Charlie Kirk and a New Era of Political Violence

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was, at once, horrifically modern and yoked to tradition. For as long as there has been a politics here, there have been assassinations, and virtually every generation since the nation’s founding has had to look on as a great leader or famed political figure was, without warning, shot dead. Kirk, for all his dynamism and influence, was never a force on the scale of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, and since he was not an American president — merely the appendage of one — he will be no more than a historical footnote a half-century from now.

But Americans of the past decades, if coming of age in far more violent and terrorized eras, did not have to reckon with such a blood-drenched visual spectacle as the videos of Kirk’s shooting that have circula