What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been
This is not intended, I'd note, to be a hagiography of any kind for Charlie Kirk. The populist far right is already trying to do that, as are some just on the right or conventional conservatives.
And frankly, even though its a few days past, this story is already in a lot of the country's rear view mirrors, including Donald Trump's whose taken up babbling about his ballroom vandalization of the White House grounds when this topic comes up.
This is an analysis, or hopes to be, of what causes a figure like Kirk to exist, and then come into prominece.
Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been
No doubt the caption to this article is an odd question. People, after all, don't have to have meanings, even if their lives always do.
I think Kirk's did, however, and a good place to start in looking at it is this:
An interesting and thoughtful clip by Douthat on Kirk.
The first time I'd ever really heard of Kirk is when somebody I know worked to have him speak at UW. I don't know that person well, but I do know that his political views have inclined towards Francoism, which he likely doesn't really understand.1 But that it's a clue about Charlie Kirk.
Kirk was born in 1993 in Chicago (Arlington Heights) Illinois and had an interest in politics young. Chicago has always been a sort of frontier town, really, in spite of its location, and has been legendary throughout its history for being violent and a center of crime. It was also a center of industry at one time, but by 1993 American industry wasn't even what it had been in 1973.
Kirk was from middle class home where both of his parents worked. His father was in the solidly middle class profession of architecture, and Chicago reportedly has some great architecture. His mother was a mental health counsellor, interestingly enough. He was (although by the time of his death, not really) a Presbyterian, which is one of the three big Protestant churches in the United States, and the only Calvinist one. Traditionally, it's extremely unyielding, although much of it has changed enormously since the 1970s.2
Kirk dropped out of college early and was a right wing organizer and figure by 2016. During that short time period he became a right wing speaker. Bill Montgomery, a wealthy conservative figure, heard him give a speech at Benedictine University and then met with him and encouraged him to form Turning Point USA.3 Montgomery, who heard that speech when Kirk was 18, told him not to pursue a college degree. He was an Evangelical Christian and an advocate of the Seven Mountains Mandate that Christians should take control of the seven societal “mountains” to establish God’s kingdom on Earth.
From 2016 on. . more or less. . . Kirk espoused far right political views as well as real conservative views. He was in the Evangelical camp of the Christian Nationalist movement. He routinely attacked university educations as being left wing and Marxist. He espoused conspiracy theories about COVID-19. He's been middle of the road on LGBTQ matters but had evolved towards a religion based view of them by the time of his death. He was a hard line opponent of abortion, stating that it a worse institution than the Holocaust. He espoused a highly traditionalist view of women and the roles of men and women in marriage, which is a huge clue as to his underlying weltanschauung. He credited urban gun violence as being due to African American women raising children as single mothers. He advocated for completely stopping immigration into the U.S. He was radically opposed to DEI. He was pro Israeli and repeated Russian talking points about the Russo Ukrainian War. He was critical of climate change concern, but had evolved from it being a fib into acknowledging that it was real, which is also a huge clue about his evolving weltanschauung.
Yesterday, we posted an item in which somebody compared him to Malcolm X. That may be more true than many are ready to admit.
Kirk is a Millennial or Zillennial4 Rust Belt American male.
Eh?
There's been a lot written about the plight of American men in the post 1960s eras. And, indeed, there should be.
We've discussed this before, but it seems to us that Americans were family centric prior to World War Two. The post war economic boom had the impact of depressing the age at which Americans married, and much of the family centric nature of American life remained, but it also started to erode family values at the same time.
Prior to 1945, the vast majority of men married, but those who did not entered into occupations which supported bachelorhood, of which there were a number. For the most part, nobody lived alone. Women lived with their parents until they married, or if all hope of marriage was lost, with their parents until they died. One of my mother's aunts who openly detested children did this, her only real option, other than religious life, as marriage meant children. Men in contrast lived at home, or in boarding houses, or in bunkhouses or barracks, for example. My mother was a real exception in that she left home as a teenager to move to Western Canada at the urging of an uncle, who had employment for her, but that was after the Second World War when things had begun to change. My father lived at home until he went to university, then in barracks in the Air Force, and then back at home again when he came home from the Service. All of his siblings basically repeated a similar pattern.
Men were expected to provide for their families and were respected for doing so, or disdained if they did not. Contrary to what is commonly believed, all the way into the 1960s there was pressure on married women not to work, which was regarded as an embarrassment to their husbands. Prior to my birth, my mother worked, over the objection of my father, and she returned to work when I was probably about 10 or 12, again over the objection of my father. They were both born, I should note, in the 1920s.
While its a delicate subject, something else that was a feature of pre 1953 American life was that sex outside of marriage was more than looked down upon. It's common to pretend there was a double standard, and to some extent there was, with women being "ruined" by premarital sex and "boys being boys", but this is not anywhere near as true as widely claimed. Good statistical data from the late 1940s demonstrates that a vast majority of American men abstained from sex until marriage. It was only after the assault of the false data Kinsey reports on men and sex (1948) and women and sex (1953) and Playboy magazine that this really began to change, although World War Two had a big impact on this as well. The launch of the Baby Boomers into their adult years on the cusp of the 1960s began, however, to have a major impact on this as they rejected every convention in society.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1981 things had started to change but not as much as supposed. Girls in high school when I was there were expected not to says yes to sex, and indeed the bank The Knack made a point of it with their 1979 song Good Girls Don't as the J. Geils Band did in 1981 with Centerfold. Boys were still expected to get a "good paying job" so they could "provide for a family".
Nonetheless, the bulldozer of the Baby Boom generation had already had a heavy impact on the culture and converted much of the family centric nature of it to being money centric. This was also starting to show itself in spades by the late 1970s and very much did in the 1980s. Sexual morality began to erode like crazy in the mid to late 80s, following the path the Boomers had set it on in the 60s, and the expectation that everyone should be a consumer. . . of good and people, took over. On the latter, things were so bad by the late 1980s that I can recall an instance in the late 1980s when a guy I knew who was fairly religiously devout was asked out on date by a girl he barely knew, and went, and the next day her friends were all asking her if they'd had sex on the date, with it being the expectation that they had. Having said that, even that late "getting a girl pregnant" meant marriage, usually, or it meant the girl dropping out of sight for a while until the baby was born, and then reemerging as if nothing had happened.
Or, after 1973, it meant an abortion.
Divorce was pretty uncommon prior to 1945 as well. The first no fault divorces came into law in 1947 in the US, probably as a result of hasty marriages contracted during World War Two. They spread relatively slowly and Wyoming didn't adopt a variant (its not truly no fault divorce) until the 1970s. Actually getting divorced was regarded as shameful into the 1970s. It was so shameful in the early 20th Century that my great grandparents outright disowned a son who had obtained a divorce from his spouse, although they later reconciled (he moved to the US, years later I was contacted by his son from a later marriage). When I was a child, knowing somebody who lived in a family in which the parents were divorced was really unusual.
So what, you ask?
Well this.
By the time I graduated from law school in 1990 things had already changed a great deal in the US, but the bare bones of the older culture were still there. It was possible, although it would soon turn disastrous, to get a job without a college education that paid okay, but not to the extent that it had been in 1970. Men and women were still expected to get married and remain married, and anticipated doing so. As the song said, it was still the case that "Good Girls Don't". Homosexuality existed, but it was concentrated in cities or closeted, the latter often to such an extent that those who were homosexuals didn't really ever acknowledge it to themselves.
However, at the same time, the generation graduating into the 1980s started to have to obtain university degrees in much increased numbers. Lots of people I went to university with were "first time" attendees, and that was because they had no other choice. And by the 1990s divorce had become common, as well as shacking up, premarital sex, and bearing children out of wedlock.
Also at some point in the 1980s it became outright necessary for a married woman to have a job in order to help "make ends meet". Only the spouses of professionals really had any other option. In a radical reversal of things, male spouses of professionals started to elect for that option by the early 2000s, which would have been regarded as outright shameful before.
Well, if things got rough, and they did, for Generation Jones, it was worse for Gen X and Y.
Generation Jones suffered eroding economic opportunities, while at the same time a cultural drift that not only got started in the 1960 continued to erode the culture, a new culture was outright forced upon Gen X and Gen Y. That peaked with Obergefell v. Hodges, which was a watershed, as I predicted that it would be. It broke the dam.
The flood that resulted caused a limping wounded cultural remanent to lash out, just the upper economic edge of the WASP class started to foist the result of Obergefell on a resistant society. An upper class erudite conservatism epitomized by William F. Buckley and George F. Will, which secretly had always expected to be out of power, yielded by force to a populist conservatism first defined by the Tea Party but then refined post Obergefell by Trump's MAGA movement, which Trump, a salesman, used, even if his personal life looked more like something out of Studio 54.
And then you have the generational, and Rust Belt, aspect of it.
Men Kirk's age, particularly men Kirk's age from certain regions, came into a world that they felt was particularly stacked against men. There was no way that they could get what they hoped for, which they imagined to be the life of the 1950s they believed their grandparents had.
Rust Belt men came of age not only with this concept in their minds, but a history of racial strife that dated back to the Great Migration which had seen African Americans leave the South in large numbers from 1910 to 1970 as they sought to improve their lives. Internal migrants, while their economic condition improved, they did not escape racism and found themselves living segregated, urban, lives. Chicago was a city particularly impacted by this.
The Arthur family arriving at Chicago's Polk Street Depot, August 30, 1920.
It wasn't the only one, however. The Rust Belt in general did, to include such cities as Detroit and Omaha. African American communities formed in all of them, and in each racial strife featured.
The atmosphere of the Great Migration came to be part of the Rust Belt culture. Blue collar, and even middle class, whites grew up not believing that they were not racist, like white Southerners, but to speak to them they clearly were, and this often remains the case today. Blacks were definitely "others" with a different culture, and one that was often rendered into a cliche. Displaced Rust Belt whites in the West often baffled locals with racial references that made very little sense to locals (I was once asked where the "brothers play basketball", for instance). Some relocating Rust Belt whites felt free to tell locals that they were relocating specifically to be in a region with few blacks, leaving locals completely out to sea on how to react.
While these tensions existed throughout the entire migration period, once the region slid into economic decay starting in the 1970s tensions of every kind became worse. By 1993, when Kirk was born, lots of Rust Belt Americans believed that their economic plight was due to minorities who were not real Americans and an educated WASP class that had exported jobs overseas.
Mixed into the background of the moral decay that started with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s had been around long enough by the 1990s that the glamour of evil was really wearing off, particularly the attraction to sexual sin. Oddly enough, people who had lived the life of 70s largess, like Donald Trump, were regarded, save for Trump, as having engaged in moral redress. The problem at the same time was that the culture had been so badly damaged over a thirty year period that restoring it was difficult, as the map was partially lost. Various movements very much sprung up to do it, however, including ones that were based in religious conservatism in various religions.
National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism was a bit of a synthesis of these trends, on the upper end. On the lower end, was MAGA.
And that gave an opportunity for a flamethrower like Kirk, which is not to say that he was not genuine in his beliefs. On the younger end, he pretty well defined what populist Rust Belt conservative whites believed. He was an economic nationalist, a populist, an Evangelical Christian, and xenophobic.
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Malcolm X.
As noted above, I think there's reason to believe that he was following sort of the same path as Malcolm X, although both of them would find the suggestion to be insulting. He may have been further down that path than Malcolm was. Contrary to the way we tend to remember him, Malcolm X was a deeply conservative man. He was very religious after converting first to the Nation of Islam, then actual Islam. He was a Black Nationalist, which isn't all that much different, oddly enough, than being a White Nationalist. He was an ardent opponent of gun control who was gunned down, just like Kirk. He was an evolving figure, murdered young, which is true of Kirk as well. He said outrageous things for effect, which Kirk did as well.
Kirk was clearly moving, and indeed had moved, from Evangelical Christianity into Catholicism, with their being a deep intellectual gap between the two. Cardinal Newman had stated that to know history was to be Catholic, but it's also true that to convert to Catholicism, in some people, is to become deeply knowledgeable about history. Kirk's statements about the Church would suggest that he was headed into the Traditionalist wing of the Church, which has seen a lot of entries by those who might loosely be regarded as fellow travelers of Kirk, such as J. D. Vance, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and Tammy Peterson. Indeed, as noted here last week, there's been a wave of conversion to Catholicism in recent years and with this year the Catholic Church will bring in more converts than it will lose to those leaving the faith. The same is happening in France, where the majority of converts are young students. Catholic conversions are on the rise in England and Scotland as well, with more Catholics attending Sunday services than Anglicans. In Ireland, which suffered as a result of an abuse crisis, the country seems to be shaking off the negative impacts of a "special relationship" imposed on the Church and on the country by DeValera and the Church is reviving again.
All of this is really interesting in regard to the long strange trip the culture has been on since 1945. Maybe it offers some hope that the redneck Sweet Home Alabama nature of the populist movement, and the fascistic aspect of the National Conservative movement, may be starting to retreat, while a focus on the interior may have begun.
Who do you trust?
Why in the world don’t you tell me who you trust?
Yeaah! You got your lawyer he will give a way
Why don’t you tell me who you trust
Why you lost your trust in bible
You better get on your knees and pray
Maybe all of this is expecting too much, but there are some interesting things going on, and Kirk seems to have been part of them. His being murdered cuts that short for him, and perhaps that's the greatest tragedy of all, as it was for Malcolm X. Their own lives were cut short, but also the impact of their anticipated longer lives upon the group they represent.
Or maybe I'm all wet.
One thing I've noted here is that I didn't know much about Kirk prior to his assassination, and frankly I wouldn't have paid much attention to him. I had him in the same class as Joe Rogan, who I think is simply a right wing yapper.
Indeed, there's some reason to regard Kirk as being sort of a latter day Charles Coughlin in a world filled with latter day Charles Coughlin, with Caughlin perhaps being notable that when silenced by Church authorities, he actually shut up. No such authority, of course, exists that pertains to Kirk, or Rogan, so they don't have to shut up, but as their occupation seems to be based on public attention, they can't really afford to. The best example of that is Tucker Carlson, who has gone from being a conservative media figure to being a Russia backing nutjob.
Would Kirk have been like that?
I guess a lot of that depends upon how you take his comments, a section of which I set out above. Some of them, in spite of the media latching on to them, are fairly conventional, and Christian, points of view, such as those on abortion. Others flirt with racism, including I'd note at least one about Dr. Martin Luther King, whom some are now oddly associating him with. Would he have abandoned the one set and continued to develop the other? Now we will not know.
What we do know is this.
Attention spans in American politics are short. The Doddling Fool in the White House had already moved on from Kirk's death, which he was outraged about the day prior, to his pet project, a ballroom, as he noted twice in press questions about the death of Kirk:
. . . was in the midst of, you know, building a great—for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom, they have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over; if it rains it’s a wipeout, and so I was with architects that were design[ing]—it’s gonna be incredible,
Donald Trump.
How are you holding up over the last three and a half days?
I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks; they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House. Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.
And I just see all the trucks, they just started, so it’ll get done uh very nicely and it’ll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually,” the president went on.
Donald Trump
Kirk may soon be yesterday's news, in spite of a dedicated Republican effort to canonize him.
And that may, interestingly enough, turn out to be the ultimate meaning of Kirk's life. Like Coughlin, he may end up an historical footnote in a later history about a narcissist demented President. Less remembered than Robert Kennedy, who isn't really remembered that much.
That is what will happen if the National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist, of which Kirk was part, do not succeed in remaking the society by next November, or by 2028 at the latest. No matter how Kirk would have evolved, their time is limited. Kirk's death, given his articulate nature and youth, probably acts to hasten the expiration of that passing time, in spite of MAGA's efforts to canonize him. And, if we assume he would have evolved, it deprives the movements of a figure that could have helped move it along, which the Reno's and Dineen's of the movement cannot, and know that they cannot.
Footnotes:
1. That story was broken by The Laramie Reporter, whom we link in here, as his net feed was interesting as he was working for Harriet Hageman. It cost him the job.
2. "Kirk" is a Scottish name meaning "church", and Presbyterianism is heavily associated with the Scots, who adopted it during the reformation, which is to say it was at least partially foisted upon them during the Reformation. It's massively different in theology from the Church of England and traditionally is Calvinistic.
All of this is interesting as to Kirk's mindset, as traditional Presbyterianism would have contributed to his unyielding view, and traditional Presbyterians remain extremely religiously conservative. However, the religion has basically split and some portions of it today are hard to distinguish in view from the liberal end of the Episcopal Church, which also may have influenced how Kirk viewed societal drifts with alarm.
4. Zillenials, long Generation Jones, are a microgeneration born between two others, whose generational characteristics are unique. Kirk was born between the Millennials and Gen. X.
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