The killing of Charlie Kirk will be a radicalizing moment but should not alter our commitment to the American Way.
T he assassination of Charlie Kirk comes in a time when social trust is already badly frayed. And it strikes at a particularly vulnerable part of our system: the free and open exchange of ideas, especially on college campuses. Consider the four most spectacular political murders of 2025 in the United States.
First, we had the Boulder, Colo., Molotov cocktail attack on Jewish marchers who were remembering the October 7 attacks and calling for freeing the hostages. An attack on a citizen political demonstration is a blow to free speech, and a particular blow to the public participation of American Jews.
Second, we had the assassination of former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman, a party caucus leader in an evenly divided legislature who had just struck a bipartisan budget deal. The killing of a legislative leader is a blow to representative democracy.
Third, we had the shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. Two Catholic schoolchildren were killed at prayer, in church, to ask God’s blessings on the start of the school year. This is a blow to the moral and religious formation of children.
Fourth, we have the killing of Kirk, a prominent political activist and frequent campus speaker and organizer, in the middle of a public debate on the campus of Utah Valley University. This is a blow to the whole process of civil discourse and political and intellectual engagement in higher education.
Democracy, protest, debate, education, prayer: All we are missing, and probably won’t be before long, is an attack on the legal system. This on the heels of the assassination in 2024 of the head of a health insurance company and two attempted assassinations of a major-party presidential candidate, and the spring 2025 arson at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Break us at those joints, and you break civil society.
Civility, like bipartisanship, is a virtue but not a necessity. We can disagree in rough and pointed language and associate into differing factions, and survive that. But if we lose civil discourse — the idea that each side gets its say — and lose the basic acceptance that the winners of elections make rules and then everyone lives under those same rules, then it all falls apart.
A Radicalizing Moment
This is bound to be a radicalizing moment. On many college campuses, Turning Point USA is the largest and most visible right-leaning organization. Charlie Kirk has traveled to speak at a lot of campuses and drawn rock-star crowds. He did so in an era that has been increasingly hostile to the expression of right-of-center ideas. Kirk did so fearlessly; he did not tone down his strong political opinions out of fear of being canceled or assaulted. Critics of Kirk on the left and the right could and did disagree with his stances or his style of expression, but the very fact that he didn’t always choose his words with perfect care also made him an icon of the kind of rough-and-tumble debate that is supposed to be characteristically American.
With his red-meat approach, Kirk may have been more about mobilizing like-minded people than persuasion, but he was willing to argue with anybody anywhere in the way that a reasoning society is supposed to do. And his courage in saying things brought people to his side who started with unformed right-leaning instincts that few others on campus would encourage. If a guy like Charlie Kirk could come to your campus and say those things, maybe there was still hope for a country where people can disagree openly, even in ways that were out of fashion with the people in power on college campuses.
After the 2024 election, there was a lot of talk of a “vibe shift.” Donald Trump’s victory — complete with winning the national popular vote by a margin of more than 2 million votes — sent a powerful message that the left’s hegemonic control, with the ability to stifle the right through the tools of lawfare and other forms of silencing, was broken. Even more so than Kirk, the fact that Trump has survived and prospered in American politics while saying and doing all manner of things that would previously have been career-enders was taken as proof that it was safe to be on the right again. American institutions were compelled to accept that if Trump, of all people, could win nearly a popular majority, maybe the spectrum of acceptable opinion in the country extended to people further right than, say, Mike Bloomberg. On campuses in particular, Trump’s frequently heavy-handed uses of power — like them or not — have sent an unmistakable message that the heavy hand of the law will stick up for right-leaning viewpoints. It seemed that another blow was being struck against a climate of orthodoxy and the silencing of the right.
Now, Kirk is gone. The man who made himself the battle flag for a generation of right-wingers and conservatives on college campuses has fallen with a bullet to the throat in mid-speech, almost Mafia-esque in the symbolism. What we’ve learned from the arrest of his alleged killer seems so far to point in the direction of a purposeful effort by the shooter, steeped in left-wing radicalism, to silence Kirk for his views. It is both predictable and understandable that this will be a bracing moment that hardens and radicalizes a lot of his fans and other right-leaning college students. Instead of being a symbol that Yes, it’s safe to say these things now, we have a powerful symbol of They will kill you rather than debate you.
As is often the case with political violence, it’s not “they” who did this; it’s one guy, however much he may have drawn on the ideas of others and fanned them into a blaze. But the spectacle of so many figures in different corners of the political left — including celebrities, educators, journalists, health care providers, and elected officials — either celebrating this moment or at least choosing to kick Kirk while he’s permanently down makes it easier for people to see this as a pivotal cultural moment rather than the aberration of one young man’s madness.
Maybe not since the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — not even after the attempted assassinations of Trump — have I seen and felt such a unifying mood of shock and fury across every corner of the right. Like Kavanaugh, Kirk represented a particular corner of the broad right and was previously mistrusted or disliked by quite a few of the other elements of the right’s coalition for his ideas and his style. He was, in life, hardly a unifying figure. But none of that matters now. This could have been any of us — anyone engaged in public argument or governance or journalism or activism on the right, locally or nationally. Everybody feels that. Everybody knows that you can be MAGA or you can be Reaganite or you can be a Bush/McCain neocon or a Romney moderate, and the same people will call you a fascist or a racist and hate you. Je suis Charlie.
The Dark Path and the Way Up
We’ve seen this kind of emotional climate before. We saw some of it in the Sixties and Seventies with prominent assassinations and a major campaign of left-wing terrorism. Then, we were fortunate: The blaze burned out and the country ended up rallying behind Ronald Reagan, who after his 1964 speechmaking debut had first become a serious national figure facing down left-wing campus radicals as governor of California. Reagan’s message, then and later, was that law and order would be restored and good old-fashioned American values would win. And they did. By the time he left office, Reagan’s victories on the field of ideas had been so sweeping that his biggest warning was that we’d forget to teach them to the next generation. (He was right then, too.)
But there’s a darker parallel in our history: the sectional polarization of the country over slavery. That, too, featured a series of events that not only gradually radicalized both sides but also convinced both that they were facing a mounting conspiracy of the other side, in which their own side wasn’t standing up for itself, and which could not end with coexistence with the other side. This ended in a civil war that killed more than 1 out of every 20 American men. Maybe there was no other way to end the enslavement of 4 million people, but that is surely not an experience we wish to relive.
The South was worried, in the long run, that the federal government would move to strangle or outright abolish slavery. Those worries grew apace after 1850 as the North’s population outgrew the South’s, free states began to outnumber slave states, and anti-slavery politics began to dominate the North. But what drove the South to paranoia and secession was more the fear that anti-slavery rhetoric, news of other slave rebellions, and any rumor of political progress against slavery would encourage slaves to rebel, perhaps with great violence against slaveholding families. That fear was rooted directly in the rebellion of Haiti’s slaves between 1791 and 1804, but it gained particular force beginning with Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831.
Because what they feared was that speech and information would lead to bloodshed, Southern politicians far too often responded with illiberal means that poisoned the well of a discourse-based politics. They banned abolitionist mail and books from reaching the slave states or being published there. They gagged anti-slavery petitions from being read in the House. They cowed Northern members of Congress with fisticuffs and threats of duels. (Joanne Freeman’s book Field of Blood documents this and its radicalizing effects in detail.) Sometimes, worse happened.
In November 1837, anti-slavery newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, who had relocated from Missouri to southern Illinois to avoid threats, was set upon by a mob that destroyed his printing press and gunned down Lovejoy (who was himself shooting back). The attackers were acquitted. Lovejoy’s murder formed the backdrop for the first major public speech by a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln, to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on January 27, 1838 — less than three months after the attack and just a week after the acquittals. In the speech, which skirted the Lovejoy case that was on everyone’s mind and used as its examples other cases of mobs and vigilante justice, Lincoln identified the abandonment of legal institutions as the greatest threat to the survival of the American republic, because it destroyed “the attachment of the People” to their government:
You are, perhaps, ready to ask, “What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?” I answer, it has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil. . . . But the example in either case, was fearful. When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. . . . Thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil. . . . Good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits . . . seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection. . . . Depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual.
In other words, the greatest menace was not lawbreakers or wrongdoers themselves but how their victims would radicalize against the system if they lost faith in its protection. To Lincoln, the only solution was to insist upon the sure and evenhanded application of law, not only as a principle of government but as a value in the culture:
The question recurs, “how shall we fortify against it?” The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. . . . Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.
In his coda, Lincoln also bemoaned — as Reagan would later — how generational change could lead to forgetting the great American lessons of the past, as “the silent artillery of time” had robbed one family and community after another of the “living history” of veterans of the American Revolution.
Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with Lincoln’s view. When France erupted in revolution in 1848, he was a veteran member of the National Assembly and took the position (as he later explained in his memoir of that revolution) that the most important thing for the members of the Assembly to do was simply keep showing up for work: “It is especially in revolutionary times that even the least important of legal institutions, or, for that matter, any external symbol that reminds people of the idea of law, takes on the greatest importance” in maintaining order and popular respect. “My maxim in moments of crisis has always been that you should not only be present in the assembly of which you are a member but also sit in the place where people are accustomed to seeing you.” This was a show of calm and order, not cowardice: “People who are unafraid in revolutionary times are like princes in the army.”
“One has to have spent long years in the whirlwind of party politics,” Tocqueville added, “to understand the extent to which men drive one another off their intended courses, so that the direction in which the world moves is often quite different from what its movers intend, just as the movement of a kite is determined by the opposing tugs of wind and string.”
That’s exactly what happened in 1856 when a South Carolina Democratic congressman, Preston Brooks, beat Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death in a surprise attack on the Senate floor while armed House Democratic comrades of Brooks held at bay anyone tempted to intervene. This was a serious escalation of violence in Congress, and it was justified by nothing other than offense at a speech Sumner had delivered two days earlier.
This was a profoundly radicalizing event for the North, and made much more so as intemperate Southerners cheered and honored Brooks. While Brooks resigned from the House, his two confederates (fellow South Carolinian Lawrence Keitt and Henry Edmundson of Virginia) were merely censured. The beating confirmed for a lot of people the perception that their own freedom of speech — and with it, their own safety — was threatened by the Slave Power. The full effects of that radicalization would not become immediately apparent, but its most incendiary forms did not take long to materialize. Upon hearing the news of Sumner’s beating two days later, John Brown rode out to Pottawatomie Creek in the Kansas territory, where he and his sons killed five settlers they identified with the pro-slavery cause (at least one of them a legislator), shooting some and hacking others to death with broadswords. This was eye-for-an-eye vengeance rather than the adherence to law and norms and fighting in the arena of speech, ideas, and persuasion.
Republicans, especially those from the Midwest, began taking a harder line in responding to violence and threats in Congress in kind. One of the pugilists, first elected in 1856, was Owen Lovejoy of Illinois — the brother of Elijah. Congressmen frequently went armed, and three abolitionist Republicans swore an oath to respond to duel challenges by fighting “to the coffin.”
On February 6, 1858, this resulted in a full melee on the House floor. A late-night debate on Kansas brought harsh words between Keitt and Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow. What was different this time from past brawls in the House was that some 30 members of the House joined in, drawing up sides between mostly Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. Republicans across the North, including those working on Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, cheered the sight of Republicans standing up for themselves against bullying. Grow went on to become Speaker of the House in 1861. (Keitt, for his part, was killed in battle for the Confederacy at Cold Harbor.) But rather than put an end to the downward spiral, the brawl proved just another step down the dark path to civil war.
The Way Back
Lincoln, even throughout the war and until the day he was gunned down, never lost sight of the difference between the two paths. From his 1858 “House Divided” speech to his inaugural addresses, he returned again and again to the need to find a way to live together and settle things with reason and law. One of my favorite examples of this is the Hampton Roads peace conference in February 1865, when he greeted with warmth and civility the Confederate envoys, some of them, such as Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, old friends from his House days. This was not weakness on Lincoln’s part, but strength.
Lincoln offered magnanimity, but he did not blink in describing his legal position that the Union had never been dissolved and the rebels had no right to make war upon it. When Confederate Assistant Secretary of War and former Supreme Court Justice John Campbell remarked that he had never considered his neck in danger, Lincoln responded, “There are a good many oak trees about the place where I live, the limbs of which afforded many convenient points from which I might have dangled in the course of this war.” He noted that some in his party wanted to expose Confederate leaders to “the punishment prescribed for the highest crime known to the law.”
After an uncomfortable pause, the third commissioner (Confederate Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, like Stephens, once a Whig colleague of Lincoln’s) challenged the president: “What you are saying, Mr. President, is that we of the South have committed treason, that we have forfeited our rights, and that we are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that what your words imply?”
The polite thing would have been to sugarcoat the answer, out of fellowship and diplomacy. But Lincoln replied, firmly but serenely, “Yes, you have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it.” Hunter, seeing that the president was immovable, backed down, offering that “we have about concluded that we will not be hanged so long as you are President — so long as we behave ourselves.”
We can’t fight or bully our way out of this. We need to keep talking, keep persuading, and keep following the only road back up. The very nature of a free society and a system of elections and laws is that it can’t be defended if the means used destroy the thing we’re trying to protect. We need the American Way of rules and order and peaceable civil discourse more than ever.