Love the republic, love your fellow Americans.

A week ago, I went to a matinée of the Hamilton musical with students from the Buckley Institute at Yale. Young Hamilton’s first song says, “I am not throwin’ away my shot,” meaning his shot at doing great things in his new country. By the end of the show, he has done great things and is shot and killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr.

Another signer of the of the Constitution was killed in a duel, Richard Spaight of North Carolina. So was a signer of the Declaration, Button Gwinnett of Georgia, which is why his signature is the rarest of those of the signers. In the early republic, deaths in duels were considered murders under the law, though they were not prosecuted because no jury would convict.

Ordinary murders pepper the history of American politics. Twelve presidents have been shot, shot at, or stalked. John Quincy Adams was stalked into the White House by an angry Army doctor. Andrew Jackson was shot at by a house painter who believed himself to be the king of England. (His pistols misfired, Jackson caned him.) Lincoln was killed by a pro-Confederate. Garfield was killed by a reject from a sex cult. McKinley was killed by an anarchist. TR was shot on his way to a speech; he judged that the wound was light enough to allow him to deliver the speech, which he did. FDR was shot at (the mayor of Chicago, sitting next to him, was killed). Truman was stalked into Blair House by Puerto Rican terrorists. JFK was killed by a communist. Ford was shot at, twice. Reagan was shot. Trump was shot, and stalked.

Other prominent figures were victims. George Wallace was shot. RFK was killed. (At the time, NR was closing an issue with a hostile cover story about him, and a hostile cover to match; we substituted an evergreen cultural piece, did a hand-lettered cover, and scoured the issue for critical references, which we excised, missing only a subscription ad that included a tiny upside-down image of the canceled cover.) Martin Luther King was killed. Kentucky Governor William Goebel was killed. Ambrose Bierce wrote a poem for a New York newspaper predicting that the bullet that killed Goebel would travel east to kill McKinley. Got that right. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was running for president when he was lynched.

Now, Charles James Kirk has joined the list.

D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature looks at Natty Bumppo, the rifleman hero of The Last of the Mohicans. “The essential American soul,” Lawrence concluded, “is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Lawrence being Lawrence, that is an exaggeration, but there have been many killer souls then and now. It is partly because we are Americans inhabiting a post-frontier mindscape; partly because we are men (and women — Ford’s two would-be killers were women). Evil and violence are around us; they are within each of us.

One of the purposes of politics in a democratic republic is to keep them at bay. Politics is how we think, how we talk, how we vote, and how we make laws and obey them. When we abandon politics, or transmute it, we bring death — death to victims, emotional and moral death to the perpetrators. Let’s stick to politics.

There is something more — call it fellowship, grace, love. A young W. H. Auden wrote, “We must love one another or die.” Older Christian Auden refused to reprint the line, on the grounds that we all die. That was priggish of him. His younger self knew better what to say. My condolences to Kirk’s widow and her children.

Love the republic, love your fellow Americans.