Martin Gurri The Progressive Left’s Descent Into Barbarism Can we re-civilize our society?
https://www.city-journal.org/article/progressive-left-barbarism-charlie-kirk-murder
There often comes a moment in the pursuit of a noble but hopeless cause when the idealist discards both ideals and human bonds, embracing barbarism in the name of a higher purpose. The progressive Left has reached that moment in its moral decline. Once self-styled protectors of the marginalized, progressives now push their opponents beyond the margins—and beyond the pale. Their cause is the defense of victims, yet some have victimized their adversaries to death, while others have mocked and abused the dead afterward. Champions of compassion have mutated into purveyors of hatred. Whether these perverse reversals have penetrated the sect’s own consciousness, I cannot say.
Possibly, the Left’s belief system made its descent into barbarism inevitable. Progressives long ago cast aside God, religion, and other transcendental restraints. The moral order and conventional rules of a supposedly oppressive society mean less than nothing to them. What remains is hedonism and the will to power. In the Internet age, both find expression in rituals of demonization—destroying those whose opinions offend them, whether through harassment by a digital lynch mob, coerced confessions and firings, or, as in the cold-blooded killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, outright political assassination. It is the same principle aimed at the same end: hate the haters more brutally than they hate you.
Kirk’s murder can be blamed on an unstable individual. The reaction is harder to explain. Many progressives seemed blind to the horror of the crime; many more rushed to strip the victim of his humanity, cheering the extermination of a 31-year-old father of two as if it were a touchdown for the home team.
Mike Solana has compiled a partial roster of loathsome reactions to the murder. It makes for astonishing reading. Teachers, nurses, engineers, civil servants—posting under their real names and affiliations, certain that the world would applaud—exulted in the simple message: he got what he deserved. Others on X and Bluesky eagerly nominated more candidates for the slaughterhouse. The kill list included Joe Rogan, J. K. Rowling, Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, and, of course, Donald Trump.
Famous personalities joined in. Stephen King, the horror novelist, bizarrely claimed that Kirk had advocated stoning gays. Elite attorney George Conway posted a photo of Horst Wessel, a murdered young Nazi—apparently Kirk’s parallel. MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd virtually accused the victim of being his own murderer for inciting “hateful actions.” In this way, a man with a creed objectionable to the Left was reduced to a mute abstraction: white supremacist, fascist youth leader, Nazi, gun maniac, Christian fanatic. Silencing him forever became a positive good.
Most Democratic Party worthies initially condemned “violence,” as if the killing had descended from the clouds untouched by human motives. Others weren’t so charitable. J. B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois and presidential hopeful, and Elizabeth Warren, queen of Senate progressives, somehow managed to implicate Donald Trump—and even the January 6 riots—as guilty parties in Kirk’s death. One can only wonder whether any Democratic leaders felt a moment of sincere compassion, self-questioning, or doubt about how to treat a political opponent in a democracy. I have seen little evidence that they did.
The media, as ever, played the role of institutional enabler in the progressive slide into barbarism. On X, Bluesky, and Instagram, users staged standing ovations over the snuffing out of a human life. Maybe the surge of hatred overwhelmed the safety algorithms—but think back to 2020. What would have been the fate of anyone who applauded George Floyd’s killing or urged further violence? Those posts would have been flagged and deleted in a nanosecond, their authors banished forever to digital hell. By contrast, those who defiled Kirk’s corpse online under their own names clearly felt safe, and in terms of platform tolerance, they were right.
The prestige press, operating on its mandatory anti-Trump principles, played an even more contemptible role. Kirk was an ardent Trump supporter, and that settled coverage: even with a bullet in his neck, he had to be cast as the villain.
The original New York Times headline, later changed, labeled Kirk a “rightwing provocateur.” That implied that he got what he was asking for. In what might be the least gracious obituary ever published, the Times accused Kirk of spreading “outright lies” during the pandemic about hydroxychloroquine. Here was a charismatic figure gunned down while promoting open debate, and the paper chose to scold his corpse about Covid cures. The Times then invited Hasan Piker, a leftist podcaster best known for saying that the U.S. “deserved” 9/11, to deliver a posthumous takedown: “I was supposed to debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s what I would have said.” Piker and the Times presumably thought they had won the argument. After all, no one talked back.
The psycho-political pathologies unleashed by Kirk’s assassination should not have surprised us. The signs were already evident. Polls show that 55 percent of those who identify as “left of center” say that killing President Trump would be justified. We heard the giggles, including from another Democratic White House wannabe, Tim Walz, at rumors of Trump’s death or grave illness—Trump would, with luck, die soon. Two real attempts on the president’s life have failed, to the loud regret of many on the left. We watched progressive women idolize Luigi Mangioni for shooting a health-insurance executive in the back. And in every case, media narratives could be found ready to explain away, even justify, the violence.
And there were other signs. A repeat offender—a black man—slashed a young white woman to death on a Charlotte light rail train, and the city’s enlightened mayor issued an initial statement full of understanding for the attacker and his mental condition, while never once mentioning the victim. The lesson was plain: some groups in our society deserve compassion; others apparently deserve to die.
Charlie Kirk’s murder pushed many of us to a tipping point. We now know where we stand. Kooks and cranks thrive under every dispensation—granted. But most conservatives and Republicans don’t cheer assassinations. Most old-fashioned liberals and Democrats don’t, either. This derangement belongs to the progressive Left.
In June, when the House of Representatives voted to honor a slain Democratic state senator, the outcome was unanimous. When the same body sought to honor Kirk, 58 of the 212 Democrats voted against the measure. Those numbers define a civilizational battleground. From the House floor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reviled Kirk as “ignorant” and “uneducated.” The Left’s hatred proved stronger than life or death.
How do we re-civilize fellow citizens who have chosen barbarism? The alternative is a sharp escalation of violence. It won’t be civil war—there are too many reasons against that, not least our fragmentation. Fortunately, hatred is not an organizing principle.
But much bloodshed and horror can occur short of civil war. We haven’t yet reached the madness of 1971–72, when leftist groups carried out 2,500 bombings and murdered police officers. But such violence can erupt quickly and persist for years. Today’s information environment makes it easy to track the movements of controversial figures, turning incitement into personal, targeted threats. In one possible future, anyone with a political opinion will be forced to cower inside a coffin of bulletproof glass.
Most tragic of all would be for Republicans to retaliate in kind, endorsing and inciting violence against opponents. Any hope of restoring sanity would vanish, and much of American life, including urban centers and universities, would come to resemble the gunfight at the O.K. Corral on endless replay.
The path back to a civilized society is long and uncertain, but we have no choice except to begin. The goal is not to change minds but to correct behavior. American politics should reflect the sanity of the great majority. Criticism across partisan lines can be harsh, even vicious, but should never be dehumanizing. No American elected official is Hitler. No faction with millions of supporters is a coven of fascists. No party owns a monopoly on “our democracy.” These self-serving claims, once dismissed as Internet bluster, are now splattered in blood—and must be condemned, loudly and without qualification, by all people of good will.
Everyone has a part to play. We must withhold our money and attention until a relatively level playing field is attained in media and entertainment. We must assert our voices and our votes until the funding and privileges that progressive groups currently enjoy in our institutions are stripped away. We must mock without mercy land acknowledgments, pronoun proliferation, and all the little rituals through which progressives ensure our obedience, until these are abolished forever.
Republicans must police the blowback from the Kirk murder to prevent violence and lawlessness from the right. In the heat of the moment, the Trump administration must not wield state power in ways that it has previously condemned. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chatter about banning “hate speech” was an embarrassment, for example. Brendan Carr, head of the FCC, looked ludicrous impersonating a Hollywood gangster over the Jimmy Kimmel flap. Republicans should remember that they have ascended proportionately as the Democrats abused their authority when in office. With the roles now reversed, they have much to lose.
In the end, Democrats have the hardest part to play. The party consists of a large but passive liberal majority and a highly active progressive minority. When the two align, as in the Biden years, liberal moderation is buried under an avalanche of progressive projects, each an assault on existing social and political norms. That must change. Traditional liberals need to mount a counteroffensive. At the very least, they must persuade progressives that venom and hatred are poor persuaders. In a better world, liberals would grasp that the fundamental threat to their ideals comes not from the villainous Trump but from the radical Left—not least because Trump always gains when the public associates liberals with their unhinged progressive allies.
This realization seems unlikely, however. Democrats are too deeply consumed with Trump-phobia—87 percent of the party faithful are positive the president is a fascist. But Trump will not be around forever, and his successors probably won’t inherit his peculiar gift for driving otherwise rational actors insane. This is a generational struggle for the soul of the Left, one that the liberals, for their sake and ours, must win. If they succeed, the Democratic Party could once again campaign from the strategic center, positioned between the excesses of the MAGA movement and the violence of the radical Left.
Until that day, Democrats will continue to conduct progressive experiments in states like California and Illinois—building windmills rather than houses, for example, and outlawing plastic straws instead of street crime. So long as the Left is in control, with unconstrained rage as its chief motivation, the party should be kept as far as possible from the coercive machinery of national government.
Talk of re-civilizing society sounds farfetched; hatred is as addictive as fentanyl, and potentially even more destructive. Such collapses of human feeling as we have seen can only leave us in wonder—and despair.
Yet, we should never underestimate the power of decency or forget the vast moral resources available to us as Americans. Our history has been the record of our overcoming—with the forces of division, often at the crisis point, tamed by the better angels of our nature. That process may have already begun. In a remarkable gesture, Erika Kirk, a young widow, publicly forgave her husband’s assassin. Such generosity is improbable, but it reflects the finest impulses of the American spirit and shows us the way to higher ground. After a season of barbarism we can, if we choose, inaugurate an age of forgiveness.
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