What I saw at Charlie Kirk’s Vigil

Fair Deal: A reflection on current events.

Author’s note: I decided to postpone my essay due last Friday on Theodore Roosevelt by one week due to the death of Charlie Kirk. In its place, I am sharing an essay today where I reflect on recent events. I will publish the Roosevelt essay this Friday, and thank you all for your patience.

The Last Millennial from Reagan Country

In his May 1967 essay “A Guide to Reagan Country”, James Q. Wilson sought to explain what motivated the people of Southern California who elected Governor Reagan. Wilson was adamant to his Northeastern friends: “we must, I think, take Reaganism seriously. It will be with us for a long time under one guise or another. We will not take it seriously by trying to explain it away as if it were something sold at one of those orange-juice stands or preached from the pulpit at some cultist church.” In Wilson’s view, there was something deeper and more pre-ideological at work in mid-century California politics. Wilson sought to survey the landscape and the people of Southern California, to understand them on their own terms and how their way of life informed their politics. He was a Catholic who grew up in Long Beach in the 1930s and 40s, full of Midwestern Evangelical Protestants and their children. When his family drove out of town to attend mass with “Mexican farmhands and Dutch Catholic dairymen,” he knew he was different.

Charlie Kirk was different too. Last Wednesday, the conservative activist was assassinated at age 31 while answering questions and debating college students at Utah Valley University. I must confess that I didn’t fully understand Kirk’s role in politics until the weeks leading up to his death. For a while, I was too dismissive and saw him as just another one of the Rush Limbaugh imitators our online culture generates. I consider this a non-partisan descriptor; it is one shared by the left-wing online commentator Hasan Piker, who opined in major news outlets about Kirk after his death. He planned to debate Charlie Kirk later this month. Piker admitted in an interview earlier this year that he sees himself as a “reverse Rush Limbaugh,” and he is not wrong about that. But similar to the phrase “reverse racism”, the directional adjective is obscuring. Piker really is another Limbaugh, another man on the microphone for hours comfortably discussing the news, his enemies, his friends, and sometimes saying vulgar jokes or worse along the way.

Kirk had his Limbaugh moments, but he was also far more than that because of what his faith drove him to do. Similar to James Q. Wilson, he was different. Many fellow young Republicans I know in DC grieving for Kirk’s death are devout Catholics or secular. Kirk was an Evangelical, a form of Protestantism that was ascending in mainstream American culture during the 1970s, stagnated by the 2000s, and finally lost out to our fractured yet firmly technophile mass culture that took off in the 2010s. Most Republican professionals under 30 shaped their worldviews during the 2010s in response (but not always refutation) to this culture, and almost always at a university. Kirk dropped out and never finished his undergraduate degree. He didn’t need to.

More than denomination or education, Kirk’s personality stood out among other young conservatives. There was something quite mid-century about him; here was the definitive right-wing happy warrior. I never met Charlie Kirk. But every single friend I know who did told me about this optimism and friendliness when they met. It reminds me of the academic Cass Sunstein’s beautiful notes on the former president who left office in a scandal. The personal warmth underneath the public persona left an impression. It was different.

After Kirk’s death, sober condemnation of political violence was given out by virtually all nationally elected politicians alongside a very online mix of mourning, debate, and provocation. This juxtaposition is curious, but most analysis of it has leaned too partisan; the very nature of internet micro-blogging is that it cannot sustainably facilitate either mourning or debate. Many are frustrated by this stubborn fact, but it won’t go away. When we mourn, we often attend a gathering at a burial ground or a church to do so. When we debate, we begin with clear participants and premises. The nature of social media is that neither of these things can be sustained. Social media is a space for provoking above all else, and provocation is what gets rewarded by its incentives. Moderation cannot really change the nature of the product.

The Best Lack All Conviction

What made Charlie Kirk different is that he wasn’t just online and provoking. He was on the ground in college campuses, talking to students one on one. There are gotcha clip compilations out there on Youtube, to be sure. But there are also long hours of Kirk simply asking students to walk through their ideas while he quietly listens before replying. These will be too quickly forgotten on the internet precisely because they don’t provoke. He had time for every random teenage college student who stood in line. He didn’t need to be there, but chose to be. He told everyone that his mission was rooted in his faith, and Wilson’s sociology of the mid-century Los Angeles suburbs is relevant to the culture this faith encourages.

It was clear to Wilson that Midwestern Protestants helped build the mid-century culture of Los Angeles: “they brought an essential ingredient of Southern California life—fundamentalist Protestant individualism. We like to think of the store-front church as being a Negro invention; not so. I remember scores of white store-front churches—mostly of small Pentecostal and Adventist sects—lining the main streets of Long Beach.” In contrast to his church, the “preaching was evangelical, fundamentalist, and preoccupied with the obligation of the individual to find and enter into a right relationship with God, with no sacraments, rituals, covenants, or grace to make it easy.”

Wilson was observing not just the coming rise of moral majority politics, which has since diminished in our day, but a recurring old American faith in using plain and straightforward English to discuss the most important matters of all. This is still with us, even if we occasionally wish it had more grace. This straightforward civic faith was important to understanding Reagan’s appeal to Southern California voters in 1966 during his controversial campaign against UC Berkeley, and his resulting governance. Charlie Kirk tapped into that distinctly individual appeal throughout his astounding career.

Few could build political networks like Kirk, but any could walk away from his earlier claim to fame after doing so. For Kirk, what made debating college students important is that every single person has a soul, which is to say, a part of them that is not dictated by the material makeup of the body, but is always open to pondering and yearning for truth. Kirk debated college students and took mockery for it (why was this right-wing man well into his late 20s still debating undergraduates?) not only because he saw them as equal citizens, but because he believed in that soul. He ruthlessly criticized his opponents on the left for organizing politics and increasingly universities themselves by race and gender. He saw this as a very dangerous development for the education of young citizens.

As the liberal writer Maya Bodnick described two year ago, this development also destroys debate. I witnessed it myself. One time in college, a fellow student literally begged me for forgiveness because he hadn’t asked for my permission ahead of his opening speech arguing for the creation of parochial LGBTQ schools. It was a disconcerting situation. He spoke to me in a strange tone, as if I were both a small child incapable of opting out of his controversial debate topic, but also a powerful judge, capable of taking great offense at his error and enforcing a very real punishment. The fear in his eyes came from the fact that college debate was competitive, lively, and yet spiritually broken. I quickly forgave him and moved on at the time, but in truth I was disturbed by his premise for apologizing to begin with.

College debate was at times a very quiet struggle session. I don’t know when that started, only that it was the case when I was there. It too often consisted of young liberal white men eagerly agreeing with female and non-white critics that they were privileged beneficiaries of debate’s customs and rules. This consensus was an empty one, because the rules of debate were in fact colorblind and thus offered the same men agreeing to denounce it with no clear path to undo the alleged conspiracy. The result of this contradiction was a perpetual state of dishonor. Why would these men both agree the system is rigged and yet do nothing substantive but apologize for it? This contradiction quietly infuriated some participants. It seemed that a hidden privilege was being perpetually guarded by being acknowledged. Another meeting on judging standards was always around the corner, but did little to resolve the problem. Such a system provides an education in nihilism, even if it appears to proceed more politely than any right-wing campus speaker controversy. Appearances can be deceiving.

Finding Kirk’s Legacy at the Vigil

When I joined the very long line for the vigil at the Kennedy Center last night, I never made it in the door. Even though I reserved my virtual ticket ahead of time, the space had filled up, and then the overflow room hosted next door was filled up too. I ended up joining a small circle of three to four dozen people outside, who prayed together and then took turns to discuss what Charlie Kirk meant to them. It was not like what you can too easily find online. I didn’t hear any frenzied discussion of “the left” or any anger at all. This isn’t to say nobody voiced frustration. One Indian woman described her wariness of putting her kids in public schools and choice to homeschool instead. Many discussed being in spaces where they wanted to talk but felt they would alienate others. One self-described biracial girl explained how Kirk’s campus debates had helped her learn to talk about politics with different family members.

She thanked those on the left side of the aisle who had condemned the attack, and briefly suggested those who praise political violence should be fired. But that was the closest to partisan criticism I heard that night; she didn’t suggest we should gather a list or go after random people for criticizing Charlie Kirk. No one else even mentioned Kirk’s critics or even his enemies, and only once or twice were critics implied when praising Kirk’s steadfastness. While the sun slowly set, every contribution focused on how Kirk helped them rediscover their personal faith, how Kirk helped them to successfully disagree respectfully with peers they were afraid to discuss politics with, and how Kirk kept some of their friends from going down darker political rabbit holes. I realized when leaving after a closing prayer that the discussion portion had gone on for at least an hour and a half. I occasionally strained to hear over the planes flying into the airport across the river, but I stayed. Most of us stayed there the entire time.

Charlie Kirk is no longer with us. The shrewd political essayist Tanner Greer reminds us that it remains an open question if the small-r republican spirit he brought forward will endure in politics. Greer is to right to note that Kirk had many political opponents, but far fewer actual enemies, including some on the right who seek power by means other than votes. One of his real enemies on the left decided to kill him one day. We will learn more details about the exact motives that lead to this horrific murder. But Kirk’s faith was anything but abrupt or driven by hatred of his enemies. It came from a steady and repeated engagement with other people. It was not, to borrow once more from Wilson, one of those things “sold at one of those orange-juice stands or preached from the pulpit at some cultist church.” It was real. I know this because, last night, I sort of did what Kirk did countless times in his college campus debating career. I traveled to another place to hear people talk about what was in their soul. Now I understand why Charlie Kirk did this. We must take him seriously. His faith will be with us for a long time under one guise or another.