An excellent if longish piece. Let everyone with ears to hear, listen and understand, especially those who love this country and do not want to see it perish in vain.
When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of cliches. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of a then-former president—instead, they condemned “political violence.”
“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former president Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender individual as merely “unnecessary.”
Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV. The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, there is a long history of Americans resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.
Since the January 6 riot that followed the 2020 election, the Left has persistently attempted to paint the Right as particularly prone to mob action. But as the online response to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates—with thousands of leftists openly celebrating the gory, public assassination of a young father—the vitriol that drives mob violence is endemic to American political discourse and a perpetual threat to order.
Our Founders understood this all too well.
In August of 1786, a violent insurrection ripped through the peaceful Massachusetts countryside. After the end of the Revolutionary War, many American soldiers were caught in a vise, with debt collectors on one side and a government unable to make back pay on the other. A disgruntled former officer in the Continental Army named Daniel Shays led a violent rebellion aimed at breaking the vise at gunpoint.
“Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them,” George Washington wrote in a letter, striking a serene tone in the face of an insurrection. James Madison was less forgiving: “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” he wrote in Federalist 55. Inspired by Shays’s Rebellion and seeking to rein in the excesses of democracy, lawmakers called for the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.
If the United States Constitution was borne out of political chaos, why does the current moment strike so many as distinctly perilous? Classical political philosophy offers us a clearer answer to this question than modern psychoanalysis. The most pointed debate among philosophers throughout the centuries has centered on how to prevent mob violence and ensure that most unnatural of things: political order.
In Plato’s Republic, the work that stands at the headwaters of the Western tradition of political philosophy, Socrates argues that the only truly just society is one in which philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. As a rule, democracy devolves into tyranny, for mob rule inevitably breeds impulsive citizens who become focused on petty pleasures. The resulting disorder eventually becomes so unbearable that a demagogue arises, promising to restore order and peace.
The classically educated Founders picked up on these ideas—mediated through Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Montesquieu, among others—as they developed the structure of the new American government. The Constitution’s mixed government was explicitly designed to establish a political order that would take into consideration the sentiments and interests of the people without yielding to mob rule at the expense of order. The Founders took for granted that powerful elites would necessarily be interested in upholding the regime from which they derived their authority.
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