Power, Bodies, and Blood: When Politicians Kill

Send us Fan MailWe tend to talk about violence in politics as something abstract. Policy violence. Structural violence. Metaphorical violence. But today, Jen & Carolyn are talking about literal violence. As in: people who ran for office, held office, advised presidents, or built political movements-and also murdered people. And what’s disturbing isn’t just that it happened—but how often power delayed consequences, softened accountability, or made people look the other way. This episode is about what happens when political entitlement meets the belief that some lives simply don’t matter. And spoiler: it’s not rare, it’s not partisan, and it’s not ancient history.Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3Blee, K. M. (2002). Inside organized racism: Women in the hate movement. University of California Press.Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press.Freyd, J. J., & Birrell, P. J. (2013). Blind to betrayal: Why we fool ourselves we aren't being fooled. Wiley.Fromm, E. (1964). The heart of man: Its genius for good and evil. Harper & Row.Horgan, J. (2008). From profiles to pathways and roots to routes: Perspectives from psychology on radicalization into terrorism. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 618(1), 80–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716208317539Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.xKernberg, O. F. (1984). Severe personality disorders: Psychotherapeutic strategies. Yale University Press.McCann, I. L., & Pearlman, L. A. (1990). Vicarious traumatization: A framework for understanding the psychological effects of working with victims. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 3(1), 131–149. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00975140Müller, K., & Schwarz, C. (2021). Fanning the flames of hate: Social media and hate crime. Journal of the European Economic Association, 19(4), 2131–2167. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa045Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.Ridgeway, C. L. (2001). Gender, status, and leadership. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 637–655. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00233Watts, A. L., Lilienfeld, S. O., Smith, S. F., Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., Waldman, I. D., Rubenzer, S. J., & Fabian, T. J. (2013). The double-edged sword of grandiose narcissism: Implications for successful and unsuccessful leadership among U.S. presidents. Psychological Science, 24(12), 2379–2389. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613491970