In the ten days since my last post, Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed. This is a tragedy for Kirk’s family (including two children so young they will have few memories of their father) and friends (including a number close to the White House).
It is also a severe blow to American democracy. Murder is wrong. Political violence, with its pervasive, malignant consequences, compounds the calamity.
I know more about Kirk today than I did a week ago, when I recognized his name just because of his affiliation with Turning Point USA. I was especially distressed to hear of his assassination because it is another mark of our democratic decline at a perilous time. And it brought to mind something I’d read a day earlier in Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.
The passage resonated for me when I heard of Kirk’s death. Shenk relates an experience of Democratic political consultant Stan Greenberg, who was practicing his craft in Israel. Emphasis added:
The relentless pressure of Israeli politics was like nothing Greenberg had experienced before. It could be exhilarating, especially when you could leave it behind with a flight back home. But he thought voters were sick of it. After spending time in the country, Greenberg came to one overarching conclusion: “Israelis longed to be normal.” The subjects that came up in conversations with voters were the same ones he had seen with focus groups in the US and UK—jobs, schools, pensions. “Normal things,” Greenberg said. “That’s all they wanted.”
The US and much of the world in the more than two decades since Greenberg’s observation have by now become more like Israel. We are no longer normal, as Shenk noted within a dozen pages: “Wars for the national soul were breaking out across the globe. Israel wasn’t the exception. It was just ahead of the curve.”
Normal politics is essential for democracy. A whole bunch of stuff is required to make our democratic institutions work: respect for folks who disagree with us; acknowledging the legitimacy of their participation; and adhering to democratic rules of the road to guide our safe passage. Intense polarization, a closely divided nation, and fierce tribal loyalties crowd out what, until a couple of decades ago, was normal.
Without spelling out in detail the conditions and constraints of normal politics, it is clear that violence is antithetical to the enterprise. Bargaining, compromise, the willingness to accept half a loaf at times, and the determination to engage in the process again in the future — all this represents the give and take of politics.
That’s the way it works when it works. When things are normal.
Violence shatters these possibilities. It’s distressing to live in a time when we are so far from normal.