By JOHN HOOD
I had strong political disagreements with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, on both style and substance — and I mourn his death, deem it an indefensible crime, and fear its consequences.
Note my choice of word: I didn’t say I differed with Kirk but condemn his murder. The use of that conjunction suggests potential tension or even contradiction between disagreement and nonaggression. No such tension exists.
Since Kirk’s assassination on September 10, his friends and colleagues have expressed not only profound grief but also appreciation for his personal kindness, Christian faith, rhetorical skill, and entrepreneurial drive. I’m in no position to do the same. I knew Charlie Kirk only slightly, through a few brief conversations.
I respect their admiration for the man they knew. Still, even if that admiration were unwarranted, his death would still be an outrage. Kirk wasn’t a soldier in war or a criminal attempting a violent act. He was slain while debating public issues with university students. His murder was a direct assault on freedom, on the rule of law, on human decency. It robbed a wife of her husband, two children of their father, and countless others of someone they loved.
For the most part, politicians and activists across the political spectrum have responded to his killing with decorum and denunciation. They’ve restated undeniable truths. Political differences are inevitable. Robust, passionate discussion of them is necessary and productive. We establish governments, conduct elections, hold trials, and subject the exercise of coercive power to an elaborate system of checks and balances because the alternative — ceaseless cycles of violence, intimidation, and chaos — will never be consistent with human flourishing.
We should all welcome their words. Language matters. The language of leaders is especially important, as it greatly influences the feelings and judgments of their followers.
Now, it is time for action. No, I’m not talking about new laws or security procedures. Perhaps some would help, but the action I mean doesn’t require legislative majorities or technical proficiency. Our current toxic stew of grievance and mutual recrimination isn’t the result of bad policies that can be modified or shadowy conspiracies that can be unmasked.
Each of us retains moral agency here. Each of us can do something to deprive a smoldering fire of fuel before it becomes a massive conflagration.
It starts by recognizing that others can fundamentally disagree with you without being villains, liars, or ignoramuses. Ask them why they disagree. Listen not for the purpose of immediately rebutting their views but to try to understand why they believe what they believe. At worst, you’ll leave the conversation better informed. At best, you’ll signal a willingness to be persuaded by others — which will, in fact, make your own arguments more persuasive to others.
Sound fanciful? I assure you it is not. A decade ago, my friend Leslie Winner and I helped found the North Carolina Leadership Forum. I’m a lifelong conservative who has run a conservative foundation and served in appointive office. She’s a lifelong progressive who has run a progressive foundation and served in elective office.
Based at Duke University, NCLF convenes three dozen people at a time — state and local politicians, CEOs, nonprofit executives, and other civic leaders — to discuss a controversial issue. Our goal isn’t consensus. It isn’t to “solve” the problem. It is to build social capital and give leaders the will, skills, and relationships to model constructive engagement across the ideological divide.
The hundreds of leaders who have gone through our program continue to disagree. They tussle over legislation, clash over jurisdiction, and compete for political power in a closely divided battleground state. The process remains tumultuous, messy, often frustrating. Politics has ever been thus.
Whoever killed Charlie Kirk — and the criminals and lunatics who’ve in recent years killed or tried to kill other political activists, state legislators, governors, judges, members of Congress, and our current president — may well seek a war.
It remains fully within our power to stop them.
John Hood is a syndicated columnist, president of the John William Pope Foundation, and one of the founders of Freedom Conservatism.
In the mix
The following are reflections by other Freedom Conservatives about Charlie Kirk’s life, his passing, and our current political moment. Click on the authors’ names to read the full text.
• Allen Mendenhall, Senior Advisor for the Capital Markets Initiative at the Heritage Foundation:
“Charlie’s death is a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are: a people who have lost faith in our own founding bet that free people can govern themselves through reason rather than force. If we cannot reclaim the inheritance of reason over violence, of speech over silence, then his death will not be the end of one man’s story. It will be the beginning of our own undoing.”
• Author and Washington Post columnist George Will:
“Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the ‘politics’ of ants, beavers and bees.”
“Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.”
“Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance.”
“Kirk, like [Bill] Buckley, was a teacher unconfined to a classroom. Anyone is such who argues for a living — who by welcoming interlocutors pays them the compliment of acknowledging the kinship of all serious users of language. It is horrific that nowadays this can be fatal.”
• Investor and commentator David Bahnsen:
“I pray they find the perpetrator, quickly, and that the individual(s) responsible face quick and thorough justice. I pray that this political violence which I suspect is in very early innings will stop, and that an ability for peaceful discourse will be rediscovered.”
“I pray that people who type on their keyboards how unsatisfactory the tenets of the liberal society are will, instead, follow Charlie’s lead — and live in a classically liberal society that celebrates debate, persuasion, assembly, speech, argument, discussion, media, and growing a movement.”
“I pray that the Right will find people with the rhetorical giftedness of Charlie Kirk — because I have met about two of them my entire life.”
• Ben Rothove, editor-in-chief of The Madison Federalist at the University of Wisconsin:
“One of the beauties of Charlie was that he was always willing to talk to people, whether you disagreed or not. I actually was one of the people who disagreed with him on something and got to talk to him about it. It was a respectful interaction and a great time.”
“He reshaped the conservative movement and focused it on young people. He recognized that universities are basically indoctrination factories that leave people scared to join conservative student organizations. Charlie recognized that higher education was the place that really needed reform, and he wasn’t scared to go there.”
“I think it’s horrifying that somebody who spent his entire life trying to give conservatives a voice on college campuses ended up getting murdered on one.”
• John Hart, former Capitol Hill staffer and CEO at Open the Books:
“There’s a debate raging on the right about whether we’re in a ‘post-liberal’ moment. Some argue that the classical liberal ideals of our founders like free speech, free markets and individual liberty are failing and that the Right should more aggressively use state power to constrain the other side that is exploiting classical liberal freedoms to advance illiberalism.”
“We should resist this fatalist conclusion, especially in the wake of vile acts of violence that are attacks on freedom. Arguing that classical liberalism has failed is like arguing that music has failed because the perfect song has yet to be written. Our system isn’t perfect, but it is the Mozart, Beethoven and Bach of constitutional frameworks.”
“I believe that we are in a pre-liberal era. We haven’t arrived at the destination our founder’s described but their revolution is very much alive. Our story is the longing and aching to get there.”
“Charlie longed and ached to get his generation to a place where it could recognize the dignity of ‘the other’ and have healthy conflict and spirited debate to avoid violence. We long and ache with him and his family — and always will.”