We Say America Is Better Than This. But Are We?
Violence is part of the American story, but so is the struggle to prove America can be something more than the sum of its divisions.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was dark moment in America’s history. Another name, another face, another wound in the body politic. In such times, we reach for what is familiar: This is not who we are. America is better than this.
Yet the harder truth is that violence is part of who we are—and who we have always been. To say “America is better than this” is to speak the language of hope and aspiration, not of evidence.
Violence has walked alongside us since the earliest days of the Republic—at the ballot box, on the courthouse steps, in the pulpit, and in the streets. Our country was birthed by revolution, valiant but bloody. In the decades that followed, mobs attacked abolitionists, duels were fought in cornfields and on riverbanks, and the nation descended into civil war over slavery.
Since then, bullets have claimed presidents from Abraham Lincoln to James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. They have taken the lives of political activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and wounded Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt. Governors, mayors, and countless other political figures have faced similar threats and attacks.
As Americans, we inherit that history—whether or not we care to claim it.
What is new is not the violence itself but the zeal that animates it. We no longer whisper about enemies; we shout into the digital void, where our rage is multiplied and rewarded by likes and clicks. Anger is no longer something to be restrained but embraced and amplified. Our politics does not simply endure polarization—it feeds upon it and packages it for mass consumption. Division has become our drug of choice, and violence the cost of using.
Kirk’s murder was a reflection of that division, and the aftermath seems only to have amplified some of the worst of our politics—especially on social media. On the left, many condemned political violence but hastened to fold his death into his politics—implying that somehow he invited it. On the right, prominent political figures rushed to blame the “radical left” and its rhetoric, as though causation were obvious and singular.
Both reactions are deeply misguided. To lay blame for Kirk’s assassination on the rhetoric of the left is no different than to suggest his murder was the inevitable consequence of his politics. Both assertions are a form of moral abdication—rationalizations that reduce murder to a predictable consequence instead of naming it for what it is: an irrational act of evil.
Words are not violence. To pretend otherwise rests on a dangerous premise that blurs the line between persuasion and coercion. Words are not powerless. Words can wound, mislead, and inflame, but they remain, at their core, a non-violent tool of expression—one that can be countered with reason and debate. Violence, by contrast, forecloses response; it compels through force and strips its target of agency. To conflate speech with violence is to invite peril—it legitimizes censorship under the guise of protection, empowers the powerful to silence dissent, and erodes the shared ground on which free societies deliberate their differences. Words may sting, but they do not tear through flesh like bullets or knives. Words may persuade and provoke, but they do not kill.
Amid the many statements condemning Kirk’s murder, a few stood out for their clarity.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox described, in painstaking detail, the depravity of the act and what it means for our nation, calling on Kirk’s political allies and foes alike to find unity in condemning violence. “If anyone… celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting,” Cox remarked, “I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.”
In a similar vein, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, with characteristic bluntness, issued a four-minute video statement condemning political violence without condition or equivocation. “Political violence, in fact, is political cowardice,” Sanders rightly observed. “It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”
Both Cox and Sanders used the moment to underscore the threat rising political violence poses to our democracy—acknowledging, if indirectly, that partisan policy priorities rest on the foundation of a non-violent democratic framework. They channeled a unifying moral clarity that is all too rare in American politics today, where tragedies are often exploited to advance political goals.
And the framework is, in fact, fragile. Persistent political violence corrodes not only trust between citizens but the functioning of institutions themselves. It discourages capable people from public service, intimidates those who remain, and fuels cynicism that government cannot protect its own leaders—let alone its people.
For when politics descends into violence, it ceases to be politics. As Ezra Klein observed in the New York Times, “There is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes… We are all safe, or none of us are.” That is the lesson of history, sobering as it may be. Violence has been a constant companion in our democracy, but so has the struggle against it—the effort to prove, generation after generation, that America can be something more than the sum of its divisions.
So in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, with political violence on the rise, we are left to confront a harder truth: we are not yet who we claim to be.
It is not true, in a literal sense, to say America is better than this. But the idea of America is. Yet ideas alone do not protect a republic. America will only be “better than this” if its citizens demand it, defend it, and live it out in their daily lives. Our democracy does not rest on the absence of conflict but on the presence of courage—the courage to disagree without dehumanizing, and to resist the temptation of force when persuasion fails.
The challenge, of course, is not uniquely American. Around the world, democracies stand or fall on whether they can manage conflict without resorting to violence, and political polarization has tested the resilience of freedom. America is not exempt from the same pressures that have undone republics elsewhere. The exceptionalism we claim must be earned, not presumed.
As history has illustrated, the American story has always contained both promise and peril. Whether we fulfill that promise depends on how we respond in moments like this—whether we repeat old failures, or learn from them. It depends on our commitment to the idea that every citizen, no matter how wrong we think they are, possesses an unconditional dignity. It depends on rejecting the notion that to oppose someone’s ideas entails unseeing their humanity. It depends on whether we insist, with fervor and vigilance, that the right to speak freely without fear of violence is not merely a norm, but a bedrock principle of our democracy.
And it depends not only on leaders but everyday people. Citizens bear responsibility too. Democracy survives only if ordinary people defend it in their daily speech, conduct, and choices.
The promise of America is not that violence will never plague us—it always has—but that liberty and human dignity can prevail despite it.