Outside the Beltway

The Seductive Allure of Collective Blame

"He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face.”

Michael Bailey · Sunday, September 14, 2025 · 10 comments

Last week was a heavy and angst-filled week in America. Charlie Kirk’s murder was as public as a murder could be—seen live in front of thousands, and then shared on social media by millions more. It was horrific, upsetting, and, for many, terribly sad.

But my real focus here is not the crime itself. Like many others, I want to reflect on what our response to this dreadful act reveals about who we are as a people. The whole country is talking not only about the murder, but also about our reactions to the murder, and our reactions to the reactions, and what those reactions (ad nauseam) suggest about the state of our nation. Here is my contribution to the chatter, though I hope by the time it sees the light of day, it is yesterday’s business. What I offer may not strike many readers as particularly realistic. But surely if the voices of rage, nihilism, or shrug-and-sigh defeatism (which masquerades as pragmatism) have a place at the table, then so too does the occasional voice of idealism.

Back to 1960

In the 1960 election, Dallas, Texas, voted for Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy. By 1963, after Kennedy began to advocate more forcefully for civil rights, his already-low popularity in Dallas plummeted even further. Some aides warned him not to travel there for security reasons, but Kennedy wanted to keep Texas in play for the 1964 elections, so he chose to go. And then, of course, he was assassinated.

So let me get to the spoiler: The city of Dallas did not kill John F. Kennedy.

Nor did Dallas declare war on America or on Democrats. Nor did Kennedy need to be avenged by punishing Dallas as a collective. Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy. He may have had help from other individuals or groups, but Oswald pulled the trigger, and he bore the guilt. Perhaps others deserved punishment as well. But Dallas was not one of them.

It’s not hard to see where I’m going.

The Intractability of Motives and the Rush to Collective Blame

The person or people responsible for Charlie Kirk’s murder should be punished consistent with the law. But as of this writing, despite a suspect being apprehended, and despite the murder’s extreme publicity, we know very little with certainty. But oh brothers and sisters, our ignorance has not stopped us from not only privately speculating (which is natural), but also publicly declaring with confidence what the motives behind the murder were, what ideology was at play, and which groups, belief systems, or political parties should be blamed and punished. Entire communities have been called out to “be held accountable.”

It’s crucial to keep in mind that violent motives spring from many sources. A quick survey of American history, rich with violence, shows as much. We’ve had numerous assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against our presidents. Surely ideology must have driven such acts against supremely political figures, right? In reality, the variety of motives is strikingly diverse. Consider:

• Andrew Jackson’s would-be assassin thought he was the true king of England and saw Jackson as a usurper.
• James Garfield’s assassin, a Garfield supporter, believed he was owed a diplomatic post. Surely one of history’s more obvious ironies. 
• Theodore Roosevelt’s (post-presidency) shooter claimed supernatural orders.
• One of Gerald Ford’s two would-be assassins supposedly acted to bring attention to Charles Manson’s cult.
• John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
• Matthew Crooks shot President Trump in the ear at a rally, killing two others, but his political inclinations and motives remain unknown.

Motives are not predictable or easily categorized—nor do they conveniently align with our preferred political optics. Human beings are complicated, reality is messy, and yet, in our absurdly polarized climate, too many of us leap almost instinctively to conclude upon hearing of political violence: “Aha! Even more proof that my opponents are evil.”

Certainly, the moment the news of Kirk’s murder broke, and even before anyone was apprehended, accusations of collective guilt poured out.

On the right, a Fox commentator declared, “They [presumably the Left] are at war with us… This can never happen again. It ends now!” President Donald Trump himself said extreme leftist rhetoric was directly responsible for the murder. Not a contributing factor, not an amplifying effect. Nope, our Demagogue in Chief, whose job presumably is to unify the country and lessen unrest, singled out an ideology and its rhetoric as directly responsible for Kirk’s murder. Then, of course, internet-ers gonna internet. Prominent contributors and social media influencers made no shortage of unhinged proclamations. Elon Musk declared, “The Left is the party of murder.” Others insisted, “This is war,” or that there should be “No more mercy for leftists… They want you dead.” 

Nor did those on the Left hesitate to assign blame. On social media I read claims that our gun culture and toxic masculinity were responsible. Grossest among the claims on the Left, Kirk was blamed for his own murder. While he did not pull the trigger, his incendiary rhetoric supposedly made the violence inevitable.

The theme of group blame is so ubiquitous in our culture that we’ve become inured to it. It’s deeply embedded in human society, perhaps even a result of our evolutionary psychology. It’s always easier to observe—and to condemn—when removed from our own immediate concerns. It’s one thing when 1930s Germans scapegoated Jews and Roma, another when wrongdoers belong to groups we ourselves believe are ruining truth and beauty. But whenever individual wrongdoers become proxies for entire communities or ideologies, we tread on dangerous ground and awaken primordial impulses more easily unleashed than contained.

Violence and Blame Are Not One-Sided

We live in a violent society. It’s not especially violent by historical standards, but by contemporary democratic standards we remain unusually violent. Horrific crimes happen with heartbreaking regularity, motivated by many different beliefs. Consider recent examples of American political violence and hate crimes:

• Decades of bombings and murders at abortion clinics as well as attacks on gay nightclubs, synagogues, Kansas City’s Jewish Community Center,  and Black churches.
• The shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice (2017).
• The plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (2020).
• The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol (2021), a violent mob action that led to several deaths and many injuries.
• The hammer attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco (2022), which was quite possibly intended for Nancy Pelosi.
• The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally (2024). In fact, there have been two attempts on his life.
• The murder of Minnesota Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife (2025).
• The arson attack at Governor Josh Shapiro’s home (2025).
• The shooting and murder at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2025).
  

Just writing this list is an exercise in heartache, and reviewing it tempts me to believe we live in a miserably lousy nation. But one thing I cannot conclude is that any one political side holds a monopoly on hatred or violence.

Three Truths in Tension We Must Manage

We need to navigate three truths that exist in deep tension.

The first truth: Liberal democracy requires an exclusive commitment to individual legal responsibility for individual actions. Our Constitution’s Article III prohibition against “corruption of blood” speaks powerfully to this point. Crimes do not legally taint even families, the closest relation to a perpetrator. Far less should tenuously linked groups be held responsible. Justice in a liberal democracy requires due process, starting with the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It requires proper legal counsel, fair trials, and accountability directed to individuals—not races, religions, parties, or belief systems.

The second truth: We are thoroughly cultural beings. Who we are, and what we do, is profoundly shaped, limited, and animated by the broader culture in which we live.

Liberalism, in its wisdom, draws sharp distinctions between the individual and society, and between private and public action. These distinctions protect us from government abuse and overreach. They are crucial safeguards against legal scapegoating. But we also know this: those liberal constructs of “individual” and “society” grow fuzzy under scrutiny.

Certainly our individual identities are deeply relational. I am a father, a husband, a friend, a professor, a Methodist, a neighbor, an American, a Georgian. In describing myself, I am really naming relationships. Who I am cannot be separated from the culture in which I live. My language, my work, my social life—all of it makes sense only within the context of particular cultures in a particular time. And the limits of what I can do as set by culture often feel as firm as natural laws even though they are not fixed permanently.

Many of us operate, even if only subconsciously, on the assumption that our culture holds together—or falls apart—together. We know that our actions are bound up with the whole.

Think of the Puritans, whose influence on American culture is outsized. Their covenantal theology taught that the community’s actions would be judged as a whole. Their theology was unique to their Reformed tradition but the impulse to tie my fate to your behavior—and yours to mine—is, I conjecture, natural. It feels natural because it is true. For all the American nonsense of “pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps” individualism, we know that somehow we are in this thing together. What I do affects your chances. What you do affects mine.

Both left and right recognize this, though they stress different things. On the left, there are calls for racial reparations—rooted in the conviction that today’s inequalities grow from a collective history, one that long outlasted slavery’s abolition 150 years ago. The left also insists, not without evidence, that gun culture and toxic masculinity make us less safe.

On the right, conservatives have warned us for decades that video games, movies, and music weaken our moral framework. Take prayer out of schools, they say, and youth will lose moral responsibility. Let Elvis shake his hips on television, and it’s a slippery slope to hell. At the very least, their anxieties about moral education—and about society’s flourishing—stand in a proud tradition, one that goes back to Plato himself.

But here’s my point. The persuasiveness of any single example doesn’t matter. These examples simply show that both left and right know the same thing: culture shapes our life chances. Culture shapes what you and I believe is possible. It shapes what we consider real. It shapes our very identities. Culture draws the horizon of what is good and bad, true and false.

Culture matters—even as individuals remain legally responsible within our liberal framework.

The third truth: We weaponize cultural responsibility selectively and hypocritically.

A bad actor on the other political side is, to us, proof their whole side is rotten. Bad actors on my side? They speak for themselves. They certainly don’t represent me. They’re lone wolves, sad souls, delusional outliers.

This selective outrage fuels the ritualized cycle of accusation and indignation that defines our politics. A terrible act happens. We express outrage—or don’t. Then the outrage cycle kicks in: too much outrage when it happens to them, too little when it happens to us. Within moments we are plunged into a ritualized dance of accusation, indignation, and disbelief, each side performing for its team. 

Where Do We Go From Here?

Here I am calling for an exceptionally challenging balance of commitment to multiple truths and self-restraint. Setting institutional reforms aside (the likes of which are beyond my pay grade), any hope we have as a nation to move past—or at least muddle through—our current ugly cycle of endless recrimination will require changes in individual behavior.

First, we must be scrupulous in rejecting collective guilt. A murderer is guilty of murder—not a race, not a religion, not a city, not even a party or ideology. The perpetrators of a crime, along with those who aid and abet them, are the ones who should be prosecuted. 

The city of Dallas did not kill John F. Kennedy.

Second, we must acknowledge that we are cultural beings and that our own actions and words shape the broader culture. Our culture shapes our quality of life. The ripple effects of our words and actions on the broader culture are too obscure to trace with certainty, but that doesn’t absolve us of personal responsibility. We fool ourselves—and engage in special pleading—when we excuse in ourselves or our tribe what we condemn in others. None of us can change culture overnight, and none of us knows how to shape it in simple, predictable ways. Still, individuals help set the atmosphere in which violence and other bad forms of behavior becomes thinkable. The one thing each of us can do with certainty is change our own rhetoric, our own tone.

So here is a paradox that rubs against human nature: we must not blame groups for individual crimes, yet we must take responsibility for the culture we are building together. Liberalism’s insistence on individual accountability is a beautiful construct. It protects us from scapegoating. At the same time, our actions ripple outward, shaping the public imagination.

Isn’t This Unilateral Disarmament?

Calling for a higher moral standard always risks charges of naïveté. In the rough-and-tumble world of politics, when opponents fight dirty, such calls may even feel self-destructive. But note what I am not suggesting. I am not saying that by refusing to assign collective guilt—or by accepting responsibility for our cultural influence—we must tolerate abuses from our opponents in silence. For example, it’s not just permissible, it’s crucial that we call out our president’s awful rhetoric. 

Let me get a little more specific by way of analogy. Public intellectual Sam Harris, a prominent critic of Islam, argues that because ideas affect actions, we can and should call out dangerous ideas. I agree. Even religious convictions, in my view, are far from immune to criticism. But there is a world of difference between rejecting bad ideas through reasoned argument and holding all adherents responsible for the vicious acts of a few. Nor does the right to critique bad ideas give us carte blanche in how we do so. Mockery ought to be legally protected, but it is often unwise.

In 1757, an unknown man wrote to Benjamin Franklin seeking affirmation for a letter he wrote satirizing religion. We don’t have the original letter, only Franklin’s reply. Franklin—among the most heterodox of the Founders, sometimes polytheistic, sometimes deistic—might have been expected to sympathize. Instead, he counseled restraint:

“Tho’ your Reasonings are subtle, and may prevail with some Readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general Sentiments of Mankind on that Subject, and the Consequence of printing this Piece will be a great deal of Odium drawn upon your self, Mischief to you and no Benefit to others. He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face.”

What some might see as timidity in Franklin, I see as wisdom.  Let us not forget that Franklin  was not opposed to violence when necessary; after all, he voted for independence. But he recognized there is no realistic world in which I can act with impunity while holding my opponents responsible. I am persuaded that if we can hold both the truths of individual legal accountability and our own individual cultural responsibility, we might resist the temptation to weaponize outrage against “them.” We won’t solve all of our problems in this manner, but perhaps we can dial our hatred down a notch. And perhaps, in time, we might begin to ask the harder, more hopeful question: How can we build a better life together?