In his 1894 essay “The Ethics of Dynamite,” English individualist Auberon Herbert likened the use of violence by revolutionary anarchists to the violence the state itself represents, and he drew out in his characteristically beautiful prose the nature of the state as a form of concentrated, organized violence. Herbert occurred to me as I reflected on growing political violence in the United States on the occasion of the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a man just thirty-one years of age, in an apparent political assassination. It seems likely that whoever did this (a suspect,...

The claim that Donald Trump is a fascist was an essential feature of the Democratic Party's electoral strategy in 2024. Despite its massive failure, the left continues to beat this dead horse and will no doubt continue. And while Trump has abundant negative qualities, being a fascist is not among them. Seventy-six million voters knew the Democrats’ “fascist” narrative was nonsense, but it remains important to confront the assertion that Donald Trump and his followers are in a meaningful sense “fascists,” not simply because it is ahistorical and false, but more importantly, because this claim...

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris recently announced that she would favor eliminating the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule to codify the former rule of Roe v. Wade (1973) that treated abortion as a civil right. Roe was overruled by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), returning the issue to the state governments to decide. Eliminating the filibuster for ordinary legislation, as Harris proposes, is enormously dangerous, as it would further transform the American political system into a purely majoritarian one that would empower temporary, bare...