The usual pablum one hears from well-meaning members of the governing class after a gruesome episode such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk––namely, that there is no place for political violence in the United States––is patently ahistorical. Alas, consulting the record of history shows that there is ample room on American soil for such lurid carnage. But no matter how lengthy the precedent, as Machiavelli insisted in The Prince, “it cannot be called virtue to kill one’s fellow citizens…”
The slaying of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University was a profound assault not merely on one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists but on the body politic itself. It is violence against the notion of the United States as a liberal society. Arguing on behalf of the Constitution in Federalist #1, Alexander Hamilton posed the question of whether the country would be established through “reflection and choice,” or whether it would be “forever destined to depend” on “accident and force.” The corpse of Charlie Kirk strongly suggests that the answer remains in doubt.
A culture of political violence has plainly taken root in American soil, even if it has not spread to the extent of previous historical epochs. Americans across the political spectrum are now seized by terrible anxiety about the prospect of further bloodshed––whether in the form of “copycat” attacks by disturbed and mentally ill individuals or even revenge attacks by Kirk’s distressed allies. We may be spared more mayhem, but the palpable fear abroad in the land is hardly a species of paranoia. At such a tense moment, one is reminded of William Butler Yeats’s well-known lines:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
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