America Must Choose Reform Over Radicalism

The assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University marks another grim milestone in America’s escalating cycle of political violence. From the attempts on Donald Trump’s life to the firebombing of Josh Shapiro’s home to Luigi Mangione’s vigilante killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, we are witnessing something far more dangerous than isolated acts of extremism. We are seeing what two centuries of political philosophers have noted as the features that distinguished the French Revolution from the American Revolution.

In 1800, the German political writer Friedrich von Gentz asked why the American Revolution produced the world’s most prosperous, free nation while the French Revolution descended into the terror, chaos, and, ultimately, the authoritarianism it had set out to overturn. His answer holds urgent lessons for us today.

“The American revolution was from beginning to end, on the part of the Americans, merely a defensive revolution,” von Gentz wrote. “The French was from beginning to end, in the highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.” For von Gentz, the Americans sought to separate themselves from Britain to preserve their existing liberties. The French sought to remake society, to tear down existing institutions and create a new order.

This distinction proved decisive. Because the American Revolution was defensive, von Gentz explained, “it was of course finished at the moment when it had overcome the attack, by which it had been occasioned.” But the French Revolution, “true to the character of a most violent offensive revolution, could not but proceed so long as there remained objects for it to attack and it retained strength for the assault.”

Evidence for this theory lies in America’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence speaks only of dissolving the political bands with England, while the Constitution aims to “form a more perfect union”—advancing what already exists rather than destroying it. The French revolutionaries, by contrast, in August 1789 abolished the entire ancien régime, uprooting any previous political system.

As Alexis de Tocqueville later confirmed in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), the problem was that “instead of assailing specific laws, [the revolutionaries] would attack all laws together, and would assume to substitute for the old Constitution of France a new system of government.” This destructive spirit thus “roused passions such as the most violent political revolutions had been incapable of awakening.” What drove the impulse was “a violent, unquenchable hatred of inequality” that “drove the French with steady, irresistible force to seek to destroy utterly all the remains of the [old] institutions; and prompted the erection on their ruins of a society in which all men should be alike.”

In On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt captured a deeper distinction. Not only were the goals of these revolutions different; the underlying motivations differed as well. While the American Revolution was a revolt against tyranny, the French Revolution sprang from resentment. According to Arendt, since the force behind the American Revolution was freedom from autocracy, the Americans remained committed to building lasting institutions within the bounds of civil law. But the French Revolution began with the assumption that the institutions themselves were illegitimate.

Thus, the French Revolution quickly abandoned institutional foundations. As Arendt observed, it was “deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering” and became focused on “liberation not from tyranny but from necessity.”

The moral urgency that drove revolutionaries to relieve all suffering ultimately removed all constraints. Acts of terror became justified because no law or institution could contain such righteous purpose. Where the American Revolution stayed anchored in legal foundations, the French Revolution showed how human suffering can transform idealistic fervor into uncontrollable violence.

Today’s political violence carries the same revolutionary fervor of eighteenth-century France. The disparate acts of violence across the country reflect a deep disdain for American institutions and the desire to transform American society.

Whether an assassin targets a conservative commentator like Kirk or a health-care executive like Thompson, the underlying motivation is the same: violence has become a moral imperative. The lesson is that when we lose faith in our institutions and political leaders, we reject the ideology behind the American Revolution and instead resort to the politics of bitterness—the violent French Revolution.

The path out of this crisis requires the defensive spirit of the American Founders that Gentz described. We need to reaffirm our commitment to working within the existing constitutional framework. This means defending free speech, even when it protects views we despise. It means not vilifying political opponents. It means pursuing change through legislation and persuasion rather than intimidation and violence. And most crucially, it means rejecting the revolutionary fantasy that violence can purify politics.

The murder of Charlie Kirk should serve as a wake-up call. The choice before us is stark. We can follow the American model—defending our institutions while working to reform them, preserving the constitutional framework that has delivered unprecedented prosperity and freedom. Or we can slide into the French pattern—viewing violence as justified when institutions fail to meet our expectations, treating every political opponent as an enemy to be eradicated.

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