It has been a horrifying week. Two weeks ago Sunday, a man attacked a peaceful demonstration in Boulder with a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, burning and injuring fifteen Jewish people. That same day, Israeli soldiers fired on Gazans who were trying to access a food distribution center operated by the Israeli government, killing 31.

Then, this week in Los Angeles, police fired projectiles at largely peaceful demonstrators, including four journalists who were wounded while they were in the act of reporting.

These events challenge us to define our categories — to distinguish law from crime, politics from terror. Politics is held in low regard these days, commonly over-identified with our dysfunctional political party system.

But in Hannah Arendt’s conception, politics is simply the act of coming together, based on principles of equality and nonviolence, to decide what to do and how to live through open debate and common deliberation. It begins when ideas are expressed through speech, and it ends at the point of coercion through extralegal violence.

Beyond its boundaries lie the realms of terror, atrocity, war crime and, at the extreme end, genocide. If we cannot peacefully speak, gather, organize, negotiate, persuade, pressure, vote and legislate, then we cannot hope to govern or be governed, except by terrorist insurgency and authoritarian repression.

Politically motivated actors who commit terrorism — whether they be individuals, groups or the state itself — forfeit the right to politics. They can no longer claim any justification, reason or rationale, for their behavior. For example, there is no societal problem that immolating people gathered peacefully in a park will solve.

There is no military objective that baiting starving people with food then and gunning them down when they seek it will achieve.

There is no public safety concern that firing projectiles at peaceful demonstrators and working journalists will serve.

Such acts only serve to provoke reprisal and escalate atrocity, which will lead to further provocation and reprisal, reaching ever higher on the bloody scale.

This is why we should identify such acts as terrorism and strip them of any other name.

For democracy to exist, the line between politics and terrorism must be painted bright. If we consider and legitimize the motives of any terrorists — or if we condemn some terrorist acts but justify and rationalize others — we contribute to the collapse of the political space on which democracy depends.

That political space is caving in all around us.

Conversations among friends are giving way to avoidance.

Politicians are grandstanding to their bases and shunning their opponents. Editorials are being censored. Events are being canceled. Officials who take unpopular stands are being targeted for removal. Funding to support social, media and arts organizations is being clawed back. Social media dialogue is souring to epithets.

Speech is lapsing into silence and fear.

And lording over it all sits the president, who loves nothing better than to goad the pride and loyalty of some against the fear and loathing of others.

However dimly we may view it, politics is still our best antidote to terror.

When robustly, respectfully, even lovingly practiced, it is still our best medicine for democracy.

And we will deeply miss it if — or when — it is gone.

John Tweedy lives in Boulder.