The Assassin’s Other Target
The first waves of response to the brutal public murder of Charlie Kirk tended toward the personal. Many influential figures in our public life knew Kirk, and many more had been shaped or inspired by his work. Even many of his critics understood his assassination in terms of Kirk’s prominence and persona, or the place he held in our politics.
But most Americans did not know Charlie Kirk personally or follow him online. It is reasonable to assume that the average American had never heard his name until he was assassinated. And yet Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University should matter to those Americans, too. His murderer evidently sought to strike at Kirk for expressing views the killer thought abhorrent. In doing so, his murderer therefore also struck at the foundations of a political order that is utterly essential to the flourishing of the average American — indeed, to the very possibility of living a life in which you do not have to know the names of influential public figures to be free.
That political order, the liberal-democratic republic we have inherited from prior generations of Americans and are privileged to enjoy and obliged to pass along in decent shape to our children, has been so successful that we now routinely take its benefits for granted. Some intellectuals mistake its insistence on rooting the law in the equal dignity of all for amoral proceduralism, and so insist that it poses unacceptable impediments to moral formation. Some radicals are bored by its constraints and frivolously call for its overthrow. All these detractors from our political order imagine that the alternative would be a society unabashedly devoted to their own vision of the good.
But Charlie Kirk’s murderer showed us what real-world alternatives would actually look like. Our political order has been so successful that we too easily forget what it arose to prevent and replace. In this world, and especially in the morally diverse mass societies of the modern West, the only serious alternative to some kind of classically liberal politics is violence.
Needless to say, this is not good news. It means our range of options is more constrained than we would like, and maybe also that it is more constrained than the alternatives available to prior generations in other civilizations. The liberal society — that is, a society organized to safeguard equal rights and limit the powers of both governments and majorities through institutions of law and consent — has never been best understood as a utopian proposition. It is much better understood as a coping mechanism for those seeking virtue in a fallen world. It calls on us to constrain our expectations of politics, so that we might reach higher in every other facet of our lives.
But constrained expectations of politics do not mean that our politics must be shorn of moral substance or closed off to the pursuit of truth. Some liberal societies have tried to achieve such a vacuous politics — draining the public arena of morally freighted disputes, restricting speech, constraining religious appeals, narrowing the range of permissible arguments. This strategy has not worked well for them, because it is rooted in a misunderstanding of the promise of liberalism. That promise does not rest on proscribing belief and expression but on proscribing domination. It imagines a public arena built for persuasion, and therefore precisely for energetic arguments about the most important human questions.
The United States has always been an exception even among liberal nations for prioritizing the preconditions for such a constructively contentious public life. Our constitutional protections of speech, religion, assembly, and the press are unique in the world. And they mean that our ideal of social peace is far from quiet. On the contrary, it assumes that quiet is a mark of oppression and can only be achieved by force. Charlie Kirk made this point himself, saying at one of his campus appearances: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens.”
Exactly. The norms of our liberal-democratic republican politics are not intended to quiet us down but to ensure that we respond to arguments with arguments, that we work to persuade and not to dictate. This can be immensely frustrating. It amounts to a politics that never quite lets anyone win. But as Kirk’s killer concluded, the only practical alternative to some set of norms of this sort is deadly force.
In this sense, acts of political violence offer us cautionary glimpses of what overthrowing our political order would look like. They should move us to stop taking for granted the hard-earned social peace that is a prerequisite for any pursuit of moral improvement in a diverse and free society.
Kirk’s assassination — like that of state legislators in Minnesota earlier this year, the attempted assassination of President Trump last year, and planned or attempted attacks against the governors of Pennsylvania and Michigan, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, members of Congress of both parties, and others — was a primitive expression of frustration with a political culture that forces us to put up with the open expression and constitutionally legitimate enactment of views we don’t agree with. It is a frustration that must be answered and resisted if our society is to persist. And resisting it means resisting the urge to make excuses for political violence.
This means that people who disagreed with Charlie Kirk’s views and arguments while he was alive should resist as best they can the urge to burden their denunciations of his murder with caveats about his opinions. It is not quite right to say that Kirk was murdered for his views. He was murdered because we live in a society that requires us to let all views be aired.
This also means that Kirk’s supporters and friends should not qualify their own rejections of political violence. The day after the assassination in Utah, President Trump was asked in a Fox News interview how our country could address the danger of political extremism on all sides. He answered: “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.”
No. No one’s political views justify violence. That is the principle in need of defense in our time. That is the counterintuitive, unnatural, frustratingly demanding premise of the liberal society. Defending that premise requires us to see that breaking the bounds of our politics is a violation of our obligations to one another regardless of the reasons anyone might have for doing it.
Defending that premise also requires all of us to allow one another to be shocked into a recognition of its importance by the evil on display in Kirk’s murder. It is all too easy to cast pious responses to the assassination as hypocritical. How could people on the left who called Kirk’s views fascist be shocked when someone acts violently to silence him? How could people on the right who routinely deploy militant rhetoric against their opponents be surprised to find violence directed at them? Where was all this desire for peaceful debate last month, or last year?
All of us have probably had some version of this reaction to the sight of eager combatants in the vicious culture wars of our day suddenly transformed into preachers of tolerance. We don’t trust their conversions, and we don’t think they will last.
But that is surely the wrong reaction. That so many in our politics are still capable of being profoundly repulsed by direct exposure to actual political violence is a sign of health. And in any case, we should not underestimate the place of hypocrisy in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be decent people is a pretty good start toward becoming more decent people. So let us afford one another the space to pretend in the hope that some of us might go further.
Of course, it would be naïve to imagine that this horrific act of violence will turn our political culture around. But hearing one another say that we should turn things around will matter nonetheless. And there is nothing simple-minded about consciously resisting the crudest vices of our cultural moment. After all, it would be no less naïve to imagine that the excesses of our time will inevitably shatter the institutions that have survived so many prior generations of passionate intensity. There is nothing inevitable about it. We are witnessing a rise in political violence, but we are nowhere near the levels of such violence that our country experienced in the middle decades of the 20th century, let alone the 19th. We are not the first to be frustrated by the constraints of the liberal society. And if we can recover some responsibility and restraint, we won’t be the last.
Such a recovery would require us to recognize how precious and extraordinary it is that we get to live in a society in which political violence remains rare enough to shock us. It would require us to respond to a wicked murder not by losing our confidence in a politics rooted in the rejection of violence but by renewing our commitment to the conviction that a society that recognizes its members as equal in their human dignity must be a society in which all are free to think and speak.
That conviction was the assassin’s other target in Utah. He succeeded in striking down his first target, mercilessly taking the life of a young husband and father who touched the lives of millions and will long be mourned by them. But he did not strike down his second target. It lies injured, and demands our concerted attention and action. It is not to be mourned but healed and uplifted. Its survival, and with it the future of our free society, is up to us.