Reflections on Violence

Two Reasons for Kirk's Murder

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

From “A Walk After Dark,” W.H. Auden

There are two reasons Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah on Wednesday: One is the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution; The other is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The simple fact is this: the only state that could guarantee that something like Kirk’s murder never occurs again would be felt, with justification, to be an intolerable tyranny by nearly everyone in this country.

To those who say, “Guns are the issue,” I say, get real:—Charlie Kirk was killed with a bolt-action hunting rifle, not with an assault rifle. Even the most modest attempts at reasonable gun control have failed. There is no conceivable world in which there would be a powerful movement in this country to ban the types of guns that millions and millions of Americans consider to be a natural part of their lives, as normal as an automobile or a refrigerator. And even if they did, the judiciary is attached to an extremely expansive notion of 2nd Amendment rights and would strike it down. Even in countries with stringent gun control, these are the very types of weapons that are permitted. Out of respect for my fellow citizens and their liberty, I would not take them away even if I could.

To those caviling about “radical ideas” or “Antifa networks,” or some such nonsense, as long as there is freedom of speech and association in this country, there will be the spread of radical and even hateful ideas. Even if you could restrict the most incendiary speech, people will interpret relatively anodyne things in ways that drive them to violence, just because they are insane, or want attention, or are even just momentarily enraged. There is no law against irrationality, and we all must accept with a certain stoicism that there are millions of people in this country with views that border on madness. In the age of the internet, it has become nearly impossible to police the spread of propaganda. All of the right-wing fury aimed at people over celebrating Kirk’s murder, all of the plans they propose to “crack down,” to go after NGOs, or universities, or “left-wing billionaires,” would involve a violation of the First Amendment in some way. What they consider to be an insidious conspiracy is just the normal operation of civil society, that is to say, free association and free speech. Since Buckley and Citizens United, spending money is considered protected speech. Trust me, there are many institutions and groups that I personally consider to be essentially seditious conspiracies against the American Republic—the Republican Party, being the most prominent example—but I know I can’t reasonably hope to see them quashed without harming liberties that I, too, hold dear. I have to hope and work for their political defeat and diminution. So far, my small contribution has not amounted to much in that regard. All of the demands to halt radicalizing discourse would treat “speech as violence” at some point along the line, the very idea that right-wingers claim to find the most dangerous of all.

It’s long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It’s actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. Even if you admit exceptions for direct incitement and libel, absolute free speech will always contain within it the possibility of repression, through the persuasion of large numbers to ostracize or persecute another person or group. What is “cancel culture” except an outcome of free speech: it begins with a public accusation, a calumny, a charge—an act of speech—and others are persuaded or incited and join in. It’s the most elementary form of political behavior, writ large. Both the people celebrating Kirk’s death and the people calling for the repression of the celebrators, either through the state or through civil society, are exercising free speech. The only guarantee against absolute free speech creating its own form of intolerable tyranny is the protection of speech and association, even for unpopular groups and ideas.

Norms of civility are also impossible to enforce without abrogating someone’s freedom of expression. For instance, some believe that at this time one should refrain from criticizing Kirk and his ilk. That’s an exercise of power. Calls to decorum exist to circumscribe what can be said. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I’m old enough now to recognize that sententious appeals to “overcome politics” as just more manipulations. I am all for rhetoric that calms public passions. That’s not very much on display on the Right: at this moment, the right-wing infosphere is just a swarming hive of hysterical self-pity, baseless speculation, and paranoia. I won’t join this chorus that seeks to set up Charlie Kirk as a paragon of civic virtue. I didn’t passionately hate him, but neither did I admire him. Yes, he had a family and friends who loved him, but so do untold numbers of men, women, and children being sacrificed as I write to various political machinations in Gaza, in Sudan, and in the Congo. The emotions I felt upon his death were fear and pity for the future of the country. I won’t participate in his martyrdom, either through overly cursing or beatifying his memory. It’s my honest and considered view that he did not engage in civil debate but rather in coarse demagoguery that brutally demeaned the dignity of his fellow citizens. That does not in the slightest justify his killing, but to pretend now that he was the model of good citizenship and wise and philosophic public deliberation would be to betray my own beliefs. I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse. But I also won’t engage in the dirty rhetorical trick that slyly suggests that a speaker created the unruly conditions for his own murder, as that late lamented paragon of civility, William F. Buckley, once did about Martin Luther King Jr. I opposed both the substance and form of Kirk’s politics and still do. That’s my opinion, and I feel it’s a reasonable opinion shared by many—by millions in fact—although there are now efforts to drown it out as being unacceptable and disrespectful to the dead. I consider such talk tantamount to intimidation and blackmail, and I resent it. It’s the same kind of droning idiocy and enforced conformity that led us from 9/11 to the destruction of civil liberties and to disaster in Iraq.

Likewise, there are now those who will say that what I’ve been doing, by using the word “fascist,” is hate speech and incitement. To which I respond: Being able to accuse one’s opponents of tyrannical designs is pretty much the essence of American liberty, going back to the very beginning. And I think a moment’s perusal of the shrill words of the high officials and tribunes of that party on social media would confirm that their designs are tyrannical indeed. I sincerely wish I didn’t feel it was necessary to say so. But as long as I do, to pretend otherwise would be merely cowardice or conformity.

I don’t need to tell you what a terribly violent past we’ve had as a nation. I don’t need to catalogue all the riots, lynchings, beatings, shootings, and burnings that fill American history. Even if you discount the Civil War, the regular political violence that characterized the 19th century is astonishing from today’s standpoint. We’ve been blessed with relative civic peace in my lifetime compared to the historical norm. But in that “peaceful” time, there’s been a sea of innocent—truly innocent—blood spilled in school shootings. Are those not political crimes? They are in the sense that we’ve decided as a polity to tolerate them. I witnessed in my lifetime the deaths of small children mocked and denied by many of the same people who are now crying that the entire left is a gang of heartless murderers. So, please spare me the nauseating sanctimony. We are told, and Kirk himself seemed to believe, that occasional massacres are just the price of liberty.

Neither side has a monopoly on political violence; they share it with people who have no discernible ideology at all except vague and inchoate discontent and rage. It takes little effort to recall that the 1960s were a decade of civil strife and assassinations. The 1970s saw a spate of left-wing bombings that are now largely forgotten. In the 1980s, neo-Nazi terrorists went on a spree of violence that resulted in the assassination of Alan Berg, a Jewish talk radio host. In 1988, the government tried to charge the conspiracy behind that wave of violence with sedition. They failed: the jurors shared too many opinions with the accused. In the 1990s, a lost golden age of American peace and prosperity, Timothy McVeigh, inspired by the same ideology, committed the largest mass murder on American soil until 9/11. I was told we’re not to justify murder, but as soon as I brought up McVeigh, I was told how his crime was provoked by the government’s tyranny at Ruby Ridge and Waco. I won’t deny that there’s left-wing violence in America, but as our opponents like to remind us in the most menacing terms, we are not the ones who generally own the guns. I hope my abhorrence of violence is principled, but I recognize it’s also prudential: I understand it’s the other guys who are much better at it, and we don’t stand to benefit from its spread.

We’ll see if this is truly the turning point people seem to think it is. With some weariness, I ask, “What’s going to change exactly? America will become a violent country filled with guns and inflammatory rhetoric? The power of the state will be used without the restraint of the law or rights to attack its enemies?” We’re there already. The true disaster would be to use this to end or injure free political life in this country. I think I can say without being disingenuous that’s not what Charlie Kirk lived or died for, if we are to take his public professions at face value. But I think even an attempt to impose tyranny or mass repression would ultimately fail. For better or worse, this is just not a particularly governable country. That is what we saw on Wednesday. After events like this, I always return to Richard Hofstadter’s conclusion of his essay Reflections on Violence in the United States:

When one considers American history as a whole, it is hard to think of any very long period in which it could be said that the country has been consistently well governed. And yet its political system is, on the whole, a resilient and well-seasoned one, and on the strength of its history one must assume that it can summon enough talent and good will to cope with its afflictions. To cope with them—but not, I think, to master them in any thoroughly decisive or admirable fashion. The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.

I think our huge inarticulate beast will amble on. The nation will have to endure its sad passions. That endurance is perhaps the most we can hope for at the moment.