Luke Marklin

Americans don’t understand just how special they are, how much light the American revolution brought into the world, and how much all the great competing revolutions of the past 300 years have been a darkness and a blight on the world that has only ever been pushed back by America’s example or American power. The communists and Islamists and others never liberated a single soul or brought anyone out of destitution into prosperity or helped anyone turn democratic. Only America, with all its faults and fissures and self-doubt, ever did that. I was asked several times over the past day what I thought of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I didn’t answer because I was confused by my own reaction, by how deeply and powerfully it affected me. I thought at first it was because he supported Israel’s existence at a time of normalized bigotry, and that’s probably part of it. But I couldn’t imagine feeling quite this strongly for most other defenders of my people’s right to exist. This went deeper. Maybe I was sympathizing with the prevailing mood among American conservative friends over the past 24 hours. Maybe. But it felt deeper still. It felt personal. Which is strange, because I have no strong views or meaningful knowledge of most of the issues and culture wars Charlie took part in. America’s great debates on gun control, abortion, gender or healthcare are all mostly foreign to me. Yet I felt like I personally lost something in Charlie’s death. And then it hit me. Steven Pinker and many others have made this point a million times before, this essential point about America, about the American-led world, and, despite America’s obsessively discussed failings and imperfections, how infinitely better this world is than the world before America. And Charlie, who hailed from a generation almost defined by its loss of faith in the West, became a kind of engine of renewed faith in Americanness - in the America that any Jew who knows their history can’t help but love. My people, my own children, could live and thrive in the world Charlie believed in, the world America made, sometimes with its power but mostly by its example. Charlie was a political pugilist. People may disagree bitterly with him on a dozen issues I scarcely understand. I can only comment on this one small thing - this very big, defining thing - that I know something about. Charlie believed in the good that America brought to the world, believed it was still America’s fundamental story, and carried that gospel into the American culture wars with the earnestness of the evangelists of old. May his death, like his life, raise a generation of new believers in that American promise. It isn’t fashionable to say it nowadays, but the truth isn’t always fashionable: The future happiness of humanity still, despite everything, depends on it.