Restoring the conditions of republicanism will require the work of generations.
Charlie Kirk died as he lived, publicly debating his fellow citizens.
He had an unparalleled talent for activism, organizing, and fundraising, and for this he was respected in the halls of power. But his signature act, from the beginning of his career to the day of his death, was the basic activity of a citizen in a republic: arguing with his fellow countrymen about what was true and false and what should guide our common life. Indefatigably confident in the importance and efficacy of face-to-face conversations and confrontations, he embodied the political way of life at its most elevated and most fundamental level.
When it came to the roots of the West and the source of meaning in his own life, Kirk favored Jerusalem over Athens, Scripture over Socrates. He never neglected or subordinated his witness to Christ, the true Logos, to the tumult of politics. Nevertheless, as his name suggests (Kirk meaning “church”; Charles meaning “husband” or “free man” or “common man”), Charlie Kirk was both a Christian and a testament to what Aristotle wrote long ago: we are political animals because we have logos, the faculty of speech and reason by which we discern what is good and bad, just and unjust. And it is our partnership in these things that constitutes our domestic and political communities.
Like the two attempts to kill President Trump in 2024 and the countless acts of terrorism perpetrated by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and others for expressly political purposes, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a direct assault on the very possibility of politics.
Hannah Arendt observed that the properly political realm is the realm of speech to the exclusion of violence. There is no law without coercion. But law itself must be rational, and the coercive power of the individual and the community alike must be subordinated to the dictates of reason. There can be no arena for debate—no life of Citizen Kirk, willing to challenge and be challenged in verbal sparring—without armaments to guard it from the interruptions of violence, both domestic and foreign. Many Americans still recognize this distinction: we should argue vehemently about politics, but shrink from the use of violence to advance our goals.
In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, it is tempting to conclude that the most important dividing line in our public life is precisely this: between those who see a place for violence in politics and those who reject it. This is a comforting thought—but it’s misleading. Everyone, after all, affirms the right to self-defense and the right to defend the innocent.
Rather, the dividing line in America today is between divergent notions of what constitutes violence itself—which depend on divergent notions of what is natural.
Consider what our medical-industrial complex calls “gender-affirming surgery.” Is this a horrific act of mutilation or the humane administration of therapy? For anyone not addled by contemporary gender theory, such “surgery” is a violent act because it is against nature. But to say so, we must affirm that organs have natures, that they develop and are arranged to achieve a particular purpose: the circulation of blood in the case of the heart or respiration in the case of the lungs. That, after all, is the meaning of an “organ”: a tool or instrument for performing a specific function.
Violence occurs when one frustrates or even destroys the given purpose of a thing. This is how we commonly use the term: a violent death in an accident or by murder, as opposed to a natural death from old age or the slow decay of the body. Peace, by contrast, is the tranquility of order. It is not established or maintained without effort—all peaceful “interventions” are in the service of enabling the body—physical or politic—to perform its proper functions.
By contrast, in our age violence has come to mean anything that inhibits the autonomous will of the individual, including nature itself. And “peace” can be achieved only by making the speech of others, and physical reality itself, conform to the pronouncements of the autonomous will through repeated and invasive intrusions. Hence “misgendering” a trans-identifying person becomes an insult to civility and an assault on human dignity—verbal violence, a declaration of war—rather than a frank, if uncomfortable, affirmation of an unchangeable, natural truth.
There are generous bounds within which fellow citizens can dispute what is natural and still live in tolerable peace. Consider the sometimes-tense debates between classical liberalism and Catholic social teaching. John Locke and Leo XIII disagreed in significant ways, but both affirmed private property as a natural right. Lockean and Leonine thinkers can debate matters of political economy frankly and openly and be good citizens of the same polity, even as they quarrel about what constitutes the common good. Neither will mistake the other’s speech for violence or an assassin’s bullet for speech.
But neither can live in peace with the Communist who believes private property is itself theft, and who therefore believes that liquidating class enemies and expropriating their wealth is a fundamentally defensive and restorative act rather than a violation of nature. The Communist has already decided that all history is the history of class struggle and committed himself to one side of this war.
Charlie Kirk, the happy warrior that he was, debated Communists, BLM advocates, and trans ideologues so long as their war was only a war of words. He gamely sought to plant seeds of doubt in the wastelands of their ideologies, and he inspired millions of young people by his efforts and successes.
Kirk civilly—politely—and humanely sparred with anyone and everyone, impressively combining a firm confidence in his own convictions with a genuine charity toward those he believed to be in error. He understood what was at stake in his vocation as a citizen: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that is when civil war happens.”
As he rightly noted, the moment one party truly believes that the other side’s speech is actual violence or that his own violence is speech, the game is up. Unfortunately, this has become the argument of an increasing number of radicals on the American Left. From their perspective, shooting Charlie Kirk appears to be a perfectly sane, justified act: defending oneself or the innocent from violence, working on behalf of true peace.
But without speaking and listening, we can have no common citizenship here on earth, nor can we attain our ultimate destiny as citizens in the heavenly kingdom. Kirk maintained these convictions to the end. But this way of life, which throws itself into difficult debates to preserve a space for speech, both political and religious, does not arise or maintain itself spontaneously. It is the peculiar privilege of well-functioning republics.
The conditions of self-government, however, have been in a state of serious decay for half a century, and have eroded with shocking speed in the last ten years. Its restoration will require the work of generations—but fortunately we have an example to follow in the person and work of Charlie Kirk.
