“Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” So wrote Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin in a text message to his roommate, which 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.

Political violence is right now a condition of American life. The fact that one side avails itself of this tool more often than the other doesn’t change that.Credit: AP

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........

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