This is the great triumph of any ideology and for this ideology it is total: to pass for morality itself. Or even better: to be, in the eyes of a given society, the whole of morality and indistinguishable from it.
– Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster
When ideology substitutes morality, it becomes possible for people to celebrate a political assassination and wish death on those who express opinions they don’t share.
This is a terrific essay on the legacy of Kirk.
https://scholars-stage.org/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of-charlie-kirk/
However, all of that is only half the story. The emotional impact of Kirk’s murder has less to do with his position in the structure of American power and more to do with what he symbolized in the eyes of so many of his followers—and his critics—on the right.
To understand these emotions, you must first understand what the young Republican on campus was feeling at the height of the Great Awokening.
The young Republican felt afraid.
The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear. He feared what would happen if he expressed his beliefs. He feared humiliation. He feared that his classmates would blackball, bully, or haze him. He feared becoming the subject of a viral wave of hate. He feared having advisors and professors turn on him, damaging his grades or sabotaging his future career. (While I have used “he” here, all of this was even more true for the conservative young woman, who faced even greater social pressures to conform and more vicious tactics when she did not.)
These young conservatives feared because they took the rhetoric of their professors and classmates seriously. They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.
It was in this air of fear that Turning Point USA began to rise. For years progressives have looked at Charlie Kirk’s campus events and lampooned him for spending so much time debating 18-year-olds. They missed the point of these events. By walking onto hostile campuses and planting TPUSA chapters, Kirk showed young conservatives that they were not alone. By arguing with anyone willing to stand in line—professor or protester, heckler or hanger-on—Kirk was demonstrating that conservative beliefs could withstand the scrutiny and social pressure of the college environment. Their creed could take the blows and keep its shape.
Loved it. Thank you so so much.
Unbelievable that some furry bastard loser annihilated all of it to please his stupid boyfriend.
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I think it goes even further. For some people ideology becomes their personality as well and their primary identifying factor. We’ve all seem them on the left and the right.
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Clarissa, does modern Russia have any sort of ideology? Do Russians in Russia have any of these problems?
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This is an excellent question. I’ll answer in a separate post.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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