Photograph: AP
| 5 min read
F ive years before Charlie Kirk was born, a man walked into a school in Stockton, California, and opened fire, killing five children. His name is now forgotten—they always are. He had carved abstract nouns into the gun’s stock—“freedom”, “victory”—and, though he was a white man who grew up in northern California, he seemed to sympathise with Hizbullah and Palestinian liberation. He had “death to the Great Satin” written on his jacket. He was pathetic, probably mentally ill, a nightmarish curiosity.
By the time Mr Kirk was in middle school, shootings like this were, if not common, then no longer surprising. The shooter in Stockton had imitators in the mid-1990s. Then came the school shooting at Columbine High School, in Colorado, in 1999. After that, school shootings seemed to become contagious. The combination of mental illness and an inability to pass gun laws made them seem like acts of nature, like a twister or a flood, something to face with stoicism and resolve rather than something that could be eradicated. After Mr Kirk’s assassination, it is fair to ask whether the same is becoming true of political murder in America.
In June Melissa Hortman, a state representative from Minnesota, was murdered. In April someone tried to kill Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, by setting his house on fire. In December Brian Thompson, the chief executive of United Healthcare, was murdered in New York. Donald Trump was shot while he was campaigning. Some of the people who broke into Congress on January 6th 2021 wanted to hang the speaker of the House and the vice-president. Steve Scalise, the current House majority leader, was shot in 2017. Gabby Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, was shot in 2011.
America has been through spikes of political violence before, at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th, and then again starting in the 1960s. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder in 1968, which followed his brother’s assassination and that of Martin Luther King, the British journalist Alastair Cooke said that America seemed to be experiencing “a resurgence of its frontier traditions in a later time”. There were two attempts on Gerald Ford’s life in September 1975. Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. From the early sixties to the early eighties it seemed like the shootings would never stop.
And then they did, either because presidential security became so tight, or because crazy, violent, lonely men changed their targets and methods. In the 1990s federal law-enforcement agencies worried most about home-grown extremists, like Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal building in 1995 in Oklahoma City, killing more than 150 people. After 9/11 the threat changed again. And then that waned too.
Whether Mr Kirk’s murder is a turning point is unknowable, but it feels that way. One possible future is that even political activists will now need extraordinary levels of security protection. Politicians already know their jobs come with death threats and get on with their work anyway. But people will surely be put off serving their country or taking a full part in their democracy. Even in that new, impoverished normal, political life will go on—just as parents continued to send their children to school after Columbine.
There is an even darker scenario, where the death of a close political ally of the president becomes the occasion for a permanent political emergency. In this future liberties would be exchanged for order. Changes of government would become much more than the metronomic swing in and out of office. Under such a system, the consequences of losing power would be full of dark threats to livelihoods and liberty. The idea that your political opponents are your mortal enemies, so poisonous to politics as normal, would become a reality.
And then there is a third possibility: that this moment too passes. This will not happen on its own. Mr Kirk may not have been an elected official, but he was an important political figure. He connected young conservatives to politics. Part of his skill as a communicator was to make mainstream conservative points in ways that caught people’s attention. He was also inflammatory and offensive.
“Jewish donors”, he once said, “have been the number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and non-profits.” He said there should be a “Nuremburg-style trial” for doctors who assist children to transition to a new gender. He claimed that “prowling blacks” went around America “for fun to go target white people”. He also said wiser things: “when people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.”
Just now, in the days after his death, it is important for his opponents not to lose their humanity and to recognise that Mr Kirk was killed while doing politics: talking about ideas, trying to bolster his allies and, most important of all, trying to persuade his opponents.
Polling shows that Americans are too ready to believe that their opponents are extremists who condone violence, whereas they themselves are peaceful and reasonable. President Trump, regrettably, reinforced this view on the right in the hours after Mr Kirk’s death by decrying only rhetoric on the left. J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois and a presidential hopeful, added to the harm. In the same breath as he lamented Mr Kirk’s murder, he accused Mr Trump of fomenting violence.
Democracy is a mechanism for managing conflict. To make it work requires not just empathy but self-awareness. Spreading conspiracies about stolen elections and calling opponents radical extremists erodes it. So does clipping only Mr Kirk’s worst bits from thousands of hours of podcasting and calling him a fascist. It’s often said Americans need to listen more closely to their opponents, and it’s true. They also need to do a better job of hearing what they themselves are saying. ■
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