Today marks the first anniversary of the killing of Charlie Kirk, one of the most prominent pro-American voices of his generation. How could such a young man, with no college degree and no formal institutional authority, make such a mark on the American conscience? The answer lies partly in what Kirk did so relentlessly: He talked. He platformed his opponents, defended his convictions in public, and insisted that the proper answer to a bad idea is a better one.
In his July 16 address on the resurgence of political terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed how rare talking has become in political life. He identified a documented rise in violence from the radical Left and warned that the West has developed a blind spot toward this cancer. As he cataloged that violence across the United States and Europe, Rubio rightly brought his case to a crescendo with the assassination of Kirk.
Nearly two centuries ago, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described war as “a continuation of policy by other means.” The radical Left has increasingly embraced that logic. When persuasion fails, coercion follows. Politics gives way to violence.
Despite all its professions of tolerance, the radical Left cannot accommodate genuinely free and open discourse. It is little wonder. An ideology that cannot survive scrutiny must silence its critics. Progressivism, therefore, resorts to politics by other means: War.
But is it war when the belligerents do not even know they are in the literal crosshairs? Is it just when fellow countrymen are unwittingly cast as foes? Perhaps those targeted in such a war are right to be surprised. They believed themselves co-heirs to the same moral inheritance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, only to find themselves deprived of all three. Not war, after all, but political terrorism.
Rubio noted this rise in political violence is not unique to America. Germany has seen that violence from the Left surged more than 40% over the previous year. Partly in response to that violence, the AfD won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt this week despite a political “firewall” against it and efforts from the Left to cast it as “far” right. Yet “far” is a relative term, easily used to place political opponents beyond legitimate public life. The irony should not escape us: Less than a century after a German regime outlawed its political opposition, Germany again debated outlawing the AfD.
History should make us wary of the language that prepares the ground for violence. The Third Reich notoriously recast deportation as “resettlement” and the killing of the vulnerable as “mercy killing” undertaken for the greater good. It laundered moral corruption through the language of neutrality, framing atrocity in terms calculated to secure moral approval. By “othering” opponents, political movements create a plausibility structure to treat fellow citizens as enemies.
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Kirk often warned, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” Yet he wanted more than conservatism and civil discourse. Moments before his assassination, he shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with a crowd of 3,000 college students. Jesus, with some of his final breaths, asked his Father to forgive those killing him. It was a fitting end to Kirk’s public witness: He spent his final moments proclaiming that even the violent, even murderers, can be forgiven. The world could use more of Kirk’s conservatism. It needs even more of his Christ.
Progressivism is its own worst enemy. It preaches tolerance while silencing dissent. When persuasion fails, it resorts to politics by other means. It already has.
Andy Schmitz is a bioethicist in the U.S. Army and a Ph.D. student in ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He recently completed fellowships in the University of Chicago’s Siegler Fellowship in Clinical Medical Ethics and the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of War, or U.S. Government.