When MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was murdered yesterday, he was doing what he did best: debating politics with students on their campus. A sniper bullet hit him in the neck, and life gushed out of his severed artery.
One would expect that brutal crime to bring people of different political views together: Right, Left of Centre, they are all members of civilised society. And civilised people react to the murder of even political opponents in, well, a civilised way.
By way of illustration, I’d like to offer my own response to the murder of the Left-wing Labour MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016.
To set the scene, Mrs Cox espoused ideas and policies I found as deplorable as American ‘liberals’ doubtless found the ideas and policies of Charlie Kirk (some of his pronouncements don’t sit well with me either, but that’s a different matter). With that in mind, I invite you to compare my reaction with theirs.
Lest you accuse me of bragging, I’m using my own words not out of egotism but out of laziness. I know many other conservatives wrote similar things, but it would take time and effort to look up their comments. My own, however, are at my fingertips:
“I don’t care what objectionable or noble causes Mrs Cox supported, what kind of politician she was or wasn’t, what her career might or might not have held in store for her.
“When a young woman in the prime of her life is butchered by a lunatic degenerate, when she dies with the last words ‘My pain is too much’, when she leaves a bereaved husband and two motherless children behind, I can feel the tragedy of it all as much as anyone. I pray for her soul and for her family; I hope God will judge her with kindness and she’ll rest in peace.”
So much for the point. Now comes the counterpoint of ‘liberal’ social media comments on the murder of a 31-year-old man leaving behind a young wife and two little children:
“Hitler giving Charlie Kirk a tour in hell.”
“He was “a f***ing Nazi. And you know what kind of Nazi is the best Nazi? A dead one. Thank God that s***stain of a person is no longer in this world”.
“Why didn’t Charlie Kirk just debate the bullet? He would have easily deflected.”
“I don’t know I think getting killed by your favorite thing in the world is sweet. It’s a nice gesture.” [A reference to Kirk’s championship of the Second Amendment.]
“If he doesn’t make it at least he died with the love of his life, school shootings.” [Ditto]
“This wouldn’t have happened if Charlie Kirk had been armed.” [Ditto]
Such feral gloating is a verbal equivalent of a savage devouring the liver of his dead enemy. Alas, this is the tonal quality of current political debate, and not only in the US.
People no longer have opponents they want to prove wrong. They have enemies they want to see dead.
It hasn’t always been like this. For example, in the early ‘50s William F Buckley published two books that attacked the liberal mindset dominant in America, God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies. Tempers were running hot at the time, with McCarthy accusing every liberal of being a communist and every communist of being a Soviet spy.
Not all of his accusations were justified, although many were. But his language was intemperate, emotive, often rude and slanderous. McCarthy’s targets responded in kind, and the air was think with invective.
Then Buckley’s books came out, with one showing the totalitarian nature of ‘liberalism’ at Yale, the other defending McCarthy’s message if not necessarily his style. Most reviewers, some of whom were mentioned in the books by name, took issue with Buckley’s assertions, indeed with his politics as such.
Yet most of them complimented his style and verve, saying how pleased they were to have such a talented and erudite opponent. Today he’d be getting death threats.
The level of public discourse has dropped below the lower limit possible within a viable civilisation. Political zealotry now rides roughshod over manners, style, integrity, even common decency. People no longer hold their speech to such tests, or even the tests of logic and common sense.
As they move farther and farther away from the source of our civilisation, they gradually lose all links with it. Their own passions, however expressed, take precedence over civility, that irreplaceable cognate of civilisation.
That turns them into barbarians, which word originally designated those outside civilisation, in that case Greek. And barbarians don’t recognise any checks on their words and increasingly their deeds. Not all of them vent their feelings with a high-powered rifle, but many of them can do so and, given the chance, will.
People who fear the possibility of apocalyptic nuclear war should look no further than social media comments on Charlie Kirk’s death. Those who cheer a homicidal act are capable of pushing the suicidal button. Having slipped the shackles of civilisation, they haven’t replaced them with any other restraints.
The political arena is resonant with jarring shrieks, and the most piercing ones come from savages incongruously called ‘liberals’ or those more appropriately called ‘populists’. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I dare say.
Charlie Kirk, RIP