Charlie Kirk was a clean-cut, good-looking and evidently charismatic young man who had views about politics and society that hopefully most Americans still find misguided if not odious. According to the New York Times he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” Allies of Mr. Kirk often sought to defend him against accusations of antisemitism by citing his support for Israel. After his death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned him as “a lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.” President Trump has posthumously awarded him America's highest non-military decoration, the Medal of Freedom, and perhaps he is to lie in state in the Capitol. We like to honor the maxim: De mortuis nil nisi bonum, "[speak] only good of the dead," as Secretary of State Dean Acheson commented when Joe McCarthy died. I will give Kirk the benefit of the doubt and chalk up his opinions to incoherence and unreflecting prejudice, rather than a Nazi-like antisemitism, although of course it is an easy glissando from the one to the other, and it is doubtful that exposure to argument -- despite his famous challenges to adversaries -- could ever have changed his mind.
His murder may well signal the way the American political system dissolves into civil war -- not only by the assembling of large armies into territorial blocs based on a fundamental national disagreement as Lincoln recognized in his second inaugural address delivered some five weeks before he was slain -- but by retail assassinations. Indeed, the outbreak of the South's rebellion was preceded by smaller-scale violence: the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate, the gang attacks in Kansas and Nebraska, John Brown's attack on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. Nonetheless We can examine other cases where acts of retail violence have preceded systemic uprising. The early years of the Weimar Republic were marked by some spectacular killings. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by right-wing militia men in Berlin in mid-January 1919. The left socialist Hugo Haase, active in the revolution of 1918, was killed in November 1918. The Catholic Party leader, Matthias Erzberger, was gunned down in the Black Forest in late August 1921, and Foreign Secretary Walter Rathenau, loosely affiliated with the center-left German Democratic Party, was assassinated in June 1922. They, too, were victims of ultra right-wing violence, which was recognized as such. After Rathenau's murder, Chancellor Josef Wirth of the Center Party denounced the spokesman for the far right's German National People's Party in the Reichstag and declared pointedly in parliament, "This enemy stands on the Right." Emergency police powers were passed to police potentially violent groups. And despite the hopes of the extra-parliamentary Right the Republic stabilized once the hyper-inflation was ended at the end of 1923 and 1924. Its hopeful years ended a short six years thereafter in late 1929-1930 with the stock market crash, the death of moderate conservative foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, mounting unemployment, and a parliamentary deadlock on funding the over-burdened social insurance funds. Did the violence until 1924 help determine the dénouement of 1930-33? In September 1930 elections the National Socialists vaulted from 12 to 108 out of approximately 600 Reichstag seats. The Social Democrats practiced a policy of "toleration -- that is of not voting against the centrist government's use of emergency powers to decree a budget -- but by July 1932 the Nazis won about one third of the Reichstag, and pluralities in some of the state legislatures -- a configuration that today's electoral advance of the AFD uncannily parallels. Ultimately it did not need assassination to bring Hitler into a coalition cabinet at the end of January 1933; and the Reichstag fire shortly after cowed the Reichstag deputies into voting him full decree powers. Social Democrats alone resisted; Communist deputies had already been arrested; Catholics capitulated in return for a Concordat between the Vatican and Hitler's government.
Political assassination also marked the final months of the five-year-old Spanish Republic after the Popular Front Victory of January 1936. Tit-for-tat political strikes and repression had marked the transition to a rightwing government in 1934 and left its shadow over day-to-day politics. The Left's parliamentary come-back in 1936 brought another upsurge of violence from the left and the right. The anarcho-syndicalist left eschewed parliamentary politics but dominated the trade-union confederation, could not or would not stop church burning and individual murders. The most spectacular was the assassination of conservative political leader, José Calvo Sotelo by a socialist, in turn a reprisal for an assassination earlier of a a leader of a socialist affiliated paaramilitary group. Five days later, four of the rightist army generals staged their own rebellion and drew on units based in Spanish Morocco. Thereupon the left seized the territorial garrisons where it could (most notably in Barcelona and Madrid) and the division of the country was set for the ensuing three years of armed conflict, revolution, and repression in both "halves" of the country.
Political assassination also marked the transition in Japan from a conservative parliamentary system, with governments often led by generals, into an effective de facto dictatorship let by the military. Younger rightist military officers, sometimes veterans of the occupation army in Manchuria, effectively wielded political murder to cow civilian leaders and even the older military establishment. In 1921 rightists killed, the head of the first party cabinet based on the parties in the Diet, who was also a founder of one of the big-business combinations or zaibatsu. Through the mid 1920s, though Japan continued to develop a vigorous public sphere and parliamentary culture. But the rise of the Chinese Nationalists who stood in the way of Japan's expansion on the Asian continent, the toll of the economic crisis on agriculture and peasant farms radicalized opinion. Manchuria became a province for Japanese expansion and nurturing political violence. On May 15, 1932, (so-called 5-15) members of the Blood Pledge League assassinated the then prime minister though they failed to take over the government. and on 2-26-36 rightist officers attempted another coup, killing ministers and holding key offices in Tokyo before standing down. Although the government executed three of the rebels, the threat of assassination hung over the liberals in both major parties and prodded the military to take control of the state, Emulating the Italian fascists and the German National Socialists, the military organized an umbrella national movement in 1940, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association-- in theory not a party in theory, but an umbrella organization that enlisted mass appeal for assure military-expansionist ends. The question of how fascist the polity became by the end of the 1930s has remained debated; the most ardent terrorists wanted to transcend capitalism or at least impose state supervision of an economy organized for war and assassinated the orthodox economic minister of finance in the 1932 putsch attempt. Assassination thus played a significant role in undermining any resistance to military dictatorship. It was hardly just a picturesque recourse by individual extremists.
The U.S. has long had a tradition of political violence (recall the assassinations of 1968) and increasingly in recent years displays of ideological polarization. The bien pensant reaction to violence usually involves a plea for compromise across party aisles to reconstitute the center and restore American politics to its supposed tradition of non-ideological competition for office. New York Times columnist David Brooks is perhaps its most insistent advocate; but it finds wider expression after every act of violence in the phrase, "This is not who we are." I cannot judge who we people are, but I can see what they do. It is not clear that we can untangle the killer from the milieu.
I would hesitate to prescribe any policies especially since restricting access to weapons has remained largely out of reach. But we should recognize that we are not good at changing hearts and minds even if we long to do so. What might safely be said about political murder -- or more precisely by exemplary assassination or even just plain old mob pogroms -- is, yes, that it can arise in an atmosphere of polarization, but it can also be an idiopathic act on the part of individuals who have adjustment "problems" we discover after the act itself. But do these after-the-fact diagnoses have any prophylactic value? Herostratus famously burned down the temple of Ephesus just to escape anonymity and be remembered. When political passions run deep, it must remain a temptation to demonstrate one's personal sincerity and credentials. Most problematic for those untempted to ask whether violence would make things better, it can seem a rational calculation to some. The problem of politically inspired killing may abate or burn itself out for a while if we are lucky...or, given current divisions, may hang around. The most disturbing possibility is that perhaps individual killings postpone the advent of wholesale civil war even as they make it harder to avert.
September 14, 2025