You can go online and nut-pick the odd leftist making light of Charlie Kirk’s death. Conservative influencers have been doing that for the past twenty-four hours or so. But the most prominent liberal commentators and Democratic officials have responded to this tragedy by saying what they always say: Kamala Harris: “Political violence has no place in America.” Hakeem Jeffries: “Political violence of any kind and against any individual is unacceptable and completely incompatible with American values.” Gabby Giffords, herself a survivor of gun violence said in a statement, “[W]e must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”
These prim pronouncements are, if nothing else, hard to square with the images of the National Guard doing armed patrols through the streets of Washington D.C. and threats by the President to send troops into other Democrat-governed cities.
These denunciations of political violence are too tasteful for the moment. Piously expressing respect for Kirk’s work and incantating the importance of “debate” are capitulations to Republicans’ invoking standards to which the right no longer pretends to adhere. Actually, it’s worse: There are no Republicans asking or demanding that their Democratic counterparts play the part of sympathetic colleague. That’s just what Democrats, and many of us on the left, do reflexively. It still surprises them when the notoriously remorseless refuse to reciprocate.
In the aftermath of Melissa Hortman’s murder last June, Mike Lee, an actual, real-life sitting U.S. Senator, posted an image on X of the alleged shooter with the tagline “Nightmare on Walz Street”—a grotesque joke referencing an imagined connection to to Governor Tim Walz. Lee also posted a second picture of the alleged assassin with the caption, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” A less obviously gleeful remark but still a flippant one, tickled by the as-yet-unproven and quite unlikely possibility that Hortman’s killer targeted her because she was too far to the right.
The next day, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith confronted Lee in the halls of the Capitol. Smith, herself on a list of potential targets left in the assassin’s car, reported that Lee “didn’t say a lot, frankly. I think he was a bit stunned.”
Smith’s deputy chief of staff wrote Lee’s staffers an email echoing Smith’s points: “Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success?”
Lee wound up taking down the images, but that’s not an answer to Smith’s deputy’s question. Looking at the behavior of Republicans in the Trump era—indeed, looking at Trump himself—we know the answer: Using the awesome power of U.S. government to compound people’s grief is exactly how Republicans measure success. Indeed, they use no other metric.
Democrats must adopt some version of that metric for themselves. They do not need to be cruel, but they can’t shy away from speaking plainly even if they offend. The architect of Project 2025 announced his intention to put federal workers “in trauma.” Stephen Miller pushed ICE to make their arrests as publicly demeaning as possible, hectoring officials, “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” Next to that sort of shamelessness, a willingness to shove Republicans’ faces in the consequences of their actions is maybe still too mild.
We are trained in dignity and empathy. It’s where our politics come from. It’s why we care about gay people and trans people and immigrants and the working class. We believe empathy matters and we act like it matters.
And it has gotten us nowhere, even when we ask for empathy around gun violence more objectively—at least quantitatively—horrific than what befell Charlie Kirk in Utah. The deaths of children in the most violent fashion imaginable have done nothing to turn the Republican Party away from their lurid embrace of killing machines.
There were those who thought that Sandy Hook could be a turning point, and then Parkland, and then Uvalde (and the dozens of others whose body counts are less sensational). The lives of these little children have been held up to the faces of conservative lawmakers with the expectation that anyone who has ever loved a child would be moved by their deaths. That somehow, hearts would unharden.
Republicans heard the sounds of little children begging for help and shrugged. As Kirk put it in a quote that is justifiably making the rounds today, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”
The second part of that riff hasn’t gotten as much traction but it should, because it magnified the callousness with braggadocio: “That is a prudent deal,” Kirk said. “It is rational.” He contrasted his truth-telling with those unwilling to speak so boldly, so without empathy: “Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”
Nobody talks like this, either: Charlie Kirk was right. Gun deaths are the inevitable outcome of valuing the Second Amendment over all the others. I can’t imagine that Kirk’s family finds it “a prudent deal.”
What is the upside to empathy these days, politically speaking? What are liberals or Democrats gaining by reaching a hand across the aisle to join in grief? The warm, fuzzy feeling of having done the right thing will hopefully be enough, because that’s all there is.
Obviously, I am not advocating outright delight in someone’s demise. The tone I’m envisioning is callous, perhaps, but short of cruel. Something like, “I’m sorry his family is suffering. I wish his message would die with him.” Something like, “No one deserves to die an untimely death, even Charlie Kirk, a supporter of policies that have killed people far more innocent than him.”
Stay away from the invocation that political violence is an aberration. Instead, point out that Trump, cheerled by Kirk, has normalized it. I read a lot of versions of this, which gets at that point elegantly: “This is a horrible crime. Maybe Donald Trump should consider sending the National Guard to Utah.”
Elizabeth Warren steered in the right direction yesterday when she refused to be cowed by a reporter who wanted to know if Democrats would be dialing back their rhetoric: “Oh, please. Why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he’s posted and every ugly word.”
I like to think that Kirk, the man immediately eulogized by the President himself, would approve of my harsh messaging. Kirk literally demonized empathy, telling listeners that “toxic empathy can be used as an unclean spirit to destabilize the church.” A professed Christian, he chuckled over his inability to muster goodwill: “I really try to have some Christ-like compassion, I do,” he said on his radio show of his interactions with immigrants. “They don’t speak any English? Yeah, I’m sorry.”
Empathy, said Kirk, “Is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.”
When someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump, Democratic leaders fell over themselves to release the appropriate statements. Republicans refused to hold hands and instead pointed their fingers at Democrats, despite the evidence that the shooter’s ideology was, at best, confused. They hailed Trump as a hero and sold t-shirts with images of the incident. They reframed the 2024 election as a vigilante operation. I fear we are about to see the same playbook run again.
In response, cold truths about Kirk’s death aren’t quite enough. But Hortman was killed just forty days ago. We should not be subtle in invoking her name now. Does the Right want to make Kirk a martyr? We have ours, too. Hortman is only one of the most recent.
As satisfying as I found Tina Smith’s rebuke to Mike Lee, you know what would have been better? Telling him that the violence against Hortman was his fault.
After Sandy Hook, the left asked people to act out sympathy, after Trump got shot, he asked people to exact revenge. The former is a more emotionally mature way to deal with trauma. The second is the way that you get media attention and political momentum—and that, at this sorry stage of our country’s history, is the only way policy changes.
The last real surge leftward in American politics came after George Floyd’s murder. The horror that moved white people to act didn’t happen on its own—it was summoned by activists who refused to settle for grief. As The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu noted, the protests that spun out of Floyd’s death were widely embraced by the public. No matter the mistakes and backlash that followed the Floyd movement, the lesson from the Floyd uprisings shouldn’t be “don’t squeeze a tragedy for political capital.” The lesson should be, look at what can happen if you do.
Perhaps the right’s diagnosis of “toxic empathy” is correct. In an interview Kirk did with the author of the conservative best-selling book Toxic Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey, Stuckey explained, “Empathy for anyone becomes toxic…when it leads us to make decisions that are ultimately harmful, not just for that person, but for society as a whole.”
When it comes to Kirk’s death, empathy helps prop up Republicans and Trumpists as legitimate and normal political actors. Cooing praise of “persuasion” sends the message that there is some common ground, some kind of fellowship to be had between the right and the left at a moment when there is anything but. And that fantasy, I believe, is ultimately harmful, not just for that person, but for society as a whole.
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