Beware the Merchants of Rage
Resist the bad actors, on the left and the right, using this week’s tragedy to make new excuses for political violence.
It has been a long time since I have felt so pessimistic about America.
In the immediate hours after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a small number of sociopaths celebrated his murder. From numerous posters on Bluesky to the incoming president of the Oxford Union, some people explicitly took joy in seeing someone whom they considered a political enemy killed.
Even so, the response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, at first, dominated by widespread revulsion. For a few hours it felt as though much of the country could still agree on such basic values as condemning wanton murder. And some political leaders really did rise to the moment, calling on their followers to lower the temperature, and to see the humanity in those with whom they disagree.
In a compelling video, Bernie Sanders acknowledged that he “strongly disagreed [with Kirk] on almost every issue.” But he also paid homage to Kirk’s willingness to engage the American public in debate and expressed his heartfelt condolences to his widow. “Political violence,” Sanders insisted, “is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”
Speaking at a press conference with the FBI and local law enforcement, Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, was just as compelling. He told young Americans that they are “inheriting a country where politics feels like rage.” He then encouraged them to recognize that they now have “an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now—not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences.”
Even as Sanders and Cox called upon the best angels of our nature, the hell machine of social media called upon the worst, feeding and fueling our collective need for rage. Within a span of 48 hours, the loudest voices found excuses for going back to the place in which they are most comfortable: hating anybody who disagrees with them.
Over the past years, horrible acts of political violence have targeted prominent Americans of every political hue. Even so, much of the right has seized upon this moment to insist on a Manichean worldview. Senior figures made clear that they would use Kirk’s killing as a justification for unprecedented forms of repression; likening universities to madrassas, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that, “I don’t care how—it could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection—but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, and that are committing acts of wanton violence.” Elon Musk was even more explicit in rejecting any semblance of “unity” for the prospect of “victory,” tweeting: “Either we fight back or they will kill us.”
Meanwhile, much of the left has been searching for reasons why they should not need to have sympathy for an outspoken political adversary like Kirk. Viral social media posts blatantly misrepresented Kirk’s words. In one instance, famous writers and other celebrities claimed that Kirk had called for gay people to be stoned; the actual clip shows that Kirk was invoking that infamous verse from Leviticus to explain why politics should not be based on stray lines drawn from the Bible.
In fact, the one thing that nobody seems able to tolerate at this moment is any indication whatsoever that anyone on the other side of the political spectrum may be a somewhat decent person. During his remarkable speech, Cox made a perfectly humane point about our need to grapple with the evil among us. As governor of Utah, he had hoped “if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us, that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for, just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’” On social media, and even in supposedly serious magazines, the rage machine quickly misrepresented these heartfelt words as an expression of hate. A tweet omitting Cox’s mention of “another state,” thereby implying that he had been inciting hatred against immigrants, has to date garnered over 19 million views.
This week is the stuff with which the road to hell is paved.
As scholars of civic conflict have long argued, political violence is always in search of excuses. It is hard to dehumanize others to such an extent that it seems justified to kill them. That’s why the descent into large-scale political violence nearly always starts with a more subtle proposition: conflict entrepreneurs paint their political adversaries as so intent on causing harm that violence is the only realistic means of self-defense.
We now live in a country in which millions of people on, yes, both sides of our partisan divide have convinced themselves of that dangerous article of faith. And that, more than anything else, makes me fear for our country right now.
Amidst these dark times, it is important to remember that most Americans aren’t sociopaths who hate anyone who disagrees with them. Most Americans do not celebrate political violence even if it hits what they consider the “right” target. But the minority of Americans who are consumed by their longing for chaos and violence are doing what they can to draw the rest of us into their warped logic.
Over the past days, these merchants of rage have been frighteningly successful. If there is any political duty which this darkest of timelines calls forth, it is to resist these bad actors irrespective of what ideological garb they happen to wear.
Thank you. We need more of this. I found myself enraged at the enraged until a friendly stranger on Substack pulled me back from the edge. Please know that your voice matters in al this noise.
Something I’ve observed is that the “rage machine” is fuelled and sustained more and more by interpretation, and less by people’s initial emotion to the event itself. It’s tempting to assume the people celebrating or denying violence are doing so out of anger, however, what they’re effectively doing is participating in narrative maintenance. They’re reinterpreting events so that their tribal worldviews remain unperturbed. It’s as if their perceived survival depends on maintaining their group’s view of reality.
We saw this when MAGA insisted Vance Boelter (the Minnesota shooter) was a leftist in spite of all the evidence he was on the right. It also explains why some progressives are eagerly rushing to misrepresent Kirk’s words. Rage is very clearly instrumental; it’s become a favored mechanism of epistemic insulation against facts (specifically facts liable to fracture/threaten group identity).
The right has helped turn this “economy of interpretation” into a full-blown media apparatus that commodified and promulgates rage, (with the aid of algorithms), and now the left is mirroring it (the more unified one “tribe” becomes, the greater the pressure for the other side to do so, and the more one’s identity becomes fused with the ideology/group, making people more invested in rage).
So it’s essentially a foundation/organization tactic that creates an environment in which scapegoating can flourish. People start to treat maintaining group consensus as the desired outcome. So when a violent act occurs, people are eager to utilize it as symbolic material to unite their group’s consensus. As long as the majority are incentivized to establish tribal group unity, the alternative (of treating violent acts as isolated events) is rejected.
I suppose something must be done to change the incentive structure and lower the stakes for dissenting dialogue.