Last Act

I was coming home from having spent the evening with some friends when I passed this small rally? memorial? for Charlie Kirk. This was out on the edge of the greater Seattle metro area, the "drive until you qualify" zone that high housing costs closer in tend to push people to. As a result, it's something of a convergence zone between the deeply-Blue Seattle area and the fairly Red rural parts of the state.

Most of my social circle, and pretty much all of the people within it that I actually see on a regular (even if infrequent) basis are left-of-center, even the ones who live out in the boonies, and passing this prompted me to wonder how much it matters whether political segregation in the United States is physical or not. I doubt the men in this photograph have been talking with their more Liberal neighbors, given that none of the Liberal people I know in the area have been reporting such conversations.

This is not to say that no such conversations are happening. I still talk, sometimes, with the more Conservative members of my circles. But these are people that I've known, sometimes for a very long time. They aren't the result of outreach "across the aisle," as it were.

The idea that Charlie Kirk was in the business of dialog and debate has become something of a given for many people, in the days after his death. But one of his best-known tactics, that of making assertions about some topic (or some people) and then inviting people to "prove him wrong" wasn't a style of debating; it was simply showmanship. No random person on the street (especially not a random college student) was going to have the very specific information needed to force a concession from Mr. Kirk or his audience that, say, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor or Jackson never benefited from any formal or informal "affirmative action" initiatives; if for no other reason than such programs aren't about individuals. The "Little Rock Nine," and other situations where schools were forced to make room for specific, named individuals, and it was clear that they wouldn't have been admitted otherwise, is not the norm.

There's nothing wrong with showmanship and advocacy, or even blending the two. A lot of people who have driven significant social change in the United States have had some level of a showman's instincts. After all, there are a fair number of preachers on the list, and the line between a good preacher and a good showman has always been thin.

But putting on a good show is not the same as really communicating with other people in a way that advances the two-way movement of ideas an understanding.