Charlie Kirk RIP

May a revival of public debate be his legacy

I wasn’t personally close to Charlie Kirk, but he was among the first to reach out for an interview when Party of the People came out and then he arranged all the details himself, generous with his time all throughout. That struck me. Hosts with operations far smaller would be only too happy to let their producers do all the work of booking guests. But not Charlie Kirk.

Reading the tributes to him, that’s just who he was: gracious, encouraging, always lifting up the voices of others. Read between the lines of the VP’s post, and you can’t escape the conclusion that Charlie Kirk was the pivotal figure in his political rise, making the introductions that ultimately led to the Trump endorsement in the Ohio Senate race and then advocating for his selection on the ticket. And it all started with Kirk reaching out to tell Vance he did a good job on TV. Kirk was the likeliest person his age to be president one day. He won’t be now, but don’t be surprised if one or more of Kirk’s acolytes are elected to the job in his stead.

As Larry O’Connor has said, the last time conservatives felt a loss like this was when Andrew Breitbart died. Like Kirk, Breitbart was the master connector, a genuinely nice person beloved by all in the movement. But no one person could replace him. So all the people inspired by him did.

When answering the question of what we do now, it’s important to not only say the easy things, like “Political violence is always wrong.” It’s also important to say some things that the audience will initially resist, because that’s what’s been standing in the way of changing our toxic political climate. As participants in the political discourse, we all have to change in some way. For Charlie Kirk, and for ourselves.

The first thing we need to say is that retribution not directed squarely at the killer is wrong. The faith that Kirk so nobly exemplified rejects it.

Dehumanizing our political opponents is wrong. Reducing a human being to the sum total of their political beliefs is wrong. Tarnishing most people on the other side of you politically as fascists, racists, bigots, or communists — when only a handful of contemporary Americans actually have such beliefs — is wrong.

What needs to be confronted — the thing at the heart of our corrosive discourse — is the idea of politics as existential. It’s the idea that if you have a certain set of beliefs, you are not only wrong, but a bad person.

To be clear, not everyone who has engaged in such discourse condones violence. But this view does lead to some awful behavior. We see it with those who’ve shut out their friends and family based on politics. And, yes, this is mostly people on the left icing out people on the right, as polls have consistently shown. This seems to be because politics today feels more existential for those on the left: people on the right hate you and your lifestyle, they don’t want you to have rights, and they even may want you dead.

In this view, being in close proximity to the other side isn’t just intellectually uncomfortable, but a threat to your safety. It’s part of a larger defining-down of violence and threats to safety. Silence is violence — or words are violence. Innocuous behaviors are microaggressions. We need safe spaces, not from violent individuals or deadly weapons, but from speech.

The inability to distinguish between a standard-issue expression of a political ideology and hatred is endemic on college campuses and online. This reductive view shows in the comment section’s responses to Kirk’s death. His killing may be regrettable, but isn’t it ironic that he held the beliefs he did on gun control or that he himself could be said to have contributed to political polarization? The implication is clear: Kirk and the right reaped what they sowed.

This is what dehumanization looks like. Charlie Kirk wasn’t a husband and father of young children, but a vessel for a set of political beliefs you don’t like. And as a result, you should view his death differently.

The lost art of public debate

Charlie Kirk was killed trying to talk to people who disagreed with him. What makes his death so poignant is that this was so rare. We have progressively lost the ability to debate first principles in the public square. We are far removed from the days of William F. Buckley grappling with opposing ideas every week on Firing Line.

What’s replaced it is the quote-tweet or the selective clip of the cable news segment for the benefit of the partisan cheering section. All of the discourse is geared around performing for one’s own side. That is, by far, the easiest way to become famous in politics these days. The mass-exodus of one side to a niche social network after Elon Musk bought Twitter was explicitly about not wanting to face people on the other side, of feeling more comfortable in one’s own bubble.

When you’re debating ideas, it doesn’t always feel comfortable. But that’s what is necessary if we are going to get out of the dark place we are in.

If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happened to high school debate competitions. You might think of this as the last refuge of good faith ideological sparring, but instead it’s sunk into a morass of nihilism as critical theory is used to negate the very premise of any rational debate at all. As Maya Bodnick wrote in 2023,

In a traditional debate round, students argue over a topic assigned by the tournament — for example, “The U.S. should adopt universal healthcare.” One side is expected to argue in favor of the motion (the affirmation side), and one against (the negation side). However, in recent years, many debaters have decided to flat-out ignore the assigned topic and instead hijack the round by proposing brand new (i.e., wholly unrelated to the original topic), debater-created resolutions that advocate complex social criticisms based on various theories — Marxism, anti-militarism, feminist international relations theory, neocolonialism, securitization, anthropocentrism, orientalism, racial positionality, Afro-Pessimism, disablism, queer ecology, and transfeminism. (To be clear, traditional feminism is out of fashion and seen as too essentialist.)

These critical theory arguments, known as kritiks, are usually wielded by the negation side to criticize the fundamental assumptions of their affirmation side opponents. Kritik advocates argue that the world is so systematically broken that discussing public policy proposals and reforms misses what really matters: the need to fundamentally revolutionize society in some way. For example, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage,” the affirmation side might provide some arguments supporting this policy. But then the negation side, instead of arguing that the government shouldn’t raise the minimum wage, might reject spending any time on the original resolution and counter-propose a Marxist kritik.

Increasingly, the only way to win these debates is to be able to wield these non-sequiturs yourself. And, to no one’s surprise, conservative or pro-capitalist viewpoints are an automatic DQ. Again, this is in debate.

Kritiks are so persuasive to left-wing judges that debaters can’t succeed in the activity without being great at them. Competitors who don’t want to argue for kritiks themselves still have to learn how to respond to them without contesting their radical premises. For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good. Instead, debaters have to concede that capitalism is a bad system and make other leftist arguments like, “it’s capitalistic to fail to argue for the topic” and “Marxism isn’t the most effective response to capitalism; instead we need to look to other critical theories” (like Afro-Pessimism or transfeminism). This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory and creates a vicious cycle where the only people left are kritik debaters.

If I have a wish for what happens next, it’s massive, society-wide exposure therapy in the form of real debate between the left and right. On college campuses, that could look like mandatory debate courses, where both sides, conservative or liberal, MAGA or progressive, have a presumption of equal validity at the outset.

Vigorous debate without existential stakes

It’s cliché to say that both sides need to sit down and just talk to each other. But the blocker to this is the contempt both sides have for each other. And the source of this contempt is a growing belief of politics as existential. Politics is now a core pillar of individual identity, so that alternative viewpoints are invalidating who one is as a person.

Get rid of that belief, and you solve a lot of things.

Much of my nostalgic longing for debate comes from growing up in a period where political philosophy tended to be discussed in more erudite forums, in the pages of National Review or The New Republic or The Nation. Cable news existed, but the debaters on the much-maligned Crossfire were typically pretty knowledgeable about the issues.

Look back at Ronald Reagan’s radio monologues. They were not rage bait but fully formed arguments for his policies.

Most of the public existed at a healthy remove from these debates, exposed only through evening news coverage. As such, people were persuadable for both sides and not siloed into separate camps by a steady drip-drip-drip of partisan content

Political tribalism is downstream of higher political awareness. It’s not a surprise that, starting in 2004, you had the steady rise of the Internet, you had modern cable news coming of age, and you had the trend of declining turnout in elections getting reversed. It’s all a function of more access to more diverse sources of information.

In this period, you also got the rise of political hobbyists, people who don’t do anything other than consume politics online and comment on it. This is the comments section, and it quickly becomes toxic.

As I’m writing this, a suspect has been apprehended in Kirk’s murder. It does no one any good to draw a direct through-line from him to a broader political movement. Most shooters have serious mental health issues on top of whatever political views they may hold, and this is usually the most direct cause of their crimes.

But I don’t think you can ignore the spiraling youth mental health crisis, one driven by social media and phones, coming at a time when people are being fed a story of politics as literally life or death — of this election being the last one.

Real life is different from this apocalyptic online hellscape. And real life simply doesn’t change very much depending on whether there’s a Democratic or a Republican president. That’s true both of people’s material wellbeing and the cultural context in which they live. It’s perfectly fine to want people who reflect your values in office, but we’ve lost an ability to believe that the country will be fine even if the other person wins, and that isn’t fine.

The question we asked right before the 2024 election shows the mountain we have to climb. Almost 80% agreed that 2024 was existential, and only 15% were willing to buy into the idea that their life would be fine if the opposing candidate won. Clearly, not very many of this majority of Americans would ever think about resorting to political violence. But we have to ask what the consequences are when too many people believe it’s the end of America if the wrong person wins. Not everyone will take matters into their own hands, but this is leading many down a very dark path psychologically.

An actual debate of ideas respects the people on the other side making the argument. People who work professionally in politics mostly understand this, which is why they’ve been unified in their shock and horror at the assassination. But go read the replies or your DMs if you’ve expressed any form of sympathy in the last few days, and it’s a different story. There it’s a vile smorgasbord of rationalization and whataboutism. And it’s a contagion the elites increasingly can’t control.