An Inconvenient Blog

By Abigail

Charlie Kirk’s death first made me think of John Adams’ famous line in a letter to his political opponent, Thomas Jefferson: “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” 

Honestly, I can’t say I ever knew much about Kirk. I don’t think I heard his voice until after he had died. In my mind, he belonged to a vague grouping of conservative influencers and thinkers whose names, but not work, I knew. Whenever I was briefly exposed to him, primarily via X, it was usually in the form of someone expressing outrage at whatever he was saying in the video appended to their tweet. I imagined him to be the zoomer’s Rush Limbaugh, someone whose rhetoric I would find either boring, abhorrent, or both. Maybe this kind of thinking is part of why he died–in the information age, it is easier to digest summaries and clips, and the internet has become a gigantic game of telephone. Very little of what I consume anymore is straight from the horse’s mouth. People stop being people and become symbols, and political violence reads more like a kind of deletion or editing of those symbols than of actual physical death. 

That’s not to say that the telephone game has distorted his message; from what I know now, I think I would still agree with my past self in finding essentially no common ground with Kirk or his views. Ezra Klein recently said he “practic[ed] politics the right away,” drawing the immediate ire of every New York Times commenter ever. Maybe he was right, but I can’t see much of what Kirk said as anything other than inflammatory and counterproductive, if the ultimate goal of a democratic society (as it probably should be) is to achieve some measure of compromise for a population that is united only by their mutual existence in the same physical place. 

But I can’t in good faith argue that the style of Kirk’s rhetoric is unique to America’s political right. The pendulum swing of the culture wars is more frenzied than ever, and right now, conservatism is benefiting. Lots of people on the right might tell me that what’s happening now, culturally and politically, is a form of well-deserved payback–a reassertion of true American values to undo the supposedly monumental damage inflicted by land acknowledgements, DEI initiatives, and overly-aggressive lockdowns. And some of my peers on the left might retort that the recent era of progressivism extremism was itself necessary to rebut the evils of the right. And then the right would say the Tea Party was good, or something, and the left would say end the forever wars, and on and on and on. On some level, that’s just how politics in America work; power changes hands frequently, just as it’s supposed to. And it’s not like political violence is new, just look at JFK and the attempts on Gerald Ford’s life and the death of Lincoln, etc etc etc. 

Whenever something bad happens, there is a collective instinct to frame it as unprecedented and to say, “Yes, it’s been bad before, but never this bad.” Plus, the blame game is addictive. Every commentator on each side of the aisle is throwing out names and dates, just to illustrate how much worse the other side is. January 6th and Paul Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer and the Minnesota reps versus Trump just last year and Steve Scalise and the Family Research Council and now Kirk himself. What feels different to me about this era is that both sides, at their worst, seem to long for the worst-case scenario to be true, purely to justify their mutual hatred. The left fetishizes fascism and the right fetishizes martyrdom. None of us want to explain ourselves to each other. I think now less of Adams and Jefferson and more of Lenin, who cheerfully said, “The whole question is—who will overtake whom?” 

I can’t deny that I see this era of right-wing power as worse than the era of left-wing power that preceded it, but I also don’t know how much of that take is my own partisanship speaking. The extremes of the 2020 years certainly pushed me closer to the center of the political spectrum, but I perceived the worst effects of those extremes to be purely cultural, albeit very bad. In college I’ve had professors tell me they stopped assigning certain books for fear of progressive student outrage, and I, like everyone else, watched the trend of cancellation morph into a genuinely terrifying force that had the power to take livelihoods and reputations apart based solely on the court of public opinion. All of this upset me deeply–I felt alienated from my party, which I had come to adopt as my own because I valued a culture of free speech and open expression, and thought it did, too.  

With the right now swept up in the spirit of revenge, I feel worse now than I did then. I don’t have to provide an itemized list of terrible things Trump has done, but beyond the obvious (item 1: tariffs, 2: an aggressively cruel attitude to immigration policy, 3: and general disregard for the use of traditional democratic channels of policy creation and enforcement, 4: plus insane appointees), I see his faction of the right as just as anti-free speech as the left recently was. JD Vance personally called for the firings of Americans who disparaged Kirk after his death, while Sean Duffy personally ensured one United pilot lost his job (not that he shouldn’t have lost his job, but a cabinet member chasing down one private citizen who posted something gross on Discord seems crazy to me). And pre-Kirk there have been numerous politicized firings, like those at the FBI. Plus, Trump was also quick to shut down looming threats to the American public like the Wilson Center and the US Institute of Peace (founded by Reagan, by the way). I think both sides of the aisle want the moral high ground right now, but neither can claim it with any legitimacy. 

But it feels silly lodging those complaints right now when a conservative thinker has just died, in what does seem to be an act of political violence from the left. I don’t think we know enough about Tyler Robinson yet to truly diagnose him, but he seems to belong to a growing number of idiosyncratic and politically confused people who have glommed onto the idea that things are just truly so bad that violence really is the answer. 

Anyway, back to Jefferson and Adams. When I was in 8th grade and first got really interested in American history and politics, their correspondence was one of the first things to engender my feelings of patriotism. They disagreed frequently and aggressively disagreed and because that was the time of American creation, those disagreements have shaped the character of the country we now live in. One argument they had was over the idea of a “natural aristocracy,” what Jefferson considered those people who, regardless of their ancestry or connections, possess such natural talents that they are inherently good leaders and influential members of democratic society. In other words, meritocracy. Adams wasn’t really a fan of this idea, his counterargument was basically founded on the idea of natural selection, and he thought that the best elites were born into good families, which were good and privileged because they possessed certain positive and heritable qualities. But Jefferson said: 

I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.

I’m not sure the citizens of either party have met Jefferson’s expectations of them in the last several years, and that’s because we fail to explain ourselves to each other. Kirk, at the very least, engaged in debate, and as Klein noted, he did so largely on college campuses, which should be shrines to the free expression of ideas. I think the biggest problem right now is that rhetoric often seems disembodied and impersonal. It’s almost unusual for people on opposite sides to engage in good-faith discussion. There is an instinctive, collective urge to cocoon ourselves in spaces that only affirm our politics. 

When people on the left mock Kirk’s death, people on the right take that literally. On its surface, it’s just the umpteenth piece of evidence that we are entirely divided, that partisanship comes before personhood. But I think to both sides he is just another symbol, as sad as that is. We all sort of like it when the other side of the aisle does something abhorrent, and we all crave anything that justifies our positions. My understanding of Kirk is symbolic, too, as much as I wish it wasn’t. When he died, I think my first thought was about how bad it would look for democrats if the shooter was left-leaning. And then I thought sort of abstractly about how bad everything is and how bad political violence is and so on. But I found it difficult to really conceptualize what his death actually was–a brutal, pointless tragedy. The only solution to this kind of thinking is for us to explain ourselves to each other.