Charlie Kirk, Scapegoat
The assassination of Charlie Kirk puts to rest the dreamy hope that President Trump’s 2024 election was the final word on identity politics in America. The revolutionary faction he defeated at the ballot box walks not by argument, but by faith. It is a faith that the innocent victims of the world cannot rest until the racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, extremists, fascists, authoritarians, Nazis—and now the (Israeli) colonizers—are purged.
For more than a decade, we called this faith “cancel culture.” But cancellation was never going to be enough. In the end, the dark inner logic of identity politics requires a literal purging of those identified as “toxins” from the body social. Identity politics is, as I have written, “the spiritual eugenics of our age.” To achieve this always-receding goal of purity, a scapegoat must be found upon whom to lay the sins of the world. Charlie Kirk became that scapegoat.
The Republican political victory of 2024 notwithstanding, identity politics remains the reigning theodicy in all of our public American institutions; it is the established church of the American elite, whose parishioners rage and mock the majority of impure American citizens, who themselves are awakening to its bloody logic. One America mourns a martyr for Christ. Another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat.
Leaving Marx Behind
I have argued since the first Trump Administration that the conservative self-understanding must be updated and reconfigured if America is to have any hope of retaining the constitutional order its Founders envisioned. Supporters of that order must grasp that the 21st-century enemy is neither cultural Marxism nor Progressivism. These ideas united Reagan conservatives prior to the end of the Cold War, when Marxism had not yet been fully discredited by facts on the ground, and the Progressive plan for government by expert elites was still ascendant.
Marxists hated the bourgeoisie. Progressives weren’t assassins. Charlie Kirk’s assassination can in no way be linked to the ghosts of cultural Marxism or Progressivism. To grasp the meaning of his assassination, to attain the steely-eyed understanding of what we are dealing with in America today, we must leave 1980s conservatism behind and identify the 21st-century enemy—not just of conservatives, but of frightened and cowed liberals as well. Today’s conservatives must recognize their new enemy for what it is: the scapegoat theology of identity politics.
We will never do this successfully if we cling to the belief that after the age of Christian faith comes the secular age. The assessment Tocqueville made in The Old Regime and the Revolution fits better by far: the age of Christian faith gives way not to secularism, but to the age of “incomplete religions.” The first of these incomplete religions was the French Revolution; the second was Communism; the third was German National Socialism; and the fourth is identity politics. Each of these has been a social contagion penetrating into every institutional fissure of the societies it has touched. And each has been a powerful contagion, because each purported to answer one of the profoundest needs of the human heart—the need for cleanliness, in the deepest spiritual sense.
Christianity invites us to the cleanliness of justification and sanctification. When its spiritual hold on a society relaxes, men and women do not abandon their search for cleanliness: instead, they look for it outside the church. Inside the church, Christ is the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world. Outside the church, the French Revolution, Communism, National Socialism, and identity politics offer up other scapegoats—for the French Revolutionaries, the landed aristocracy and the Catholic Church; for the Marxists, the bourgeois class of capitalists; for the Nazis, the impure races and the Jews; for identity politics, the white, Christian, heterosexual male.
That there is a family resemblance between these four incomplete religions helps us understand why conservatives have been half right in claiming that Marxism is still a threat. Like identity politics, Marxism, too, scapegoated an ascendant group. Marxism, however, is not the genus; it is one of the four species in the genus of incomplete religions we have witnessed and endured since the French Revolution. All four incomplete religions are sworn enemies of historical Christianity. Each purports to achieve cleanliness through the purging of groups that are anathema to its faith, and admits of no uncleanliness within. Culpability is always external, never internal: being on the Left means never having to say you are sorry.
Christianity begins with Christ’s question: “Who do you say that I am?” The response is that the sins of the world reside so deep within every human heart that only Christ’s divine intervention can dislodge and supplant them. Charlie Kirk’s assassination clarifies what so many of us have long intimated: the acolytes of identity politics fully intend to replace Christ, the human and divine scapegoat, with an exclusively human scapegoat. We are involved in a cosmic struggle between a much-wounded Christianity and the incomplete religion of identity politics, which promises to replace Christianity’s liturgical and theological mumbo-jumbo about the grace of Christ with an immanent answer to the question of how to achieve civilizational cleanliness.
Let the deeper meaning of what I stated at the outset set in: one America mourns a martyr for Christ; another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat. Both have their rituals of light—the one involving candle-lit prayer gatherings, the other involving the riotous burning of cities. The West does not live in a post-religious world; it lives in a post-political world, in which the essentially religious category of the scapegoat now substitutes for the give-and-take of what once was American politics. Appearances notwithstanding, the battle for the soul of America today is only derivatively political; in reality, the battle is over which scapegoat takes away the sins of the world. Our national fate rests on how we answer that question.
The End of Progress
What about that other ghost of 1980s conservatism? In America today, the Left calls itself Progressive. That is a lie. Progressives in the first half of the 20th century opposed the Left, which was then Marxist. For much of the 20th century, Progressives were liberals, not leftists. Their position was that as America became less of a rural and more of an industrial society, citizen competence would no longer suffice to run and to grow our country. Instead, they argued, the American republic could only fulfill its promise with expert competence, which our universities would produce.
This changed in the watershed year of 1968. Marx captured the hearts and minds of the younger generation, and the idea that universities should produce expert competence began to be replaced by the idea that all scholarship was ideological. The liberal ideas of the person, of property, of the independent rule of law, of market commerce, of republican government, of nationhood—along with the great books that defended them—were “bourgeois scholarship” that had to be purged. And they were. Between 1968 and 1989, Marxists in our universities demanded, in Marx’s words, “a ruthless critique of everything existing.”
But it went no further. As Louis Hartz reminded us in his 1955 masterpiece, The Liberal Tradition in America, it could go no further. “Class,” in the aristocratic sense that the rest of the world understood—landed property handed down through family lineage—was not a category that captured the American popular imagination. (The absence of Old-World class consciousness is what Hartz meant by “American Exceptionalism,” a term he invented.) That is why Marxism, whose central analytical category was class, could never take hold of the American imagination. Marxism in our universities destroyed much, but it could build nothing. It was superseded completely after the collapse of Communism.
Too many conservatives do not understand this. If they did, they would have stopped talking about cultural Marxism decades ago. After 1989, the postmodernism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida quickly pushed Marxism aside. Never-ending “critique” remained, but now set on a very different foundation. Marx, like the liberals he opposed, believed that history had a meaning. Not so with the postmoderns, who gave us rhetorical pyrotechnics, impenetrable jargon, the “destabilizing” of everything, and the transmutation of objective truth into mere “narratives.” Marx’s critique was meant to re-center thought around the redemptive meaning of history that Communism propounded. By contrast, postmodernity sought to de-center everything—except the postmodern thinker himself, who became the object of adoration among faculty and students in proportion to how much he declared that there was nothing worthy of adoration. Thought loomed small; the thinker loomed large.
Wars of Religion
In The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom wrote that “the American soul has no basement.” By this he meant that the full implications of the very dangerous ideas that emerged in 19th-century Europe were never worked through to their ghastly conclusions in America. Europe had revolutionaries; America has halfway revolutionaries. Thus, our “Marxists” are social justice warriors who settle with what Marx contemptuously called “bourgeois socialism”—that is, Be Nice Capitalism, with no revolutionary side effects, all coordinated from above by Davos Man.
Our halfway revolutionaries are the Identitarians who begin with Nietzsche’s claim that the thinking self is a delusion, that underneath the conscious self is our identity, which is deeper than words can say. That is why challenging identity claims with words is ruled out—you must affirm, celebrate, and have months of the year dedicated to different identity groups. To this one Nietzschean idea, they add another, which Nietzsche tirelessly sought to repudiate, but which they cannot do without—namely, the idea of the innocent victim.
In the halfway revolutionary mind, there is an intersectional scale on which every group identity can be located. It ranges from the maximally innocent victim to the prime transgressor. Everyone must measure his distance from the prime transgressor—the white, Christian, heterosexual male—to establish a position with respect to other innocent victims. The transgendered received the most innocent victim points until recently, when—everyone can feel it—the transgendered were replaced with the new maximally innocent victim, namely, the Palestinians under Hamas.
“From the river to the sea.” Thousands of years of civilizational struggle to plumb the depths and mystery of justice, and this is the pinnacle of moral clarity that identity politics offers today. Intersectional moral scoring has a brutal simplicity rivaled only by the Code of Hammurabi.
What sort of world does this produce? If your identity falls into the victim category, violations of the law that you author will not be held against you, for identity politics justice offers a higher justice than mere law can comprehend. If your identity is that of the prime transgressor, you are held to be morally guilty, even if you do not break the law. Members of Antifa can burn down Portland without consequence or comment. You, a law-abiding citizen, go to sleep at night haunted by an indictment no judge can dismiss, and about which our “scholars” will never tire of reminding you.
Many commentators have fixed on the idea that Charlie Kirk was killed because he dared to use reason. This is true, but it does not go far enough. The issue of our time is not free speech. That is downstream of the real issue, which is religious: Just who is the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world? In our post-Progressive universities, speech is under assault because faculty, students, and administrators have concluded that it is not Christ, but rather the prime transgressor who must be sacrificed. That is why the purge of “toxins” like Charlie Kirk from our university campuses will continue, occasionally with bullets, more often by subtler means.
Young men are taking the hint. Already 64% of our university students are young women. Our universities are now effectively schools for girls, identity politics matronage networks that are overseen predominantly—the sociology and demographics cannot be overlooked here—by a cadre of faculty and administrators whose wager is that their own irredeemable stain can be blotted out in proportion as they evaluate the world around them through the lens of innocent victimhood, and dispense university resources accordingly. This is a far cry from the 20th-century university that Progressives envisioned. They at least sought to solve real problems.
Pragmatism, for all its limits, was the governing philosophy of the Progressives. Today, our university students learn identity politics. To endure the bizarre degradation/celebration ritual that higher education has become, students must signal their unwavering allegiance to its faith or be excommunicated. Empathy carries a big stick. The Left is no longer Progressive; it may call itself that, but it is Identitarian, and we must say so plainly on every possible occasion. The Founders’ regime presupposed an immense reservoir of human competence among its citizens. Identity politics puts forward a new regime type, based on innocent victimhood.
What is to be done? At the level of our thinking, we must release the ghosts of cultural Marxism and Progressivism. They perished long ago, and we have no business raising them from the dead if we wish to live. Today, the incomplete religion of identity politics is the principal threat to the American republic. The meaning of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is most clearly seen in that light.
If that assassination is to have a lasting impact on conservatives who are struggling to make sense of the moment, they need to make a clear-eyed assessment of what they (and old-line liberals) must now unite to fight against. At the personal level, this means refusing to participate in conversations in which the scapegoat words used by the Left serve as false proxies for arguments.
There are never-ending problems to be addressed in America. Reasonable people can disagree. With an open hand, indicate to your fellow citizen that you wish to address these problems together. If they continue to scapegoat rather than give reasons, walk away. There is nothing more to be said until their cathartic rage dissipates. For some, it will never dissipate.
At the political level, this means that every U.S. government program animated by the incomplete religion of identity politics must be defunded. This is not a free speech issue. Those on the Left who wish to proselytize their incomplete religion are free to do so, just not underwritten by taxpayer dollars. Our constitutional regime is based on citizen competence. It cannot be expected to fund programs whose bedrock supposition is that innocent victimhood must be the wellspring of our regime going forward.
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