The assassination of American conservative pundit Charlie Kirk last week hit me harder than I imagined something like this would. In the time since that tragic event, I think I now know why.
Kirk’s fellow conservative, Ben Shapiro, put out an insightful monologue in the days after the assassination.
In this video, Shapiro says everyone – left and right – is broadly correct about condemning “political violence,” but that these condemnations risk being empty gestures if they do not get more specific. Not all ideologies and movements are equally prone to violence of this kind, and if political violence is to truly be dealt with, those ideologies in fact behind it must be called out by name.
For the American context, Shapiro mentions the various “Critical” ideologies today associated with transgender and neo-Marxist politics, white nationalism, and Muslim extremism.
I would go a step further than Shapiro.
He is correct to say we need to be particular about where calls – and what Shapiro terms “structures of permission” – for political violence are coming from. But he stops short of acknowledging that beyond mere ideology, society as a whole has allowed the scope of politics and politicisation to creep ever onwards and forwards.
Things that would have been considered supremely personal, private, and intimate only half a century ago – not to mention a century ago – are now widely regarded as matters of “public interest.”
If we solve the problem of over-politicisation, we solve the problem of ideological extremism. But that means coming to terms with faults on our own “sides” of the aisle.
Had it coming?
There is not much overlap between my politics and that of Kirk.
Kirk sought too much government intervention in domestic social issues and too little government intervention against tyranny in eastern Europe. But as activists go, Kirk was one of the more reasonable ones, and his views, though contentious, rendered him nothing more or less than a moderate conservative representing the mainstream of conservative opinion in the United States. He believed in talking and debating, not rounding up his enemies.
Still, now he’s dead, because despite this mildness, he represented positions felt necessarily unacceptable by his detractors who, again, built a structure of permission for his (and others’) execution. Kirk’s assassin need not necessarily be one of these intellectual detractors, but his conduct slotted seamlessly into this permission structure.
Shapiro made another good point, noting that after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, nobody felt the need – in the midst of condemning the event – to explain why this outlet was so wrong about so many things. But, after Kirk’s assassination, this has been common, and indeed I just noted my disagreements with Kirk’s politics. In a healthy society, the assassination is simply condemned without qualification.
What Shapiro is criticising, however, are those people who were trying to say that while they do not really support Kirk’s assassination, he had it coming due to his views.
And that is not what I am doing.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is to be condemned (and legally avenged) without hesitation. While some political actors no doubt do have it coming when they themselves incite and encourage violence, Kirk was not one of these. Society, on the other hand, has made this event and events like it completely foreseeable and inevitable.
Sit down and talk?
The “solution” to things like this happening hitherto identified is for people to rather talk than be violent, channelling Kirk’s own method of engaging his opponents.
But this is not a serious proposal when no attempt is made to understand the underlying problem.
Nobody wants to assassinate the Vice President of the Randburg Lost Puppies Association. Why? Because nobody’s vital interests – those things someone considers necessary to function freely and comfortably in society – have been forcibly integrated with this person’s activity. The decisions this person makes in that capacity do not involuntarily displace the decisions made by others.
To propose that “we should just talk” when the thing being talked about is a vital interest of some is an empty gesture. Violence will always be regarded as fair-game by people in the defence of those interests.
The South African liberal ecosystem in which I work and advocate is not immune to the romanticisation of politics – that we simply need to sit down and talk about any number of things – and this sentiment is entirely commendable.
But if we truly want to lower the temperature of politics, there are things that ought in fact not even be on the table of contestability. We should not talk about them – in the realm of politics – because that by itself establishes an unacceptable premise and opens the door for escalating the contestation.
After all, criminals believe in killing the police and prosecutors and judges who interfere with their “work”. Criminal work is a vital interest of criminals – it is their bread and butter and a key part of their identity. And because the criminal justice system is singularly dedicated to ending this activity, violence is a perfectly understandable reaction from syndicates.
When the activity, identity, and work of anyone – not only criminals – is made into a part of state influence and control, the same risks necessarily arise.
This is not so in the realm of mere social, personal, and communal contestation, where the principle of voluntariness is strictly observed and enforced by the state. In the realm of political and state contestation, there is no principle of voluntariness: if the state comes to a decision, what it decides is inherently compulsory for all affected.
This is not me saying – like others, shockingly, are – that Kirk specifically invited his own killing because he deigned to want to sit down and discuss transgender politics, abortion policy, or affirmative action.
I am saying that (Western) society, as a whole, should feel a deep sense of crisis for making these topics of contestation in the first place.
The “public interest”
To take one example of over-politicisation: A person’s gender has only become a matter of political contestation because of the role the state plays, in various respects, that makes gender relevant. From marriage licences to laws relating to maternity or military service.
Not only that, but also because those involved in transgender politics want to enlarge the scope of state involvement in gender matters, by creating special privileges and institutions dedicated to it. Even state health departments as far away from American culture wars as those in South Africa have bought into the idea of special dispensations for transgender patients.
What gender you are – or what gender you supposedly “decide” to be – should be a matter wholly outside the political realm that does not come within a country mile of a tax cent.
If we do not insist upon this, and make gender identity a fundamental component of political contestation, then it should not surprise us that some might regard “words as violence.” They have convinced themselves – and society has convinced them – that they are entitled to something due to their gender, and when it is mooted that that thing might be taken away, their reacting violently is foreseeable.
It is not because Kirk said and believed what he did that made it foreseeable, but rather that society decided to make “gender politics” a phenomenon in the first place that people like Kirk and many others are put in danger for voicing opinions one way or the other.
Take National Health Insurance (NHI) in South Africa as another example.
Currently, there is almost universal agreement – outside the political elite – that the NHI is a bad idea. However, in time, generations will grow up knowing only the NHI as the ticket to their horrifically bad and collapsing healthcare system. If the government succeeds in destroying the private healthcare sector, the NHI will represent the whole frame of reference for these new generations.
Imagine, then, if in 50 or 100 years an advocate comes along and proclaims that “we need to abolish the NHI!” or even just “reform” it. Many of the NHI’s beneficiaries will regard these words as “violence” to their vital interests, and some might well decide to react violently themselves.
It is not the fault of the advocate, of course; and while it is directly the fault of the person reacting for conducting themselves violently, it is ultimately also the fault of society for having allowed people’s healthcare choices to become a matter of public policy.
This politicisation always comes alongside good vibes.
We need to politicise healthcare in the “public interest.”
We need to politicise housing in the “public interest.”
We need to politicise education in the “public interest.”
With these three vital interests among many others now politicised, whenever someone has a different view on how they should be administered in the “public interest,” this is no longer a matter of academic debate – as we will often be reminded – but an outright attack on those interests that sit so intimately close to people’s necessities of life.
Society’s extension of the “public interest” over more and more areas of life necessarily invites more violence, no matter how nobly this “democratisation” is sold by politicians and publicity firms as a romantic “we’re in this together” hand-holding exercise.
In the realm of politics and matters of state, we should not sit down and talk about adults being or deciding to become transgender. We should not sit down and talk about nationalising healthcare. We should not sit down and talk about “white privilege.”
These things are not rightly open to political contestation. These are peaceful people existing peacefully, whose choices and often mere existence are being dragged into the public domain where such questions do not belong. It is only when their peacefulness ceases that their conduct rightly becomes a matter of politics.
Depoliticising these affairs is the only real way to combat political violence.
An emotional week
I do not recall reacting quite so emotionally to the death of a stranger before.
It would not have felt this way had Charlie Kirk passed due to some medical condition, or in a road accident, or even if he were murdered in a mugging or a housebreaking or a mass terror attack. That he, as an individual, was so specifically singled out by someone with a political grievance, and killed for it – no less in the United States of America – feels surreal. Just typing about Kirk in the past tense is a bizarre experience.
I did not quite understand why the death of someone I share so little ideology with, whose work I never really followed, irks me so particularly. In fact, I have seen many across the political spectrum, especially those who have a lot to say, express similar sentiments this past week.
And I now think it has something to do with reminding me – us – about my own mortality in this line of work, given scope and the high temperature of politics. I had felt this way about over-politicisation for a long time, but Kirk’s death has made it more real.
Is there any place to hide for those who voice an opinion under these political conditions, if not even comparatively moderate voices are spared?
Though I am not a conservative, Charlie Kirk was the American conservative leader of my generation. He was a constant, and a moderate voice of millions.
I just turned 31, and Kirk was about a month away from his 32nd birthday. His life, watching his children grow up and thrive, had not truly begun when it was snatched away from him and his loved ones… all because our forebears and many today believe that everything under the sun is and should be vociferously contested.
Totalitarianism awaits
I often tell the story of my journey from nominal socialism to classical liberalism.
For most of my youth, I regarded myself as a “modern liberal” (in the American sense) and often combined that with referring to myself as a “socialist” or a “statist.” This changed, almost in a heartbeat, when I met real socialists for the first time in my first two years at the University of Pretoria.
It was not because I found some fault in their logic – that insight would come later – or found some of their policy proposals particularly disagreeable. Instead, the casualness with which they approached violence was what immediately struck me and put me off that philosophy.
I know now that this open and generous conceptualisation of violence is a direct result of the socialist insight that the personal is political and that there is no real distinction between public and private.
The West – uniquely among all civilisations – solved this particular dilemma long ago.
Whereas in Eastern and African civilisations there is no separation between law and morality, the West uniquely separated them to a considerable degree.
Whereas in Eastern and African civilisations the separation between the private and the public is highly precarious, the West uniquely erected a high – though not insurmountable – wall between the two.
This incredible success, evidently, irked Marxists who, as many conservatives today also believe, thought that it created distance between individuals and true, integrated, social living.
Nonetheless, this separation created the strongest, wealthiest, happiest, healthiest, and most internally peaceful civilisation in human history that was destined for the stars, were it not for Western civilisation’s own and increasing lack of confidence in its own values.
The West has in its very political DNA found the formula to lower the temperature of politics and depoliticise society, but the follow-through on that has been growing weaker and weaker primarily on the back of leftist agitation.
We know who killed Charlie Kirk, but we do not know exactly why. Whatever the reason – left or right – we can be sure that the relentless drive primarily (though not exclusively) by the socialist left over the past century and a half to politicise everything is in large part to blame.
The populist and authoritarian right, always reactionary, meets this challenge with politicisation of its own that often swings much further than is proportional or justifiable.
This is an utter race to the bottom where only totalitarianism awaits, regardless of who “wins.” As usual, liberalism, properly understood, presents us with the only way out.
[Image: Alban_Gogh from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend