That all changed on Thursday when the co-founder of lobby group Turning Point USA was gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University.
The motivation for Kirk’s assassination remains unclear, although a suspect is in custody. What is clear though is that the temperature of political discourse in the United States is well and truly past boiling point.
Kirk was a Republican, and closely aligned with President Trump, who survived an attempted assassination during his election campaign.
On the Democrat side of the aisle Melissa Hortman, Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband were killed in June by an assailant who had already wounded a Democrat state senator and who had planned to attack other politicians. In 2022 the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was badly injured by someone who had planned to kidnap her from her home.
Political violence is a plague on all houses. It is not new, nor is it exclusive to the US, but its shocking consequences are exacerbated by the easy access in that country to lethal weaponry.
Regardless of what one thinks of Charlie Kirk’s political views, or the views of any other of the politicians recently subject to threatened or actual violent attack, disagreement should be expressed in words, not with weapons.
Political rhetoric is replete with martial metaphors and similes of strife and struggle. The escalation of tensions between the extremes of the Left and Right in recent years has been termed the culture wars, and casualties are being suffered.
Twice in recent weeks this newspaper has editorialised about the distressing, unwanted verbal and online attacks aspirant local body politicians have been subjected to in Otago and Southland.
On a national level, in June a new report was released confirming what many already knew — that New Zealand’s female members of Parliament are subjected to egregious abuse and many have held genuine fears for their safety. While seldom subject to gendered abuse, their male colleagues will have experienced similar vitriolic attacks.
Local government elections are ongoing at the moment; the next general election is a year away. The last thing anyone wants to do is tempt fate, but the insidious cancer which has afflicted politics in the US — and elsewhere, as the mass demonstrations in the UK over the weekend are just one example — must not infect our public discourse.
The challenge which now faces the US is how to withstand the instinct to retaliate following this latest atrocity, a response which would run the risk of attracting an equal and opposite reaction.
The last thing that the US needs is for its politics to be conducted at a rolling boil, with incessant and never-ending indefensible outrages upon personal liberty, safety, and freedom of expression.
Sadly, it seems inevitable that that is exactly which is going to happen; the rancorous scenes in the House of Representatives when congressmen and women could not even conduct a simple moment of silence for Kirk without yelling at each other offered dismaying evidence of that.
Liberal democracies only function if people are willing to put themselves for public office. In the current climate doing so takes considerable courage; the risks are higher than mere embarrassment or ridicule.
It is a sorry state of affairs that things have reached this pass, and it may be that this trend of foaming fury from across the breadth of the political spectrum cannot be reversed.
All the more incentive then for people to stand up for civility and cordial discourse, rather than personal disparagement and discuss.
If we are going to right what is wrong in politics, the first step is surely to be able to simmer down and to talk about it.
