By Wayne Allensworth
The murder of Charlie Kirk was most likely a political killing. An assassination. It isn’t a stretch to assume that the killer is deranged, one of the alienated, marginal, mentally-unstable people postmodern society spawns like poisonous mushrooms. At the same time, the murder was most likely — again, it’s no stretch to assume this — also at least partly the result of leftist political agitation financed and encouraged by the globalist managerial establishment and its media outlets. I will not indulge in the feigned even handedness we are already hearing about both sides supposedly being equally responsible for the deep mutual hostility between MAGA and the leftist/globalist alliance. Political violence in recent years has been, not entirely, but mostly committed by the leftist militants who act as the globalists’ enforcers.
“Polarized” doesn’t even to begin to say how wide the gulf is between the Middle American base of the MAGA movement and its opponents. The differences transcend mere politics. We are witnessing a clash of world views, of metaphysical beliefs about what it means to be a human being or a nation. It is essentially a religious struggle. As I have written previously, we have reached the end of politics in America. It was a topic I took up in Chronicles near the end of Donald Trump’s first presidential term:
“Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative.
America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and social revolution of the New Left changed the country demographically and culturally. The old America of regional cultures was about as diverse a polity as could be while remaining stable. America, with her Anglo-Saxon political heritage, was a country with a considerable reserve of ‘social capital’ and public trust. It was understood that a loss at election time was not an existential crisis (the election of 1860 notwithstanding). Politics were not zero sum.
That is no longer true. And this means the old politics, which had been hollowed out over a period of decades, are largely a thing of the past.
Politics no longer are concerned with mere policy—which can be bargained over within a procedural framework that once included shared cultural assumptions. Now politicians debate the most fundamental moral and social issues of society and culture, including the legitimacy of the American polity as such, the value of human life, even the definitions of gender, sex, and marriage. Tax policy and healthcare policy are the sorts of things that can conceivably be worked out in committee. Fundamental disagreements over the foundational elements of civilization cannot.
Yes, there will be elections, and they may be worth voting in, but the disaster has already happened.”
So what now? Charlie Kirk’s murder is yet another lurch toward chaos. A country so deeply divided and plagued by outbreaks of violence can eventually be held together — but not forever, as the Soviet experience demonstrated—only by authoritarian means. We could slide into a Twilight Zone of what the late Samuel Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” with chaos and authoritarianism at the same time. Or, as I’ve noted many times, we could part ways with one another, the “red” and “blue” states agreeing to separate. But as mutual hostility grows and the gap widens, it seems increasingly less likely that a parting would be amicable. For that you need a reserve of good will, and I don’t see a lot of that. A systemic failure might spur on a split, accompanied by the states’s redrawing boundaries, as a preliminary step to a broader political realignment. In the meantime, as I wrote previously, we must begin thinking about what comes after the United States as presently constituted:
” Countries do not last forever. Like people, nations have lifespans. They are born, they live, and they die. In the past 35 years alone, we have witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the creation of numerous new states. Czechoslovakia split into Czech and Slovak republics.
History does not stand still, and neither should we.”
Of course, none of us know how this will turn out in the end, but the decline of the Washington-based globalist empire will be neither pleasant nor peaceful. In the meantime, we must be aware of and resist any attempts by the managerial class to install a Chinese-like “social credit” system, along with digital currency, which would be a high-tech Gulag that imprisons all of us.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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