Nothing’s Shocking

Imagine a world in which a radical leftist is murdered, and then rightwing pundits proceed to eulogize him, pro sports franchises hold moments of silence for him, and Republic governors order flags flown at half-staff.

You may as well imagine a human colony on Pluto. It's inconceivable.

And yet the mirror image of that scenario is our national reality following the murder of Charlie Kirk. I thought I had lost my capacity to be surprised by the degeneracy of our civic culture, but last week taught me there are still new ways we can debase ourselves.

What I’ve now learned is that there is a place in polite society to venerate a man like Kirk, where there is none to venerate his opposite. I learned that in the same week that a court in Brazil convicted that country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup. That’s the difference between a country trying to draw hard lines around political advocacy that goes too far and a country that doesn’t just pardon its insurrectionists, but requires they be eulogized.

Back to our imaginary murdered leftist. Let's call him Kirk Charles. And let's imagine a greatest hits compilation of his hottest takes, such as 1) capitalism is inherently evil; 2) private property must be abolished; 3) liberal democracy is a tool used by capitalists to subjugate workers; 4) to be truly free, humans must organize themselves in stateless societies based on voluntary cooperation, free from such oppressive institutions as police and banks; and 5) anarchic violence in pursuit of political ends is acceptable.

Do I agree with any of those ideas? No, I do not. Would I feel badly if our imaginary Kirk Charles was murdered? Yes, I would, just as I feel badly about the real Charlie Kirk being murdered, because murder is bad and political violence is bad. But I certainly wouldn’t expect to see him on the jumbotron and be told that I should honor him, especially because his views are so far outside the mainstream and especially when there are thousands of other people living simple, decent lives, who senselessly lose those lives in anonymity every year in this gun-drenched nation of ours.

So if it’s obviously unacceptable to glorify our imaginary provocateur, then why is the same not true for Charlie Kirk, a man who built his career by saying indecent, hateful things? The simple answer to that simple question is that there are many people at the highest levels of society — the sorts of people who set the standards for acceptable discourse and our collective experience as Americans — who are either sympathetic to Kirk’s views and/or too afraid to say they find them unacceptable. What’s worse? I don’t know. They’re both very bad.

What the reaction to Kirk’s murder has taught me is something I previously wasn’t able to accept: that his views are part of the ambient temperature of our discourse. You don’t honor the deceased on the jumbotron unless a lot of people, or at least a lot of important people, agree with how he conducted his life. It turns out that Kirk wasn’t a radical, that things that I thought were shocking are things we’ve become accustomed to, and that our road back from this is longer than I thought.