When is Political Violence Justified

What the Liberal Tradition Says on the Subject

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Someone in a Signal chat last week said, in the flat pacifist maximalist way that has become the default register of American liberal ethics, that political violence is never justifiable. I said, wryly, well, that’s not really true. He asked me what I meant. This piece is the receipt for the demurral.

Before I give the philosophical answer, I owe the reader the operative one, because on this subject any philosophical treatment that does not begin with the operative holding is a treatment that has forfeited its own seriousness.

Political violence is not justified in the United States in 2026. It is not justified against the President, against members of Congress, against federal officers, against judges, against any American official or institution or citizen. I do not support such violence. I do not endorse it. I do not condone it. I would oppose it if attempted, and I would name it as the wrong choice against the tradition whose logic I am about to lay out.

I say this while holding one of the darker readings available of the American political situation. What Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been engaged in since January is an abortive constitutional coup — a systematic effort to convert the executive into an instrument unbound by law, to capture the judiciary as an accessory to that conversion, and to disable the peaceful mechanisms of correction that the framers built into the system. I have argued this in these pages at length, in the piece on a more powerful President over a weaker Presidency and the piece on the great gaslighting of America and the entire ledger of the prior pieces. I hold that reading. I have not softened it. I do not soften it now.

And I still say political violence is not justified. Because holding a dark reading of the pattern is not the same as holding a dark reading of the exhaustion. The pattern condition is met. The exhaustion condition is nowhere close to met. Peaceful avenues for the restoration of the constitutional order remain abundant. The ability to organize, to protest, to boycott, to litigate, to run candidates, to vote, to speak in public, to publish, to fund the institutions of resistance, to persuade one’s neighbors, to build the coalition that will end this — all of it remains readily available, even now, even under a captured executive and a weaponized federal apparatus. It is harder than it should be. It requires more of us than it should require. But it is available. And as long as it is available, the Declaration’s own logic forbids the resort to arms.

That is the holding. Everything that follows is the theory that produces it, and the further theory of what would have to change for the holding to change.

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Before any theory, the axiom.

The Founding of the United States was an act of political violence. The men who signed the Declaration were traitors under the law that governed them, combatants under any law that could have been applied to them, and by the summer of 1776 they were already engaged in a shooting war against a legitimate sovereign whose troops were occupying the cities they lived in. They knew what they were doing. Franklin’s line at the signing — we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately — reads as a witticism now but was a plain legal observation at the time. The penalty for treason under English law was hanging, drawing, and quartering, and every man who signed that document was making himself eligible for it.

They did it anyway. And two hundred and fifty years later, the country they founded reveres them for it. Every Fourth of July, every schoolchild’s civics class, every naturalization ceremony, every appeal to the Founders’ wisdom in a Supreme Court opinion — the entire ceremonial architecture of American self-understanding is a monument to the proposition that this particular act of political violence, undertaken under these particular conditions, was justified. The word matters. Justified is stronger than tolerated and stronger than excused. It means a moral good in its own right, the right choice made by good men against a government that had lost the right to command their allegiance.

This is the tradition, and I think most Americans understand it at some level. Almost no one, pressed, actually holds the view that political violence is never justifiable under any conceivable circumstance. Ask a liberal whether the French Resistance was justified, or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or Nat Turner, or John Brown, or the American Revolution itself, and the answer will come back yes, in most cases yes, with qualifications and hesitations that are themselves an implicit theory of the threshold. The threshold is understood. What is rarely said aloud is where it sits, what conditions would move a country across it, what the citizen’s obligations become on the other side of it. Someone has to say those things. Not because the country is close to the threshold — I have already said it is not — but because a threshold that has never been spoken about is a threshold no one recognizes when it is being approached, and I would rather this country recognize the approach if it happens than fail to recognize it and arrive.

I will be the one who says it, then.

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The Declaration of Independence is a legal brief written in the cadence of a poem, and the legal brief is the part that matters. Jefferson, who was trained as a lawyer and who had spent a decade reading Locke and Sidney and the whole apparatus of English common-law resistance theory, was building an argument in the specific form arguments took in 1776: statement of the law, statement of the facts, application of the law to the facts, conclusion. The law is stated in the second paragraph. The facts are the twenty-seven-count indictment of King George. The application is the assertion that the facts satisfy the law. The conclusion is independence.

The law, as Jefferson stated it, has three components.

The first is the consent condition. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and the ends for which that consent is given are the security of certain rights — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, elsewhere in the American constitutional tradition, the equal protection of the laws and the due process by which those laws are administered. When government becomes destructive of these ends, the consent that founded it is voidable. This is Locke, and before Locke it is the medieval English coronation oath, and before that it is the reciprocal-obligation doctrine that runs through the whole Anglo-Norman feudal tradition. A ruler who breaks the compact releases the subject from allegiance. This has been the working theory of legitimate government in the English-speaking world for more than eight hundred years.

The second is the exhaustion condition, and it is the one contemporary invocations of the Declaration almost always ignore. Jefferson’s exact words: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The Declaration functions as a receipt before it functions as anything else. The entire middle of the document — the list of grievances — is Jefferson’s demonstration that peaceful redress had been sought, and sought, and sought again, and refused. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Before the invoice, the receipt. Before the right to revolution, the record of what was attempted first.

The third is the pattern condition, and it is the one that separates the Declaration from every terrorist manifesto that has ever been written. Jefferson’s phrase is exact: “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The threshold is a pattern — long, sustained, invariable in direction — whose design is the destruction of self-government itself. A single injustice does not qualify, nor a bad policy, nor a leader you dislike. The test is whether the aggregate direction of state action reveals an intent to end the conditions under which peaceful correction is possible. That threshold is meant to be very high, high enough to keep the theory of revolution from collapsing into the theory of every political malcontent with a grievance and a gun.

When all three conditions are met — consent voidable, redress exhausted, pattern despotic — the Declaration does not merely permit resistance. Read the words: “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” The word is duty. An obligation incurred rather than a permission granted. The Founders wrote the theory of just revolution because they believed themselves to be exercising it, and they believed the theory would apply again, someday, to some government, somewhere, and they wanted that future exercise to have a standard to be measured against.

This is the liberal ethics of political violence, with real content and specific triggers, and it has been the working theory of legitimate resistance in the American tradition for two hundred and fifty years.

⁂

This is a piece someone has to write, and I have decided the someone is me.

I understand the reasons the piece does not usually get written. The theory has been weaponized by every militia manifesto since Ruby Ridge. Timothy McVeigh cited the Declaration. January 6 rioters carried it in their pockets. Every claim to just revolution in modern American practice has been made by a right-wing insurgency operating on manufactured grievances and cosplayed exhaustion, and any writer who takes up the topic in good faith risks being placed in that company by readers who cannot or will not distinguish the analysis from the appropriation. I know the risk. I am taking it anyway, because the theory is real, and the moment is dark enough that someone the appropriators cannot easily claim needs to hold the tradition open in public, and I am willing to be that someone.

There is also the more human reason the piece rarely gets written, which is that the theory, taken seriously, forces one to hold two things at once that the ordinary rhythm of political speech does not accommodate.

The pattern condition has been met, and I say so without hedging. If you read what I have written across these pages, you already know I believe it: the pipeline that built the unitary executive, the capture of the epistemic infrastructure by donor networks pursuing structural despotism, the conversion of the Supreme Court from a check on that pipeline into an instrument of it, the ongoing project of stripping the federal workforce and installing loyalists, the deportation regime operating outside due process, the assault on the machinery that made the country legible to itself — this is a long train, and it is invariable in direction, and its design is the destruction of the conditions under which self-government can peacefully correct itself. The pattern condition is met.

And the exhaustion condition is nowhere close to being met. Elections are still held. The 2026 midterms will be held. Courts still, however imperfectly, rule against the executive when the executive overreaches — as they have in dozens of injunctions since January. State attorneys general still sue and win. Journalists still publish. Organizers still organize. Boycotts still bite. The press is diminished but functional. Congress is captured but not eliminated. States retain their sovereign machinery. The peaceful avenues have been damaged, in some cases severely, but they are not closed. They are open, they are legally protected, they are physically available to every citizen willing to use them, and they are — this is the harder part — capable of producing the correction they exist to produce, if enough people use them well enough.

So the operative fact stands: the exhaustion condition has not been met, and until it is met, the terminal remedy is forbidden by the very logic that would otherwise permit it.

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But the conditions could be met. The threshold is real. It has been reached before in American history — in 1776, and arguably again in 1861 for the four million human beings held in chattel slavery, whose peaceful means of redress were literally none, whose exhaustion condition was fulfilled by the entire structure of American law, and for whom violent resistance was — as Frederick Douglass argued and John Brown demonstrated — a direct application of the Declaration’s own logic to the condition of a people whose peaceful means had been foreclosed by law. And the threshold could be reached again. In the wrong sequence of events, in the wrong five years, in the wrong compounding of failures, we could be there.

The honest liberal position, and the one that the tradition actually requires, is to name what that would look like. Because refusing to name it does not make it less likely. It makes it more likely. The threshold that goes unnamed is the threshold that gets crossed without anyone noticing until it is already behind us.

The specific triggers that would satisfy the exhaustion condition are these.

An election is canceled or its result nullified by executive fiat, and no institution — no court, no state, no legislature — is able to enforce the result. The distinction from the current moment is that this scenario is not a delayed election or a disputed election but one canceled or overturned outright, with force behind the cancellation.

An opposition politician of national standing is arrested and imprisoned on charges that are transparently pretextual, and the courts are stripped of the jurisdiction to review the charges, and the imprisonment is used to disqualify further political competition. What separates this from a bad-faith prosecution is that the machinery of law has been stripped of the power to intervene, and the imprisonment is being used structurally to remove the possibility of political opposition.

The Supreme Court is stripped of jurisdiction to hear constitutional claims against executive action, or its rulings are simply ignored by the executive with no consequence, and this pattern is established over a period of time such that it is understood by all parties as the new operating condition. This means an executive branch acting, systematically and openly, as though the judicial branch does not exist.

The press is silenced by force — by prosecution under sedition-style statutes, by regulatory closure of platforms, by physical violence against journalists that goes unpunished — such that the flow of information required for peaceful political correction is cut off. This is silencing, not criticism or lawful challenge, and it is designed to end the possibility of the governed knowing what the government is doing.

State governments that resist federal despotism are federalized by force — their national guards seized, their officials removed, their legislatures dissolved — such that the federal structure that has served as one of the peaceful means of resistance is dismantled.

And underneath all of these, the ordinary electoral mechanism — the ability of the people to choose their representatives in a free and fair vote and to have that choice respected — is ended, either by cancellation, or by manipulation so gross that the outcome no longer bears any relation to the ballot, or by the disqualification of political opposition through mass arrest.

Any two of these, occurring together and sustained over time, would in my judgment satisfy the exhaustion condition. Three would satisfy it decisively. And when the exhaustion condition is satisfied, and when the pattern condition has already been satisfied — as it has, and as I have argued at length that it has — then the consent condition is voidable, and the Declaration’s terrible sentence applies. “It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

I am not saying that any of these has occurred. I am saying the opposite. I am saying that the availability of the peaceful means is what distinguishes the moment we are in from the moment the Declaration was written to address, and that the availability is real, and that our obligation as citizens is to use those means with an urgency and a competence and a coalition-discipline commensurate with the gravity of the pattern we face.

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Some readers will find even this uncomfortable. Some will accuse me of drawing a road map. They will say that naming the triggers is a form of invitation, that the threshold-in-being is a threshold-in-preparation, that even the philosophical treatment produces the political result.

This is precisely backward.

Naming the threshold is what makes the peaceful contract binding on the sovereign. A regime that believes its opponents will never resort to force under any circumstances is a regime that faces no cost for crossing any line. The line-drawer’s discipline is what constrains the line-crosser. The Founders understood this. It is why the Second Amendment exists in the form it does, however debased its contemporary invocation. It is why the militia clauses of the Constitution exist. It is why the American constitutional tradition has never been a purely pacifist tradition, and why the great pacifist figures of American history — Thoreau, King, John Lewis — always articulated their pacifism against the background of a tradition that permitted violence, and thereby made their choice of nonviolence a moral choice rather than a legal requirement. King’s nonviolence was possible because Malcolm’s alternative existed. The one made the other credible. And the American state responded to King’s discipline in part because it understood that the discipline was chosen, and that a different choice was on the table.

The regime that comes to believe its opponents have no other choice becomes the regime that treats them as though they have no other choice. This is the pattern in every consolidation of authoritarian rule, from Hungary to Turkey to the compounding drift in the United States since 2017. The despot’s confidence grows with each unpunished escalation. The escalations grow with the confidence. And the moment when the pattern could have been arrested — the moment when the sovereign might have paused to consider whether he was approaching a line his opponents would defend — that moment passes silently, because no one had spoken the line aloud.

I am speaking it aloud. Not to invite its crossing. To make its crossing more costly. To make the crossing legible, so that the day it happens, the country will know it has happened, and the tradition will have the vocabulary to say what it is.

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I want to place myself in the argument, because a philosophical piece that does not commit its author to a position is a piece that has forfeited the right to be taken seriously.

Here is where I stand.

If, tomorrow, an election is canceled by executive order and the cancellation stands, I will support organized resistance to the federal government. I will support it publicly, I will fund it if I can, and I will accept the moral responsibility that comes with saying such a thing in these pages under my own name. I do not want that day to come. I do not expect that day to come. I have been careful all my life to distinguish the darker political readings I entertain from the operational stances I take, and I am not entertaining a dark reading here. I am naming a threshold. If the threshold is crossed, I know what I would do.

If, before that, an opposition politician of national standing is arrested and imprisoned on transparently pretextual charges, and the courts are stripped of the power to intervene, I will support mass civil disobedience of the kind that risks physical harm to those who undertake it, and I will support the moral and legal doctrine that such disobedience, even when it results in violent confrontation, is justified. I will not, at that stage, support first-strike violence against officials. But I will support the resistance whose response to state violence includes the willingness to defend itself.

If the Supreme Court is stripped of jurisdiction over executive action and the stripping is enforced by the executive itself, I will support the states that refuse to comply with federal orders under such a stripped Constitution, and I will support the doctrine that federal officers who enforce those orders in defiance of state resistance may, at some further stage, be legitimately opposed with force by state actors acting under constitutional authority.

Between here and those thresholds is a large territory, and it is the territory we currently occupy. In that territory I remain a citizen who votes, who writes, who supports litigation, who funds organizing, who argues in these pages that the peaceful means are still available and must be used, and used more effectively than we have used them. I remain there because the theory itself demands that I remain there. Prudence dictates that governments long established not be changed for light and transient causes. I take that seriously. I take it as binding on my own conduct as much as on Jefferson’s.

But I do not pretend the ceiling does not exist. I do not pretend the theory does not apply. And I do not pretend that if the ceiling is broken, my obligations remain what they were beneath it.

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Liberalism, at its origin, was a revolutionary doctrine. The ethics of orderly parliamentary contestation came later. What came first was the theory that justified the killing of a king.

John Locke wrote the Second Treatise of Government against the backdrop of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which an English king was deposed by force, chased from the country, and replaced by a Parliament-selected monarch under conditions Parliament dictated. Locke’s argument for the legitimacy of that revolution is the intellectual scaffolding on which the Declaration was later built, and Locke’s argument was unambiguous: a ruler who violates the natural rights his subjects retain has broken the compact, and when the compact is broken the subjects may resume the powers they had delegated, by force if force is required. That is the entire operative content of the Treatise, and any reading that softens it is a reading that misses what the book was written to do. The book is a defense of revolution, written to justify one that had already happened and to make future ones intelligible as legitimate acts rather than criminal ones. That book is the foundation of the political tradition we call liberal.

Before Locke, the same argument was being made in the English Civil War by the parliamentary theorists who executed Charles I in 1649. John Milton, whose Areopagitica is a cornerstone of the liberal case for free speech, also wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a direct defense of regicide as a legitimate act of a sovereign people against a tyrannical ruler. Algernon Sidney, whose Discourses Concerning Government Jefferson kept beside Locke in his library, argued explicitly that armed resistance to a tyrant was not merely permitted but required, and was executed for his views under Charles II. The English liberal tradition was born in a shooting war against monarchical absolutism, and the philosophers who articulated its principles were writing either from the winning side of that war or from prison cells awaiting execution for having taken it.

The American liberal tradition inherited this directly. Jefferson wrote to Madison, in the aftermath of Shays’s Rebellion, that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” He meant it. He was writing to the man who would draft the Constitution, and he was arguing that the willingness of the citizenry to rise against a government that had exceeded its legitimate powers was a precondition for good government, a background pressure without which the machinery of consent would eventually collapse into acquiescence. Madison himself, who was more institutionally minded and who spent his career building the machinery that would make peaceful correction sufficient, still assumed that the ultimate check on a lawless federal government was the armed resistance of the states. This is the entire underlying premise of the Federalist argument for divided sovereignty: a federal government which trampled the states’ rights would face armed opposition from state militias, and the credible prospect of that opposition was expected to deter the trampling in the first place. Peaceful petition was the ordinary mode. Armed state resistance was the background threat that made the ordinary mode work.

The French liberal tradition made the same argument on the same premises and produced a revolution far bloodier than the American one, and the French philosophers who provided its intellectual apparatus — Rousseau, Sieyès, Condorcet — were operating within the same Lockean frame. The revolutionary generation across the Atlantic world, whatever their disagreements about religion or economics or the proper design of legislatures, agreed on the fundamental point: legitimate government rests on consent, consent can be withdrawn when the compact is broken, and the ultimate guarantor of the compact is the credible threat that its violation will be met with force.

The American abolitionist tradition, which is the tradition through which liberalism was extended to include the enslaved, understood this with a clarity that most contemporary liberals have lost. Frederick Douglass, in his 1857 speech on West India Emancipation, said flatly: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” He then continued: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” He kept a rifle in his study. He defended John Brown publicly after Harpers Ferry. He told a congressional committee, on the record, that his own escape from slavery was an act of legitimate revolutionary violence undertaken against a state that had forfeited its right to command his allegiance. And Douglass, by the end of his life, was one of the most honored figures in the American liberal tradition, honored precisely because he had understood what the tradition required in the specific historical conditions under which he was working.

Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, told the seceding South: “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” Lincoln was defending the Union. He was arguing against secession on the grounds that the conditions for revolutionary right had not been met. But he was doing so within a frame that took the revolutionary right itself as given. He assumed his audience would recognize the underlying doctrine because it was the doctrine on which the country was founded and by which its legitimacy was continuously renewed.

This is the tradition. Every serious philosopher of liberalism, from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, understood that the theory of consent implies a theory of resistance, and that the theory of resistance implies a threshold beyond which force becomes legitimate. Locke wrote it. Milton wrote it. Sidney died for it. Jefferson signed his name to a document deploying it against the government that ruled him. Madison built a constitution assuming it as a background condition. Douglass extended it to the enslaved and armed himself in accordance with it. Lincoln invoked it while arguing that its conditions were not yet present.

Recovering this tradition is the opposite of a call to violence. The tradition is what makes peaceful correction credible, because it names the alternative that peaceful correction is designed to render unnecessary. A liberalism that has forgotten its revolutionary roots is a liberalism whose peaceful methods have lost their meaning, because the peaceful methods only work when the sovereign understands that the citizenry’s patience with peaceful methods has a bottom. The Founders built the country on this understanding. The abolitionists extended it to include the enslaved. The framers of the Reconstruction Amendments wrote it into the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification-for-insurrection clause, which presupposes that armed rebellion against a legitimate government is treason precisely because armed rebellion against an illegitimate one would not be. The liberal tradition, taken whole, has always carried this doctrine inside it.

What I am asking of the reader is to hold the tradition whole. To read Locke as Locke wrote himself, and Jefferson as Jefferson wrote himself, and Douglass as Douglass wrote himself, and to notice that every one of them held simultaneously that peaceful means must be tried and exhausted before force becomes legitimate, and that when peaceful means are exhausted, force does become legitimate, and that the threshold is high but the threshold is real. The militias have made a caricature of this argument by removing the exhaustion condition and treating the threshold as though it had already been crossed. The argument itself, held whole, is the argument that produced the constitutional government they falsely claim to defend, and it belongs to the tradition that built that government, not to the movement that would tear it down.

⁂

The interlocutor in the Signal chat said political violence is never justifiable, and I responded with three wry words because the sentence he had spoken was not one that could be answered in a Signal chat without becoming the piece I am writing now. He deserves the full answer. Everyone who has ever had that thought and left it unsaid deserves the full answer. And the country deserves someone who is willing to write the full answer down, in their own name, in a form that can be read and disagreed with and quoted and refined by anyone who wants to take up the argument.

So here it is. My name is on it. The argument stands or falls on the strength of the reasoning, and I have tried to make the reasoning as strong as I know how to make it. If you disagree with the threshold I have drawn, tell me where you would draw it instead. If you disagree that the threshold exists, tell me what you believe replaces it. If you agree, say so — not because I need the confirmation but because the tradition needs the voices.

The saving answer is the Declaration’s answer. Consent voidable. Redress exhausted. Pattern despotic. And when all three conditions are met, and only when all three conditions are met, the citizen may — must, the document says — throw off such Government and provide new guards for their future security.

We are not there. I have said so throughout, and I say it again here: the peaceful means remain abundant, and our work as citizens is to use them, to build the coalitions and institutions and habits through which they can be made adequate to the pattern we face. That work is available and unfinished, and it is what we owe to the tradition and to each other and to the country that has not yet slipped into the condition where the terrible answer applies.

But we could go there. And a country that pretends it could not is a country that will not see itself arriving until it has arrived. And a country that has surrendered the vocabulary of arrival is a country that cannot name what it is doing even to itself.

I am unwilling to be such a citizen. The three-word demurral I made in the Signal chat was small, but it was the beginning of a longer answer, and the longer answer is this: I would support political violence when the conditions Jefferson named are met, I would oppose it in every other circumstance, and I would spend my life trying to keep the country in the every-other-circumstance rather than let it drift into the one where the terrible answer applies.

That is what a liberal ethics of political violence, honestly held, actually says. And here is my on the page, holding it.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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