(2025-09-11) Klein Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics The Right Way

Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way. The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too. [] Charlie Kirk killed]]

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

That was not all Kirk’s doing, but he was central in laying the groundwork for it. I did not know Kirk, and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.

Sept18: Nathan J Robinson:

• I am reluctant to keep going after the New York Times’ Ezra Klein... But I really must protest, because Klein has lately published two pieces of material (a column and a podcast) that not only irk me, but are usefully illustrative of a particular kind of politics that we must avoid if we are to successfully arrest the country’s slide into authoritarianism.
• First, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Klein published a column praising Kirk.
• Klein does not present it as a mere opinion that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” He says it’s just a true statement, something everyone can agree on, whether you held Kirk’s beliefs or not. But there’s room for a huge amount of disagreement here. Numerous commentators pointed out that Kirk actually practiced politics in a horrible way.
• What, then, does Ezra Klein mean when he says that Kirk was “doing politics the right way”? Well, he appears to mean only that Kirk didn’t throw bombs at people, that he advanced his political agenda using words (and money) rather than violence. But by that standard, David Duke was also “practicing politics the right way” when he decided the Klan should put on suits and ties and join the Republican Party rather than carrying out lynchings.

Sept22: eigenrobot long-tweet

• I would like to offer commentators a framework to speak about it more fruitfully.
• Violence should mean the deliberate application of physical force against an unwilling party to cause harm or compel action.
  Coercion refers to the use of violence or the threat--maybe the implicit threat--of violence to compel action from or attain an outcome against an unwilling party.
  In this ontology, all violence with an objective beyond the violence itself is coercive, but not all coercion is violence. Going forward, I'm going to be talking about coercion, because that's what people are really getting at.
• Coercion is inevitable; in fact it's pervasive. Society is only possible when we constrain individual behavior within certain bounds, and we ultimately do constraining via coercion. Laws and rules map coercion... Not all coercion is "legitimate." As part of our social compact, some kinds of coercion are understood by common agreement to be valid and others are not. This space is mapped by laws and conventions of varying degrees of formality and abstraction.
• Disliking a given case of coercion doesn't necessarily make it "illegitimate."... Disagreements about the scope of legitimacy are ultimately managed by coercion.
• What I am trying to point at with these accumulated propositions is that a political process--courts, elections, inheritance law, and everything else that applies in a given country--is not just a mechanism for determining the set of laws that map the use of state coercion.
  It is also a system for coordinating the development of a coalition willing to define and defend a specific notion of legitimacy for routine political coercion. In the United States, we can call this dominant coalition at any point in time the "constitutional coalition."
• (skip lots)
• Everyone who uses words to attempt to attain control of the government to enforce their political preferences will, if they succeed, use the threat of violence to enforce those preferences.
• My read is this: Robinson is tacitly asserting that the specific modes of coercion that his political opponents would use to be small-c constitutionally illegitimate. That is, this is not a matter where a compromise on his positions within a shared political order is acceptable to him; this, in the same way that the South would not accept an abolition of slavery, or that the plebeians would no longer suffer the hitherto accepted unfettered aristocracy of the patricians. He is calling the use of state coercion to further the specific objectives that Kirk preferred an illegitimate use of power, against which more general coercion is justified. It's an assertion that he would not participate in a constitutional coalition with Kirk.
• So It's Civil War Then?
• I wouldn't say that in the conventional sense. We're not really organized for an open war with pitched battles. In the United States, in particular, the national government's monopoly on military force is fairly strong and established
• Today, Blue/Red affiliations are geographically split only by the urban/rural divide. State governments are mostly contested; a national civil war would mean microcosmic civil wars inside these states. I don't think this kind of general shooting is likely to simply break out ex nihilo.
• Little Dark Age
• But we are currently experiencing a kind of civil war as constitutional factions use methods of coercion that would, in normal times, be understood to be illegitimate.
• @knrd_z has an important thread considering many 20C civil conflicts; they're often not really recognized until after the fact. Our ongoing constitutional crisis is one such conflict, and many contemporary events can often be helpfully understood as clashes in this low grade war as factions use coercive measures specifically to attack and degrade their opponents
• It's true that many of these cases can be tied to specific policies or interests of each faction, but viewing them in isolation is missing the larger context of a struggle for constitutional power between factions using methods that in normal times would be broadly understood by any stable power as fairly illegitimate but which have been locally legitimated by necessity.
• Conclusion: Long Twilight Struggle
• Unfortunately, it seem to me that we are very far from resolution.
• I view this civil war as resulting from the collapse of the American Cold War consensus.
• All of the factional coalitions are internally weak. The old political parties were relatively strong institutions where participants saw one another as joined in a shared and long-term project; today they're more like platforms for individuals
• While still military dominant internationally, the United States is weak internally. Its institutions are discredited and degraded; our civil society is hollowed out.
• Social media have greatly contributed to the weakening of political coalitions and to the deprecation of traditional power structures, and it's not clear what sort of institutions might emerge to more gainfully channel the energies that the internet has unleashed.
• I am not telling you that society will collapse wholesale into famine and war; I think it's more likely we muddle through in some way or another without a total implosion, without pitched battles or open revolts. But I don't think this will happen quickly, I think the ensuing period will be a relatively unpleasant time to be alive, and I don't think what emerges will be an order recognizable as normal from a late 20C point of view.