For a few hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, something unusual happened in American politics. People who had spent years fighting over almost everything seemed to agree about one thing. Democrats and Republicans both condemned the shooting and on the Senate floor the night after the murder, Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock said he had disagreed with Kirk on "just about everything," before defending his right "to speak, to think" and "to argue it out." Kirk, 31, was shot dead the previous day at Utah Valley University while speaking to students on a college campus.
The irony, if we could call it that, was hard to miss. Kirk had built his career around argument: saying things many Americans admired, many others despised, and then inviting people to challenge him. His murder did not settle any of those arguments but for a brief moment, it seemed to establish something more basic about how Americans were supposed to have them.
Kirk did not have to become a saint and his critics did not have to withdraw a single argument against him. The potential consensus was much smaller and perhaps more useful: political opponents are allowed to speak but disagreement has limits, and murder sits well outside them. Fast forward a year and that narrow bargain looks more like a missed chance.
Kirk’s killing gave political enemies a rare reason to defend the same rule for the same reason: disagreement could be brutal, personal and even contemptuous, but it still had to remain disagreement. Instead, Americans quickly went back to deciding that free expression, political decency and even sympathy depended on who was speaking and who had been hurt. The test was never whether America could agree about Kirk.
Polling after his death suggests Americans already agreed on the most basic rule: political violence was unacceptable. The harder test was whether that agreement could change the way they treated political opponents once the shock wore off. Unfortunately, as statistics show, none of it looked promising.
A Quinnipiac poll released two weeks after Kirk’s killing found 82 percent of voters believed political rhetoric was contributing to violence, yet 58 percent doubted the country could lower the temperature. More than half expected political violence to get worse. It did not take long for that narrow consensus to widen into something much more contentious.
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