The assassination of Charlie Kirk is likely to be a pivot point, though the direction after the pivot is anything but clear. From the perspective of a decade hence, what is to come will seem logical and explicable, even inevitable. But right now, we are in the middle and nothing is clear.
What is not in dispute is that Charlie Kirk was a generational talent as a political communicator, in terms of energy and ability far ahead of anyone else. And he was—from every account of the many who knew him—a profoundly good man, growing in depth all the time, devoted to engaging in democratic politics at the most fundamental level, getting out and debating those who disagreed with him. It is also not a matter of dispute that there is a large number of people on the left—how big and influential we don’t yet have a firm handle on—who are willing to say in public that Kirk deserved to be murdered.
But we don’t know where this takes us. The Charlie Kirk assassination may one day be seen as an early stepping stone along the way to a dramatic break—a civil war whose winner isn’t obvious (besides China), leading to socialist revolution, right-wing authoritarianism for real, or the break-up of the United States.
The preconditions for civil war in the United States exist according to a growing body of knowledgeable opinion, as they do in most countries of the West. The ethnic fracturing due to mass immigration has destabilized the sense of a shared society and identity which all of them possessed 50 years ago, a sense which has helped ensure that extremist ideologies were, eventually, seen as extreme. In the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s, there was more political violence than today, but there was a common consensus about what was normally American and what was not. No one cared very much about whether their sons or daughters would marry Republicans or Democrats. Now most do. In the U.S. today, the most virulent leftism seldom comes from new immigrants or their descendants, but the general loss of societal cohesion which allows it to flourish does flow from multiculturalism and its resulting social instability.
We don’t yet know who killed Kirk, though some initial law enforcement reports indicate that the killer was some kind of sympathizer with transgenderism and “antifascism.” But we do know the milieu of the people celebrating Kirk’s murder, and they are far more entrenched in society and numerous than were supporters of the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army 50 years ago.
Many voices on the left have voiced genuine sorrow about the assassination, recognizing that killing someone for speech you disagree with is the most fundamental rejection of all that is best about American democracy. But inevitably these voices posit a kind of moral equivalence between left-wing and right-wing extremism, while ruing both.
Ezra Klein, the very smart New York Times columnist and podcaster, opens his own equivalency argument with the attempted “kidnapping” of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, which seemed to even a casual follower of the trial little more than FBI entrapment of some very unsuccessful men who lived in various basements. It doesn’t really match in weight with the shooting of congressional Republicans by a former Bernie Sanders volunteer or the two attempts to murder presidential candidate Donald Trump.
It is worth noting too that mass actions are probably more sociologically important than acts by lone gunmen; in this realm, equivalence of right-wing violence with left-wing violence is not remotely serious. For years, masked left wingers have been given virtual free reign to intimidate, shout down, or physically harm conservative campus speakers; there is no parallel whatsoever on the right. Indeed, part of what made Kirk so hated by the left was his unexpected ability to break through the left-wing campus control mechanisms and build a curious and often enthusiastic audience for mainstream conservative views.
Some paths forward are obviously better than others. A bad but hardly implausible scenario is that some individual or groupuscule on the right, taking note of the progressive celebrations of Kirk’s murder on social media, will say to themselves something along the lines “let’s see how much they like it” and act accordingly. One can see that escalating quickly. This would soon wipe out whatever bonds of comity and congeniality between liberals and conservatives remain (much weaker and fewer, in any case, than 15 years ago) and could become a veritable spiral of terrorism, perhaps escalating to conflicts between blue cities and red heartlands, involving infrastructure destruction and the like. Before Kirk’s murder, I would have thought Britain or France likely to descend into civil war before the United States. That now seems less certain.
A more optimistic path would involve sustained and effective governmental effort to break down the political and social networks which sustain left-wing violence. This would probably resemble the efforts to root out communist subversion in the 1940’s and ’50s and the later FBI attempts to infiltrate and undermine radical groups that continued through the 1960’s. The goal would be to make casual affiliation with violent progressivism personally risky and unprofitable—the kind of choice that could cost you a comfortable career. There would be excesses and injustices in such a program—there always are—but if the alternatives are civil war or the left just winning though continued physical intimidation of conservatives, there is no better option. Presumably, this could be accomplished under political leadership that in style and substance sought to build the widest possible consensus among Americans while isolating the radicals. Eisenhower would be a good role model.
In its timing, the Kirk assassination is curiously twinned with the reporting, suppressed for weeks, of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a black maniac in Charlotte, North Carolina. The public transit killing was a plain-as-day consequence of progressive law enforcement and judicial reform doctrines, pushed relentlessly by major left-wing foundations. The two murders seem to reinforce one another as evidence of current left-wing ideology in action. Add to them the widespread celebration of the murderer Luigi Mangione, and it seems hard to deny that a cult of violence is metastasizing in the contemporary American left.
Perhaps it won’t be broken at all, perhaps there will be neither a violent counter-reaction, nor political efforts to legally root it out. Perhaps we won’t even see a meaningful reduction in violence-encouraging rhetoric from major Democratic politicians (most of whom have condemned the Kirk murder) and media institutions. We may then have before us not a pivot point but more of the same, a slowly escalating accommodation to violence from the left, the acceptance that it is just normal that conservatives be barred from speaking on campus. That too is possible. And probably the worst result of all.
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