Tim Luke suggests that American Dionysia employs problematic “modes of reasoning” that prefer, among other things, “ideal categories” to “actual conditions,” “moral choices” to “material necessities,” “individuals” to “institutions,” and “riveting [figures]” to “embedded structures.” I’d like to challenge these binaries. Given the violence inherent in America’s neoliberal democracy, actual conditions and material necessities engender moral choices, including the dicey question of violence in behalf of basic rights and common goods. When dominant economic and political institutions unleash violence with impunity, and government stands idly by or, worse, actively supports them, and electoral accountability borders on pretense, what are democratic citizens to do? This is not just a theoretical question. Thanks to the 2008 neo-depression millions lost their jobs, savings, homes, and healthcare, and some have seen their life expectancy drop as the state adopted ideologically-driven austerity measures and crushed collective efforts to challenge the basic order of things, as it did with Occupy Wall Street. Millions live in cities in which young black men are killed at will by police in a state of virtual military occupation as the Republican Party and its conservative judicial allies conspire nationwide to disenfranchise people of color. This is an era when armed citizen groups blocking evictions from foreclosed homes and policing the police become thinkable again. Imagine that citizens plan to gather en masse at a local police station, corporation’s headquarters, C.E.O.’s palatial estate, national political convention, or polling places of the one-percent to take a stand against the harm that has been gratuitously imposed on them, and to let the reigning powers know that demands for redress must be met—no justice, no peace as more than empty rhetoric. Imagine, further, that they are notified that they may peaceably assemble one mile from their designated target in an area cordoned off specifically for this purpose but under no circumstances leave this securitized zone, thus rendering one of the most vital forms of democratic politics effectively invisible and irrelevant. Nevertheless they proceed to their original destination because taking forceful action is essential to having any hope of redressing structural grievances. Police armed to the teeth are waiting for them, poised to attack if they do not obey orders to disperse. What are democratic citizens to do when faced with a state that employs brute force to safeguard elite interests and systematically manage, that is, contain, marginalize, and subvert democracy? Are rights to be exercised and, if necessary, taken by the people or are they to be granted by the state? Do ordinary democratic citizens need to possess a capacity for violence as they aspire to some semblance of sovereignty, as American history suggests? What if, tragically, counter-violence of some kind is necessary, at key moments, to prevent, stop, or redistribute the everyday violence routinely inflicted on them by the neoliberal state and economy? Luke’s review does not address these difficult questions, which both canonical (including the Greek tragic poets) and contemporary political theorists can illuminate. Regrettably there is a broader tendency in political theory either to condemn violence as antithetical to democracy and thus reject it in any form or avoid talking about it altogether, especially if it might be politically productive. These days the all-American tradition of gun atrocities tends to monopolize attention about public violence and render blanket condemnations of its common sense, but American democratic political history is, in part, a productively violent one.