Fighting Fire with Fire

Last week, I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. While the film deserves its own article, I want to focus on one aspect of the film’s themes, and that is the use of violence in the service of political ideology. (Spoiler Alert: I talk about some details of the film that go beyond what trailers have shown.)

What is striking about the film is that it follows two very different types of people from distinct political ideologies. On the one hand, you have Bob Ferguson and Perfidia Beverly Hills, two radical revolutionaries who are a part of the French 75. They use violent tactics to resist the state and rescue captive immigrants. On the other hand, you have Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, a white supremacist military man who uses violent and oppressive tactics to hunt down his possible daughter and kill her to ensure entry into his white supremacist club, The Christmas Adventurers.

Both sets of people adhere to different ideological positions. But, one common point between the two is that each side acknowledges that violence is, in their minds, a justifiable means to bring about their preferred political ends. While the film highlights this similarity, it sets up the French 75 as the protagonists and state power embodied by Lockjaw as the antagonist.

Although One Battle After Another takes a relatively clear stance on whose violence is “better,” it also clearly communicates an uncomfortable truth about violence in general: violence can be used in service of just about anything. Save for the highly dedicated pacifist, no political ideology is immune to the use of violence.

To understand why most political ideologies are in some way violent, we need only ask a simple question: does the ideology accept that states are permitted to use coercion in order to enforce the law? When you accept that a legitimate state can sometimes use violence, your ideology must have provisions for violence. In order to purify one’s political ideology of all violence, one would need to reject state sanctioned coercion, which is fairly difficult to do at both a theoretical and practical level.

While violence can emerge from nearly all ideological corners, a recent presidential memorandum would have us believe otherwise. On September 25, President Trump released a memorandum on domestic terrorism and organized political violence. It mentions several instances of political violence-among them the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the attempted assassinations on President Trump, the murder of Brian Thompson, and an attempt to kill Brett Kavanaugh. It then goes on to outline several ideological themes that, according to the current administration, unify the motivations for political violence:

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Trump’s administration has framed the issue of political violence in the United States as primarily a problem of radical left-wing extremism. As it turns out, there is some research that supports the claim that left-wing violence has increased. However, the very same research also reveals something else: between the years 1994 and 2025, the majority of politically motivated violent attacks have come from the right. So, although left-wing violence may be rising more rapidly relative to right-wing violence in 2025, right-wing violence has long outpaced left-wing violence.

There are also several glaring omissions in Trump’s memorandum. For instance, he fails to mention the attempted violent insurrection on January 6th, the killing of Melissa Hortman in June of 2025, or the attack on Nancy and Paul Pelosi, which are just a few examples of right-wing extremism. He also omits political violence motivated by anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim sentiment, or by violence towards the LGBTQ+ community.

Given the flexible nature of violence, one might wish to simply argue that any ideologies that lead to violence should be abandoned. However, this position fails to recognize some difficult truths about violence.

First, we must constantly remember that modern political entities are violent by nature. It is why the police and military have weapons. It is why most modern nations invest money into defense budgets and one of the motivating reasons for why many international alliances are struck. It is why, in the U.S. in particular, we spend more money on our own military than any other nation. It is why nations come up with rules that regulate the ways in which states can legally use violent means to enforce rules. It is why a majority of U.S. states still have the death penalty. Any time power changes hands in the U.S., so too does the capacity to shift how the violent means are used. But no party in the U.S. has gotten rid of the means of violence, and it is hard to imagine anyone doing so in the near future.

The reason why violence and state power are commingled has been the subject of political philosophy, social contract theory, critical theory, sociology, and history for a long time. It is widely acknowledged that where there is a state, there follows state-backed violence. Indeed, one of the defining features of a state is that it makes rules and is allowed to enforce those rules using the force of violence. Whether one accepts a social contract theory that legitimizes state violence, or opposes its legitimacy on anarchist grounds, all can clearly see that the state’s supreme power comes from its ability to use the coercive threat of violence.

In addition to the strong bond between state power and violence, we must also acknowledge that it is difficult to eschew ideological positions that justify violence because most of us are committed to some version of the right to life and the right to self-defense. These two rights often come together. The right to life generally states that one has a moral right to their life, which at the very least demands that others not wrongfully take your life from you. From this one can derive the right to self-defense, which generally says that if another fails to respect your right to life, then you may do what is necessary to protect your own life, even if that means using violence.

Given the common belief that states are defined by their use of violence and the general commitment that many have towards the use of violence in self-defense cases, we cannot easily say that all violent ideologies must be abandoned. So, when we evaluate a “violent ideology,” the crucial question is not whether an ideology can justify violence, but under what conditions it does. Framing the issue this way forces us to examine our own ideological commitments and to acknowledge the fundamental seriousness of politics.

And this is precisely why Trump’s memorandum is troubling. His failure to recognize clearly demonstrated forms of right-wing political violence in his memorandum or in his public speeches gives us little reason to believe he genuinely cares about solving the problem of “violent ideologies.” Even more concerning is the way he frames the issue as a “war from within.” In harmony with this warlike rhetoric, Trump has responded accordingly: deploying the National Guard to U.S. cities, empowering police departments to collaborate with ICE, encouraging top military officials to use U.S. cities as training grounds, and routinely citing the insurrection act.

Trump is employing a rhetorical sleight of hand that demands scrutiny. In order to justify the increased militarization of law enforcement, he has selectively highlighted instances of political violence with ambiguous or left-leaning motives. At the same time he ignores, pardons, and uses violence motivated by right-wing beliefs with confidence. This selective framing not only distorts the reality of political violence in the U.S., it also actively makes it worse by deepening the divide between the left and the right.

While many ideologies have room for the use of violence, it is crucial that we do not conflate this point with the idea that all justifications of violence count for the same, or the idea that violence is to be celebrated and used flippantly. Violence is gravely serious and we have good reason to avoid resorting to it unless absolutely necessary. Violence violates bodily autonomy, and often leads to serious injury and death. Taking the life of another is at the top of the list of most immoral things one can do to another human, and for good reason. However, we cannot evaluate the justifications for the use of violence when we fail to acknowledge the fact that violence is used by a wide range of political ideologies.

Asking whether or not an ideology is violent will only ever answer part of our question about its moral value. If we accept the possibility that some violence is justifiable, but that it needs serious justification, knowing that an ideology is violent only tells you that you must scrutinize the ideology more closely. What we need to know next is why an ideology justifies the use of violence. This brings us swiftly one of life’s great moral quandaries: when, if ever, is violence justified?

Answering this question is no small feat, but there are a few principles we can start with to constrain the possible justifications for violence.

First, we can ask whether or not all non-violent means have been pursued. Given a commitment to the moral seriousness of violence, it is imperative to know whether non-violent means cannot bring about the same result. Famously, Martin Luther King advocated for civil disobedience using a similar logic; first exhaust all legal means at your disposal, and then after those routes have failed, engage in non-violent civil disobedience as a way to bring about change. This condition can constrain the use of violence in a similar way,  to only those cases where there are no non-violent means available.

Second, given the moral seriousness of violence and the risk of being wrong about one’s reason for using violence, violence should be kept to an absolute minimum, i.e., one should never use more violence than is necessary to fulfill the justified end of violence. If someone poses a moderate threat to you, but does not threaten your life, it would be wrong to use lethal force when non-lethal force would do. This follows from a commitment to the idea that violence requires justification in the first place. Given that not all violence produces the same amount of harm (e.g., sprained wrists, broken bones, and death are all outcomes of violence), one needs not only a justification for using violence in general, but also for the specific type of violence used.

Third, we should ask ourselves how an ideology frames violence in the first place. Does the ideology glorify violence or does it frame violence as a regrettable necessity? Does the ideology acknowledge the seriousness of violence or does it try to minimize it? Does the ideology dehumanize others? Or, does the ideology recognize the importance of a principle of moral equality? Does the ideology recognize a fundamental right to be protected from violence? The answers to these questions can tell us more about whether the violence is in the realm of justifiable.

While this list is not exhaustive, it outlines some ways we can think about violence that pull us beyond often unhelpful binaries. It is not as simple as saying we should simply reject all violent ideologies. Political ideologies need to address the question of violence and we need to grapple with the way that violence can arise from every direction of the political spectrum. Failure to acknowledge this is a failure to take the discussion about violence seriously.