This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.

In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.

The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.

This may mean that the art of persuasion to which Kirk dedicated his public life experiences a revival. Perhaps an entire generation turns wholly from the Left and tradition, conservatism, and the Right become for the first time in a century the vanguard of the youth’s future. Millions of Kirk’s disciples may conclude that no politics is possible with an antagonist that reserves murder as its redoubt when argument fails.

None of these conclusions would be wrong.

When those conclusions are reached, the movement that helped precipitate Charlie Kirk’s murder may realize its error. They may finally understand that Kirk, Trump, and everyone else whom they hate with a blinding, intense passion were the moderates, the ones they could live with, the ones who didn’t wish to eradicate them. They may tell tales to their children of a time when the ascendant Right was perfectly happy to have a debate. They may say they wish it had never happened, that they weren’t for killing the man, that a lone extremist with a rifle was in no way representative of the whole.

When they do, we will remind them that on the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, leftist members of the United States House of Representatives objected to a moment of prayer on his behalf.

What happens next has several templates, some more probable than others. There is the hunt for the shooter. Then there is the reckoning for what created him—a reckoning that’s long overdue.

We have too many martyrs now. Before Kirk there was a president who nearly suffered the same fate. Before Kirk there was a woman who just wanted to ride the train home. Before Kirk there were little children at Mass, praying as a killer opened fire.

American liberty requires sacrifice, and it requires martyrdom too. But the martyrs in our tradition should be afforded the choice of their fate. We celebrate the men of the Alamo and Corregidor. We find by contrast something horrific and unjust in death unsought and undesired. One is war, the other is crime.

Charlie Kirk chased the better angels of our nature. His killers herald the end of angel-chasing. What’s left is Melville:

For they killed him in his kindness,

In their madness and their blindness.

And his blood is on their hand.

There is sobbing of the strong,

And a pall upon the land;

But the People in their weeping

Bare the iron hand:

Beware the People weeping

When they bare the iron hand.