What is the greatest threat to American democracy? Easy: hyperpartisanship. Seeing your opponents as enemies. Defining corruption as “holding opinions I dislike”.
All these things were on hideous display in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. At the time of writing, it is not clear who pulled the trigger or why, so let me start somewhere else, with the removal of Britain’s slippery and sybaritic ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson.
Lord Mandelson was fired following the leak of a string of obsequious messages to Jeffrey Epstein, many of them gathered in a scrapbook of birthday greetings. Yes, that scrapbook. No one disputes the authenticity of the Mandelson messages, yet we’re supposed to believe that similar messages from President Donald Trump were forged.
I am trying to imagine the scene when the pederast tycoon’s personal assistant presented him with the collection.
“Look, sir, I’ve got a great compilation of birthday greetings for you.”
“Great, make sure I write to thank them all.”
“Yeah, but not Trump, his is a fake.”
Anything is possible, I suppose. Still, it is strikingly hard to find anyone who has complained about both Mandelson and Trump, despite the allegations against the two men being pretty much identical. Sure, Trump might argue that he ended the relationship earlier than Mandelson. Equally, Mandelson, who is gay, might argue that he at least is above suspicion when it comes to Epstein’s worst crimes. Yet the fact remains that we have seen similar messages to the same convicted abuser in the same scrapbook, and it seems to be a problem only for one of them.
Tribalism comes to us naturally. We are programmed to excuse from our side what we condemn in the other. Yet the rule of law and representative government depend on our being able to resist that programming. In our very online age, resisting it is hard. Which brings us to the horrible murder of a young man who held no public office and was simply touring the country, inviting people to disagree with him.
As I reeled from the footage of Kirk’s assassination, I noticed that the people posting simple messages of sympathy appeared to be vastly outnumbered by those scouring the internet for evidence of inappropriate reactions from the other side.
On the Left, there was some hideous victim-blaming. Perhaps now, the activists declared, these conservatives would understand why their violent rhetoric was so dangerous. Some listed shootings by Rightists. Others pointed, in a tone that stopped just short of sneering, to Kirk’s own statement that homicides were a price worth paying for the Second Amendment.
On the Right, people actively sought out a handful of TikTok accounts in which young people celebrated, or at least were presented as celebrating, Kirk’s murder. Those children were then presented as “the Left” and held up as what “we” have to “fight.” The fact that former Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and other public figures put out sober condolence statements was glossed over. Or, rather, it was missed altogether, because all American citizens with access to the internet were being fed by algorithms designed to make them mad.
Political assassinations are not new in the United States — Kirk had a point about the price to be paid for loose gun laws — but, until recently, it was taken for granted that everyone was uncomplicatedly against violence. No one felt the need to tack on disclaimers about how much they disagreed with the deceased. No one followed their condolences with a “but …”
Deaths change everything. We are wired to respond to any loss on our side, to treat it as martyrdom, to blame the murder not on a specific assassin, but on people we dislike more generally.
The Spanish Civil War was sparked by two assassinations. José Castillo, a leftist police officer, was shot by a fascist gang, and the following day, José Calvo Sotelo, a conservative politician, was murdered by socialist militiamen. By the time their funerals were held — clenched fists for Castillo, straight arms for Calvo Sotelo — the slide into armed conflict was inevitable.
WHEN DID ENGLAND GIVE UP ON FREE SPEECH?
Spain in the early 1930s had been marked by increasingly authoritarian attitudes. Both sides came to see elections as contingent, to be accepted only if their parties won. Each began to see the other as a menace. Rightists dismissed their opponents as godless, un-Spanish, in the pay of foreign communists. Leftists dismissed theirs as an oligarchic clique that stood against the people. In the face of such monstrous threats, who cared about election results?
And all this happened before the invention of media platforms designed explicitly to keep us angry and agitated. God help us.
