From Paranoia and Payback to Moral Taint: Disgust as the Proximal Affective Driver of Political and Politically Motivated Assassinations

ABSTRACT Political assassinations are commonly interpreted as extreme responses to threat or injustice, driven primarily by fear, anxiety or anger. In this theoretical article, I challenge that view and advance a more differentiated proposition: Political and politically motivated assassinations are often less directly driven by fear, anxiety or anger than by disgust once a target is construed as unchangeable moral taint. Drawing on the Interaction Discrepancy Model (IDM), I conceptualise such assassinations as the behavioural endpoint of appraising another person as a source of enduring moral contamination whose transgressions are attributed to them and judged unlikely to change. Within this framework, fear and anxiety correspond to appraisals of uncertain changeability and primarily motivate preparative responses such as vigilance, concealment and avoidance, whereas anger corresponds to appraisals of likely changeability and primarily motivates retributive responses such as punishment, protest and sanction. Disgust, by contrast, is linked to appraisals of unlikely changeability and is especially compatible with exclusionary and expulsion‐oriented tendencies; under specific political conditions, that removal logic may escalate into assassination as an extreme attempt to eliminate perceived contamination from the political sphere. I clarify how disgust is conceptualised relative to debates on core disgust, moral disgust and moral outrage, outline how the account can be falsified using historical analyses of assassins' writings and ethically acceptable analogue studies, and discuss practical implications for prevention by shifting changeability appraisals and avoiding narratives of absolute irredeemability. I also identify future research directions, including testing possible moderators such as power and political leverage.