is the loyalty of the worker. That millions voted against their own interests. That they worshipped the billionaires who robbed them, slashed their own benefits, gutted their own healthcare, and cheered as tax codes were rewritten to favour private jets over public schools. Not because it helped them but because it hurt someone else. That is the America Charlie Kirk stood for. And that is what the love of the bullet will do to you.
Written by George Trueman
George is raising money for Ataxia UK, a charity that means so much to him and his family. His wonderful sister Ruby has Friedreich's Ataxia (FA), a rare and progressive neurological condition that affects movement, coordination, and muscle strength. It’s a life-limiting condition with no cure. You can donate here.
