Comment

Stan Grant
Charlie Kirk and America’s decline

It is perilous and foolish to speak into the maelstrom. As a rule, I tend to avoid it. This week, events compel me to break my rule.

I am speaking of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its subsequent fallout. In this case, the human tragedy is amplified by the zeitgeist it catalyses.

The first obvious yet emphatic thing to say is that the killing of Charlie Kirk is heinous, barbaric, inexcusable and unjustifiable.

The second is that any analysis is secondary to the sheer madness of the act.

I do not require a psychological assessment to conclude, ipso facto, that the alleged killer has something seriously amiss. I do not need politics or culture or whatever other motives are being proffered.

That’s all I wish to write about Kirk’s murder per se. The abomination renders analysis unseemly. That pertains to all human violence, war, murder, callous indifference: rationalisation risks complicity.

The fallout from the crime is revelatory, however, even if it has lamentably and predictably broken along political lines. Invariably at such hyper-politico-cultural moments, it is framed at the extremes.

On one side there is the inhumane celebration of Kirk’s killing. On the other there is the opportunistic exploitation of the tragedy to pursue a bullying, silencing agenda.

Presiding over this is Donald Trump, a president who does not even pretend unity. He shamefully used Kirk’s memorial service to inflame hatred.

Trump’s is a presidency of savagery. It speaks to a monstrous polity that damns the right and the left. Savagery is the lingua franca of this politics.

The majority of Americans who fill coffee cups, work the shop register, teach children, tend the sick and aged, transport goods and people, do whatever is required for the grist of daily life, likely abhor this barbarism, but they are unavoidably tangled in its net.

The ubiquity of American cultural, political, economic and social reach means that by extension we too are caught in the drag of American decline.

It is inevitable, it is terminal and those who are at all surprised have simply not been paying attention. At its core is an emptiness of meaning, a discarding of an integral myth. That is modernity’s raison d’être. America is its apotheosis and its nadir.

Those responding to the Kirk killing by appealing to a resuscitation of idealised civic life – deliberation, free expression, mitigation of harm, a patina of respect – exaggerate the ameliorative effect of those virtues. The imagined liberalism from which they derive is a chimera.

Modern liberalism from its late 17th century genesis was founded on civilising the extremes of human discord and potential. The governing principle is that if human agency is necessarily subsumed by a leviathan – an all-powerful state – it requires to the highest possible degree human consent. This is the basis of John Locke’s social contract.

Absent divine authority, the authority of humans requires the ballast of informed, participatory deliberation.

Fundamentally, we agree to what we surrender in exchange for the constrained pursuit of our particular ends. The United States Declaration of Independence codifies this in the commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Over time this reconstruction of human flourishing has taken on the status of holy writ. That’s a mistake. In fact, modern humans are a profane innovation. Without God, modernity is groundless.

All this emerges from the existential upheaval of the Copernican scientific revolution, which shook humanity’s hitherto belief that we occupy the divine centre of universal existence.

The heliocentric model stripped us of heaven. We have ceded our centrality to science. Enlightenment philosophers reconstructed a secular, earthly heaven of individualism, obligation and rights. They imagined this would be enough to bind an untethered humanity.

Immanuel Kant even spoke in Copernican terms when he reimagined reality as a construct of the human mind. It has proved a shaky foundation.

Unlike science, social science does not speak with the exactitude and clarity of mathematics. Liberalism requires constant translation and that’s where we fail today.

We are a babbling mess. The language of liberalism is not robust enough to contain our existential disputes. Indeed, in its preference for freedom over tradition, liberalism itself contains the seed of incoherence.

Whose freedom? Who or what defines its limits? If consensus fails, then truth itself is optional or relative.

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, well-intentioned appeals to liberal principles are banal. Liberalism is not human nature; it is a human condition, one that has no more stability than any other social construction.

Liberalism is straw in the wind and today politics is blowing a force 10 gale. Democracy rewards illiberalism, just ask Donald Trump.

We cannot revive the ghost of John Stuart Mill. Beyond nostalgia, Mill has little to say to this age.

The technology that science has spawned, from the obliterating nuclear threat to the soul-shrinking depravity of social media algorithms, can render modern life futile.

Right now humans are on the threshold of annihilation or redundancy. At the turn of the modern age, confronted with their existential scientific challenge, the great minds constructed a possibility of human flourishing that offered at least the potential of dignity and peace.

Now, however, we confront our perilous future not with the imagination of our philosophical forebears but with resignation. Our innovation is technical rather than intimate. In our rush for convenience and efficiency we slip further from the human touch.

We are anaesthetising ourselves in a cold, brittle and anaemic world. It is passionless and performative. It is given more to indifference than empathy. Human charity gives way to human scorn.

In a world of dehumanising technology, listless art and utilitarian poetry, fantasia surrenders to suspicion. The human stranger does not contain the possibility of enchantment but is an object of mockery.

This is the grind of the last human of postmodernity. America, ever a stage, is our curtain call.

More than half a century ago, Nobel laureate scientist Konrad Lorenz laid out what he called civilised man’s eight deadly sins. Among them were overpopulation, emotional atrophy, a loss of tradition and the severing of the human from nature.

As an organism unbalanced becomes diseased, so does society. Lorenz saw democracy in the grip of ideological oscillation. This extremism he saw especially in the US, where excess was leading to inhumanity, to what he saw as showing “dangerous signs of escalating to regular catastrophe”.

Half a century before Lorenz, poet Rainer Maria Rilke saw from America what he called a world of empty words, a “sham of life”.

In 1946, Albert Camus toured the US and warned of the “crisis of man”. This is a generation, he said, without truth, a generation who believe in nothing and live only in rebellion. To them, morality is hypocrisy.

Camus said we know this crisis is upon us “since the execution of a human being can be envisaged otherwise than with the horror and shock it ought to provoke”.

And so, in 2025, we come to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It is not a novel event in a nation so familiar with political assassination. Context is key, however, and today in our full-blown human crisis this execution of a human does not provoke shock and horror but becomes a stage for the performance of politics, social media callousness, presidential hate and fodder for late-show monologues.

Spare me the appeals to exhausted liberalism. We are beyond that. This is not to accept a totalitarian alternative; it is to rescue what remains of our humanity.

If brute science determines our fate, then we had best buttress that with a humanity that speaks all languages and is not captured by the immiseration of politics that was always liberalism’s Achilles heel.

Language goes first and the human next. The US is a nation without language, a nation beyond translation. As the literary critic George Steiner said, “When you cannot translate outward, murderousness follows.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Caught in the drag of decline".

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