At the SNF Agora Institute, scholarship illuminates the dangers facing democracy and brings them into public view. Senior Fellow Yascha Mounk, Professor of Practice of International Affairs at SAIS, examines the pressures on liberal democracy. In two essays written only days apart, The Assassin’s Veto and Beware the Merchants of Rage, Mounk captures both the immediate shock of political violence and its corrosive aftermath.
Written within an hour of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, The Assassin’s Veto makes sense of a moment when violence struck American political life. Just as a heckler’s veto allows a small group to disrupt speech, the assassin’s veto raises the cost of political participation so high that people fear for their lives if they speak. That chilling effect, he warns, threatens to silence democratic life.
Public engagement carries risks of abuse, vilification, and misrepresentation. Those pressures already drive thoughtful, public-spirited people away from politics, leaving the political arena to narcissistic, shameless, and more self-serving players. Political violence raises the stakes further, and many potential leaders now face the question of whether entering public life is worth the risk.
In Beware the Merchants of Rage, written days later, Mounk examines the aftermath. For a brief moment, he observed, Americans across the political spectrum recoiled in shared revulsion. Among the clearest voices was U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who began by acknowledging his profound disagreements with Kirk but also called him “a very smart and effective communicator and organizer and someone unafraid to get out into the world and engage the public.” The Vermont independent senator reminded Americans that freedom and democracy depend on the ability to speak, organize, and participate in public life without fear. “Political violence,” he said, “is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox also rose to the moment. The Republican executive called the killing “an attack on the American experiment” and warned that political violence “makes it more difficult for people to feel like they can share their ideas, that they can speak freely.” Speaking directly to young people, Cox acknowledged that politics today “feels like rage” but urged them to choose a different culture. He quoted Kirk himself: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” For Cox, those words underscored why open debate must endure, even in the face of profound disagreement.
These moments of clarity quickly gave way to partisan narratives. On the right, some leaders seized on the assassination to argue that only the left was violent and to call for sweeping purges of organizations. On the left, some voices justified or minimized the killing because of profound disagreement with Kirk’s views. Respected sources spread misinformation, but Mounk calls this secondary. “Misinformation isn’t what causes the problem,” he argues. “It’s the excuse people use to justify what they already wanted to do.”
For Mounk, the “justificatory spiral of violence” marks the most dangerous part of the current moment. Each act of political violence meets with attempts to rationalize, excuse, or weaponize it. That spiral deepens polarization and raises the likelihood of future attacks.
Mounk urges citizens to push back by calling for platforms and leaders that lift higher-quality, unifying content. He doubts the United States will descend into civil war, given the strength of its institutions. Still, he fears a steady rise in polarization, more assassinations, and growing pressure to take sides at all costs. The remedy, he argues, is what political scientists call “in-group moderation,” which confronts extremism within one’s own camp instead of focusing only on condemning opponents.
He hopes readers take from both essays the urgency of holding the line. Political violence, he insists, must never be excused, even implicitly. Leaders like Sanders and Cox show it is possible to fight for political values while rejecting violence outright. That is the standard Americans must demand of themselves and of one another, Mounk says.
By warning about the justificatory spiral of violence, Mounk advances a core mission of SNF Agora: to confront the dangers to democracy, to bring them into public conversation, and to insist that persuasion, not force, must remain the lifeblood of civic life.
