Despite Civil War echoes, scholar of political rhetoric foresees no repeat
LAWRENCE — If it’s any consolation, a scholar of the rhetorical power of political violence in the context of the Civil War doesn’t believe we’re in for a sequel following the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
Jay Childers, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, expects more political violence in the short term but sees no single issue like slavery that can again divide the United States.
Childers is available to journalists to speak about the meaning of political violence, now or in the future.
Over the past few years, Childers has published work on the rhetoric of physical violence, the persuasive power of abolitionist John Brown and his 1859 raid into Virginia to fight slavery, and Brown’s legacy for those who support political violence today. In all that work, Childers makes it clear that we should take the rhetorical power of violence seriously.
“Violence is rarely if ever truly senseless,” Childers said. “I don't think anybody wants to acknowledge that physical violence can actually have the impact that the perpetrator wants it to have.
“That's why John Brown gets the attention he does. He went into Virginia to try to end slavery, and, in some ways, he helped spark the Civil War, which led to the end of slavery. Because of that, some people hold Brown up as a hero, because he was willing to use violence and risk his life to help achieve a goal that we all now recognize as a noble one.
“We don't want to think that citizens should use violence at all. So there is a sort of fear that if you write about violence as a rhetorical act — which is attempting to influence society in some way — you would then have to acknowledge that sometimes it can be an effective rhetorical strategy. And that's difficult for me to say. But I've read and studied these things for years, and I know that it's true.”
Childers, author of “The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), is finishing up a book on the transmission and public reception of Brown's courtroom speech following his 1859 conviction for murder, treason and insurrection, arguing that the speech played the decisive role in how Brown’s actions against slavery were understood.
And while Childers sees many parallels to the pre-Civil War period — with today’s siloed and unreliable internet news ecosphere echoing the 19th century “no standards” penny press — there is no issue like slavery deep enough to divide the nation.
“For the past couple of years, I’ve spent my days reading newspapers and speeches from 1859 and 1860, and when people talk about how divisive things are now, I'm like, ‘Well, they've certainly been that way before,’” Childers said. “I’m reading how people are attacking each other and making claims about how this side is trying to destroy that side. So I understand the impulse today to suggest the U.S. is headed toward a new civil war.”
Childers cited the 1858 speech by then-New York Senator and later Lincoln’s Secretary of State William H. Seward, “in which he called the struggle over slavery the irrepressible conflict. And today one feels almost that same sense of ‘something has to give.’ It’s difficult to imagine that U.S. politics can continue the way that it's going without something having to give in some direction.
“But the Civil War was about a single issue – slavery. It was about the economic system that used slavery and the economic system that didn't. That is the major difference right now. I don't know that there's a single, defining issue that separates the right and the left. There are a handful of things people focus on: immigration, transgender rights, tariffs and national security, and a number of other things. But there's not one single issue that seems to have the moral weight of slavery.
“So that's why I tend to think we're not going to end up in some sort of militarized conflict between two different groups of people in the U.S. Something has to happen for us to break through this very serious political crisis, but fighting a civil war will not be what decides how we resolve our current ideological disagreements.”