Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is A Tragedy And A Disaster

The assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right and provide Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent. Escalating political violence corrodes democratic norms and poses a unique threat to the Left.

By Ben Burgis and Meagan Day, Jacobin

Charlie Kirk has never received a warm welcome in the pages of this magazine. It doesn’t matter now. The assassination of Kirk is a tragedy. Morally, it is unjustifiable. Politically, it is cause for serious alarm. A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left.

As of the time of this writing, no one knows the shooter’s ideology or motivations. But some key points are clear enough.

No one should be killed as punishment for political expression, no matter how objectionable. In addition to our basic abhorrence of violence, we are also proponents of democracy, which depends on free speech and open inquiry. Without them, collective self-governance is impossible and tyranny becomes inevitable. Imposing silence on political opponents by brute force, whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.

Furthermore, the prospect of a descent into tit-for-tat political violence is an ominous development that threatens to narrow the space for meaningful political action. This augurs poorly for the political culture writ large, and in particular for the Left. We say things that others find extremely objectionable all the time, and we expect to be met with strenuous counterargument — not violent reprisal. While political violence has always existed around the fringes, this has mostly proven to be a reasonable expectation. It seems we have been living through a fragile consensus: in our otherwise extraordinarily violent culture, political leaders and commentators went mostly unharmed. Now the consensus appears to be unraveling, with chilling implications.

Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable people. While this type of violence originates from all across the political spectrum, the Right has been responsible for vastly more of it than the Left for several decades. In the last few years, assailants increasingly seem to hail from the politically muddled, mentally disturbed, and heavily armed elements of the American populace whose general paranoia and disorientation have become enmeshed with an incoherently but viciously polarized political culture. Even garden-variety American mass gun violence has an increasingly political valence to it; where the school shooters of old were given to a kind of totalizing, depoliticized nihilism, today they scrawl contradictory political slogans on their weapons.

The killing of Charlie Kirk already seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. This toxic combination threatens to badly corrode democratic norms and extinguish any hope of left-wing progress.