The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

First, while power flows from pre-existing privilege, it also grows from the barrel of a gun, and the willingness to deal out violence changes power dynamics, even when it doesn’t have a truly revolutionary outcome. The terrorist’s veto on portrayals of Islam is itself a very real form of power, and as long as journalists who challenge it end up dead, the idea that they are “up” and their targets are “down” reflects a denial of life-and-death reality. Or, to take a related example, the hundreds of white women recently raped by Pakistani gangs in England’s industrial north were theoretically higher on a ladder of privilege than their assailants. But the gangs’ actual power over their victims was only enhanced by that notional ladder, because multicultural pieties were part of what induced the authorities to look the other way.

Second, we live in a world where William Gibson’s insight that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” is vindicated every day, and where migration and communication bring cultures that are experiencing this uneven distribution into constant contact. In a globalized world, the faith that the Hebdo cartoonists mocked is the faith of both the powerless and the powerful, of unemployed banlieue dwellers and Iranian theocrats, with threads running in between. (A jihadist in London might have been radicalized in a mosque funded by Saudi petrodollars, for example.)