Facing

A lot has been going on in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's shooting. President Trump and other prominent Republicans have called for those who were critical of Mr. Kirk, or seemed to celebrate his death to be fired from their jobs, and there have even been calls to round up and prosecute people believed to be a part of "the radical Left." The accused gunman, now in custody, is facing calls for their execution, which started even before formal charges had been filed.

This seems to fly in the face of Mr. Kirk's advocacy of the First and Second Amendments. He said that real problems would start when Americans stopped talking to one another, and he seemed to be aware of, and okay with, the idea that in an armed society, the wrong people would wind up being killed, so one presumed he understood that he might be one of them. (I would claim that he understated the problem, as even only taking homicides into account, some fifteen thousand or so people die every year from shootings.) But none of this has stopped angry voices on the Right from calling for more firings, at the implied risk of government sanctions, and calls for vengeance after the incident.

This is, to a degree, simply to be expected. Partisans tend to be good at mobilizing anger; it's a very effective tool for fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. And there's nothing new about calls for violence after the killings of those who avoided calls for violence themselves. Few things seem to convince people of the necessity for violence more than the death of a peacemaker.

But they do tend to have a tarnishing effect, at least in the immediate aftermath, on the deceased. In this instance, Republican calls for those who are critical of their politics to be punished with unemployment are nothing new. So was Charlie Kirk simply a useful shield against criticism? Someone to hold up when it was pointed out that American Conservatism seemed to have no problems with "cancel culture" when they were the ones calling for cancellation? Or was Mr. Kirk a willing smokescreen, having taken it upon himself to present a false image of the American Right that people could cloak themselves in?

There's no way of knowing, but the seemingly immediate and quite public discarding of the tactics that Mr. Kirk appeared to pursue (at least at times) seems to justify the questioning of how important they were to the broader Conservative movement of which he was a part.

Of course, a lot of this is led by President Trump, and conflicts are too much a part of his standard operating procedure for him to ever be credible in calls for peace and unity. If there's anyone from whom calls for a ceasefire are cover for reloading the guns, it's the President. And given the degree to which the President single-handedly directs the Republican Party, it's no wonder that everyone who is anyone in the party simply does what they perceive him to want.

And that shifts the focus to the relationship between Mr. Kirk and President Trump, and I, for my part, suspect that all of the President's political relationships are fundamentally transactional. And that in this case, that worked both ways. And Charlie Kirk is mainly of use to the President as someone whose death can be held up as a vehicle to convey to the Trumpist base that they're under threat, and that only the President, with a compliant (to be generous about it) Congress can save them from the hobgoblin of "the radical Left." Whether Mr. Kirk would have approved is something of a moot point.

 P.S.: Big picture, this isn't a knock on the President; it's just how politics in a polarized society works. Recent events, however, have brought it into sharper focus.