Political violence is pretty much a daily feature of today’s news cycle. Assassins are guaranteed their fifteen minutes of fame.

But something more than notoriety is happening in the wake of political violence today. Shoot at a pro-life speaker on a college campus, a group of Catholic children attending Mass, a shopping center in an Hispanic neighborhood, a presidential candidate in an open field, a Christian school, a synagogue, a Black church, or an immigrant detention center, and the assassin will immediately be subject to a drafting process: What is his or her race? Sex? Political and/or religious affiliation? After each new episode of political murder, Americans play a sick game of pin the assassin on the enemy. “Violence is never the answer,” everyone says, repeating the obligatory cliche. But if so, why do we seem certain that the violent ones represent the other side? Why does jumping to conclusions about the inhumanity of our political counterparts come so easily to us?

When I was growing up in America, I almost never heard unkind words spoken about this or that group of people. I remember being appalled at learning in school of the political violence that had marred the decade before my birth. It seemed completely foreign to me, despite being so recent. The 1960s and early 70s were a time of ongoing political upheaval: Assassins targeted presidents, presidential candidates, and other public figures; police clubbed and fire-hosed Black protestors and children; the Weather Underground, seeking to incite a communist revolution, launched multiple terrorist bombings and attacks on law enforcement. Just the other day there was news of the death, in Cuba, of Joanne Chesimard, who, under her nom de guerre Assata Shakur, attacked and killed police officers in the name of Black liberation.

Not long before I was born, during the early years of the Carter administration, Americans were still obsessed with killing communists, killing anti-communists (President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in 1975, the second one at the hands of a woman who wanted to start a left-wing revolution), protecting white rule, overthrowing white rule, fomenting uprisings, carpet-bombing Southeast Asia, and “liberating” every conceivable group—women, the poor, laborers, Palestinians, indigenous peoples, Latin Americans, the environment, you name it—usually by means of horrific violence. When I was in pre-school, however, President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt at the hands of a crazy person who just wanted to make an impression on his favorite movie star. Nothing political about it. Assassination had gone from an intensely hateful and politically driven act, targeting specific human persons, to a twisted pastime for people seeking recognition, a kind of Hollywood audition for the deranged.

Looking back now, as America again boils over with political violence, I can see that we never really overcame the hatred that once infected our country. We just learned how to talk in code about it. We used words like “the projects,” “inner cities,” and “welfare queens” as euphemisms for uglier phrases that had fallen out of fashion. “Gated communities” was a euphemism, too, but everyone knew who lived there. Where hatred once festered in human communities, there now was a cold syntactical truce. The human element had been elided, and Americans talked politics by not talking politics—that is, human politics—at all. The words “pro-life” and “pro-choice” became common, as though we were debating an abstract concept and not whether to dismember an innocent human being. “Collateral damage” became a military and media euphemism for humans blown to pieces in bomb strikes. “Extraordinary rendition” meant spiriting people to secret prisons and, frequently, torturing them. Companies and politicians spoke of “right-to-work legislation,” not of the worker and the family for whom his or her wages bought food.

This odd, dehumanized politics has only worsened with time. When Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus last month, many pundits and online opinion-mongers started shouting back and forth about “free speech.” Charlie Kirk was killed for what he was saying—namely, that the human person is paramount. Ironically, Kirk’s murderer heard him loud and clear, but the media acted as though “free speech” were the battleground. Euphemism continues to reign supreme. The locutionary act itself is now assumed to be essentially free of content. It’s not the words that matter, or the people who say them. It’s the saying of the words themselves, the speech without the human behind it, that is now at stake, at least to hear our professional chattering class tell it.

We could have been talking to each other about Kirk’s message. We could have said, “Look, babies are being killed in the womb, and we have to save them.” The same with young children who are being mutilated in the name of gender “rights.” Instead, we got into a fight over a late-night talk-show host and his “free speech” rights. We had the chance to turn to one another and speak face-to-face as human beings again. We passed up that opportunity in favor of latching on to yet another prominent figure and screaming about him.

No wonder we now seize on assassins in the news. Their fifteen minutes of fame is virtually the only time when we admit that politics is about, by, and for human beings. We refuse to speak to one another about politics, so we let the famous—and the infamous—do our talking for us. All the while, the human person grows invisible. Think of the tens of thousands of families in “inner cities” whose nameless children have been killed this past half-century, children almost nobody outside of the “inner cities” knows or cares about. Think of the people who have undergone “extraordinary rendition” or who were killed as “collateral damage.” Think of all the workers now without work because corporations sent their jobs to the other side of the world. (Foreign workers don’t vote in American elections—a very convenient arrangement, and indicative of the drive to erase the human from the political in America.) When pro-life activists who rescued the remains of murdered children from a barbaric “pro-choice” clinic in Washington, DC, were on trial for the federal “crime” of compassion, the judge wouldn’t permit photos of the aborted to be shown in court.

We don’t discuss the suffering people among us. Instead, we look for avatars who convince us “the other” is always violent, dangerous, not worth knowing in the first place. Perhaps it’s all a sop to our troubled consciences. We denied the humanity of whole swaths of humans, so we welcome the opportunity to confirm ourselves in our original act of refusal. Conversely, when a madman with a rifle goes on a killing spree, we jump at the chance to finally put a face and a name with a political movement. The human reemerges in politics, albeit in twisted, hideous form. We recruit the killer to the enemy camp posthumously, making him the totem for a group whose members we don’t know—and don’t want to know.

The assassins’ code—the use of cold-blooded mass murderers to stand in as the human element in a dehumanized politics—is a symptom of something seriously wrong with the American psyche. We have learned to deny the human in our politics. This has changed us, left us unable to face one another as human beings, and led us to associate rival groups with the very worst and most violent among us. There is great irony in this. Political violence sent us scurrying for feel-good ways to paper over deep societal divisions, but doing so, in turn, allowed us to turn aside from the human connections that bind us into one political union. We need to stop using euphemisms and start addressing the human costs of our political decisions. Either we recognize the humanity of every human person—unborn children, poor people, workers, foreigners, and, yes, enemy combatants—or resign ourselves to seeing the human in politics only in the faces of monsters who murder wantonly in the inhuman void we have created for ourselves.