Part VI: New Vocabulary for Old Violence
One reason America struggles to understand lone-actor attacks is that our vocabulary is stale. We reach reflexively for words like terrorism, political violence, left-wing, right-wing, extremist. These labels are simple, portable, and familiar. But they are also blunt instruments. They flatten complex crises into clichés, and in doing so, they often reinforce the very myths attackers want to project.
The Problem With “Political Violence”
What makes violence political? Is it the attacker’s stated intent? A manifesto? A Facebook post? Or is it our decision to label it that way? In Buffalo, a plagiarized manifesto was treated as definitive proof of ideology. In Butler, the mere fact of targeting a political figure was enough to declare the attack partisan. In Kirk’s case, the prominence of the victim and the symbolism of the stage nearly guaranteed that the act would be called political, even before the attacker’s full motives were known.
The category of “political violence” now functions less as a precise description and more as a rhetorical move. It signals that the act belongs to the broader war of left versus right. But this assumption may obscure more than it clarifies.
Costume vs. Cause
As we’ve seen, ideology often operates as costume, not cause. Martyrdom fantasies, personal collapse, and performative gestures are frequently more powerful motivators. Yet when media and political leaders default to ideological categories, they validate the costume and neglect the crisis underneath.
Why Words Matter
Language shapes response. If we call every attack “political,” we reward the attacker’s desire to be remembered as a soldier in a larger struggle. If we describe the event instead as grievance violence, performative collapse, or mythic self-destruction, we shift the emphasis away from ideology and onto the crisis itself. We deny attackers the dignity of ideological martyrdom and focus attention on prevention.
Toward a Sharper Vocabulary
We need words that distinguish between types of lone-actor attacks:
Ideological violence: rooted in genuine, coherent political doctrine.
Grievance violence: triggered by personal or relational grievances, framed in political terms.
Performative violence: staged to create spectacles and memory, often via livestreams or manifestos.
Collapse violence: born of untreated mental decline, isolation, and despair, with little or no ideological consistency.
By parsing violence more carefully, we not only describe it more accurately—we open new avenues for understanding and prevention.
NEXT POST
Part VII: Rethinking the Definition of Political Violence
If the analysis so far exposes the weaknesses of our current narratives, the next step is to ask a harder question: Should lone-actor shootings ever be called political violence at all?