The folks at FIRE noted today that “we’re in the cancel culture phase” of the Kirk tragedy news cycle, where any seemingly insensitive comment will attract an online mob seeking vengeance. But we should be able to state a few obvious truths simultaneously:
Political violence is never acceptable and destroys any cause to which it attaches. Kirk’s murder was despicable, and the monster who killed him may end up doing more to advance right-wing ideology than a hundred Charlie Kirks could. Martyrdom is a potent political force.
Kirk was a proponent of publicly debating his ideas. His campus tour was dubbed “Prove Me Wrong,” and his organization advertised it by telling potential attendees, “Don't agree with Charlie? Great, you go to the front of the line.”
Many of Kirk’s ideas were juvenile nonsense—and much worse.
There should be no shame in describing accurately what Kirk believed—and what he helped elect. Maybe there was a time in American public life when it would have been unseemly to do so in the immediate aftermath of such a tragedy, but we don’t live in that world anymore. It was not “unacceptable,” as MSNBC’s president called it, for an on-air contributor to criticize Kirk’s rhetoric on Wednesday. As anyone who has ever read an obituary knows, journalists do not flinch from grappling with the legacy of the deceased, no matter how awful the circumstances of their death. That MSNBC fired the contributor, Matthew Dowd, tells you all you need to know about the network’s commitment to robust debate.
Kirk himself championed that kind of unfettered argument. In his viral clips, his town-hall showdowns, and across his sprawling media platforms, he built a youth movement that helped elect Donald Trump by imploring adversaries to make their case.
I found his views on women (they should be subservient to men), immigration (he boosted replacement theory), preventing gun deaths through regulation (too high a cost to personal freedom), and the scientific consensus on climate change (“complete gibberish”) to be, in order, sexist, racist, callous, and moronic.
He hated the “awful” Martin Luther King Jr., condemned the Civil Rights Act, mused about biblical language calling for the stoning of gay people, blamed “Jewish donors” for the rise in antisemitism, and called transgender people “an abomination to God.” His death does not make any of these views more or less valid, and it has to be possible to discuss his impact on politics without being accused of condoning his assassination.
Much of the discussion this week about Kirk’s beliefs centers on race and gender and religion—the stuff that really fuels online outrage (justifiably so, in many cases).
But I think it’s worth digging into one big thing that Kirk initially got right and that tells us a lot about the transformation of the conservative movement in his lifetime.
In interviews, including a profile by Robert Draper in The New York Times earlier this year, Kirk traced his own political awakening to several books, including The Founders’ Key, by Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn. Kirk had discovered Arnn’s book while taking an online class through Hillsdale, and he cited it as crucial to understanding his political goals.
Arnn published The Founders’ Key in 2012, and it’s very much a product of the conservative movement of that time, which was defined by an anti-government backlash against the Obama administration. It was the era of the Tea Party movement, which Kirk joined as a young man, and the right back then professed to be libertarian at its core. The big fear for conservatives was that bad people with bad ideas would get elected and abuse the power of the federal government.
That was the thrust of Arnn’s book, which argued that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were uniquely tied together and that the left wanted to sever the bond in a way that undermined our democracy.
In Arnn’s view, the Declaration articulates the ends (natural rights, equality before the law), while the Constitution supplies the means (separated powers, checks and balances, federalism). He warned that progressives sought to delink those two founding documents by disregarding the restraints written into the Constitution that protect us from an out-of-control federal government that can be weaponized against its own people. Arnn insisted that progressives were hell bent on using the power of the state to accomplish policy goals without respect to any constitutional limits. He argued that this severing of ends from means was the biggest threat to liberty in America.
The great project for conservatives, he wrote, was to restore “a government that operates entirely within the confines of the Constitution.”
With this political education from Arnn and Hillsdale informing his worldview, Kirk set about building a new right-wing movement that claimed to want a government defined by local control, a Congress that stands up to the “imperial” president, courts that constrain the executive branch, and an administrative state that is defanged.
You probably know the rest of the story.
Donald Trump came along, and in less than a decade, he inverted the entire project. The ends-over-means abuses that Arnn warned about became Trumpism’s guiding philosophy—and Kirk devoted his life to bringing it to power.
The Justice Department is now a political tool of the president that identifies its enemies first and then uses its enormous prosecutorial powers to find crimes that those unlucky targets may have committed.
The overbearing regulatory agencies that Arnn decried are now weapons to harass and control disfavored industries, including the media.
The state is now used to silence critics and to bring law firms, universities, and corporations to heel, something Arnn warned was among the greatest threats from the left.
State National Guards and numerous federal police agencies have been co-opted by the White House and sent into cities against the will of locally elected officials.
The president conjured a system of tariffs with no congressional authority and uses it indiscriminately to punish or reward sectors of the American economy and foreign trading partners.
Trump has claimed vast new presidential powers by declaring a series of national emergencies that don’t exist.
The courts that try to restrain Trump are subject to vicious attacks by the president or outright defiance of their rulings.
The Congress has stood by through it all and either remained silent or served as a cheerleader for Trump’s torching of the Constitution.
This is to me the main legacy of Kirk’s life in politics. He was part of a generation of activists who transformed the right from Tea Party libertarianism to Trumpist authoritarianism.
Again, nothing Kirk ever did or said justifies the despicable act of political terrorism that took him from his wife and children. At the same time, there is also nothing wrong with accurately describing his toxic ideas and his corrosive political legacy.
Absolutely on point!
Amen!