Charlie Kirk: Martyr in a Civil War
What Charlie Kirk's murder tells us about the
modern West and its discontents.
I count Charlie Kirk a teacher of words to the youth of the late-modern West. Kirk, who, so far as I understand, had no claim to a university education, was quick of wit and tongue and was an effective and charming apologist for young conservative values in the age of Trump.
Now Charlie lies murdered — slain by a cowardly assassin shooting from some 200 yards away.
I see in Charlie Kirk a symbol of the very troubled age in which we live.
Charlie Kirk lived his values. As a Christian and a conservative, he stood his ground everywhere he went. What made Kirk most attractive was his openness to dialogue in an age of cancel culture, faithless virtue-signalling, the erosion of free speech, and the chilling effects of the criminalisation of thought and opinion.
In an age overturned by political extremism and economic problems, Charlie Kirk refreshingly welcomed dialogue and debate with everyone — especially those who rejected and despised his conservative views.
Charlie Kirk's murder reminds me of all our troubles. Evidently, our politicians cannot solve our problems, so citizens are turning to ever darker messaging for succour and comfort in this comfortless age of civic anxiety. That means our politics move away from the centre and toward the shadowy edges of the far left and the far right.
I think of the U.K., where Labour's leftist statism is not left enough for some (Corbyn's new left party); yet for others, Keir Starmer's gang of incompetents needs to be replaced by Nigel Farage's Rightism, to the right in fact of the Tories themselves.
Our elites have been jockeying for power, hoping to scrabble for the last clutches of wealth and opportunity in the dimming light of the West.
Trump overtook the Republican Party and its old-money in America and turned it towards populism and pure democracy. Arrayed against Trump are the oligarchs of Western life, hoping to claim the last baubles before the economic bell tolls and gold rises to $15,000 an ounce.
The West is torn between two political possibilities for managing the defects and violence of human nature: the aggressive sovereign power of the State (the 17th-century path Thomas Hobbes chose), or forms of radical democracy. Examples of all options exist within the far left and far right today.
Charlie Kirk was a martyr to Trump's democratism and the rule of the people. To the oligarchs, this is "mob rule." Yet one would only have pursued Kirk's open-dialogue mission if one still believed in the people and their voice.
I have no doubt Kirk was murdered by someone who held the alternate view - that the best way to manage blighted human nature is not to let the people rule, but to give the State totalitarian control. The exchange the proud State always offers citizens is protection for freedom. Cradle-to-grave socialism builds itself up on the grave of human agency and freedom.
To understand Kirk's death and its import, we must turn to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, whose own dark view of human nature Hobbes found so comforting during the English civil wars of religion in the 17th century.
In The Peloponnesian War Book III.10, Thucydides tells the story of the Corcyraean revolution. Corcyra, a small city caught between the great-power politics of fifth-century Sparta and Athens, found itself amid civil war — the democratic party of the commoners being supported by their allies, Athens, and the elite oligarchs by the Spartans.
Thucydides says:
"During the seven days that Eurymedon stayed with his sixty ships, the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow citizens whom they regarded as their enemies: and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the moneys owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there."
Thucydides adds:
“So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being every, where made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians [Spartans].”
What we learn from Thucydides is that the first casualty of war is always truth. Words no longer meant what they seemed to say. One man’s democracy was a mother man’s mob rule! And today likewise we find ourselves caught by the relentless output of media mouthpieces spouting the party lines of greater powers at conflict.
What Charlie Kirk’s political assassination shows us is that the civil war is already well advanced. His murder is his silencing. But he was a partisan in a debate between populism and oligarchy, between commoners and elites. What Kirk shares with his killer, I do not doubt, is the same nagging fear of the dubious character of human nature, which the Bible names as Sin and Thucidydes simply recognised as human nature.
“The sufferings,” says Thucydides, who was no longer sunnily optimistic about human nature, “which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same”.
What Charlie Kirk’s political assassination shows us is that the civil war is already well advanced.
Charlie Kirk thought democratic political forms — a separation of powers, perhaps — could ameliorate the effects of human darkness. His killer, I believe, longed for nothing more than a nihilistic submersion of human powers in the draught of the oppressive State. This deadly parable offers us neither equality nor sovereignty.
Yet to take a side myself, I only admired Charlie Kirk's fascination with human speech and words: his discipline in requiring specificity, definition, and the powers of distinction. Who will ever forget the chaotic debates where he took on as many as 20–30 sophomoric university students at one time? This principled commitment to openness and dialogue is the primary witness of Charlie Kirk's Christian view of human nature. Never so dark as Thucydides, never so light as Rousseau and his heirs on the committed Left today.
Whatever Kirk's politics, he maintained a powerful and distinctive kind of optimism — needed now more than ever — about the power of the rational logos: the ability of human reason to build bridges between isolated worlds, narratives, and selves. For this, he is to be admired, thanked, remembered, treasured — and replicated. Indeed, we need thousands upon thousands of young Charlie Kirks committed to talking to others, especially those with whom they deeply disagree.
For his killer, this wicked person and the powers he or she serves, apparently only the bark of a gun can overcome the problem of human nature.
In memoriam,
Dr Craig Heilmann
Join our Substack for instant access to more articles like this:
