There are many threads surrounding the MAGA right’s ongoing martyr-making and canonization of Charlie Kirk. We know about the tendentious rewriting of history both from Kirk’s stalwarts and his fellow travelers; we know how his death is being used as the pretext for various crackdowns on free speech and domestic enemies. But the part of this saga that is most interesting to me is the part that is based on a fairly simple and lazy misunderstanding. It’s not a terribly large part of the story but it contains some interesting dimensions.
Ezra Klein, rather notoriously, eulogized Kirk as someone who was doing politics right. He wanted to debate everyone. He was a master of persuasion, Klein claimed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made similar points. Each of them made slightly better points than their one-line quotes that have gotten the most circulation. But in those comments and in their penumbras an idea got hatched that Kirk was an example of people debating their disagreements, engaging rather than retreating to their echo-chamber bubbles.
None of this is true. And the issue is people who don’t even seem familiar with the “debate me, bro”/”prove me wrong” youth-ish subculture which is so ubiquitous as to be embedded in an endless number of internet memes. In the meme version it’s a guy somewhere between 20 and 30 making a provocative claim and daring all comers to defeat his claim in a verbal standoff. Debate me, bro!
As I recently saw a teenager explain, the model is then for the “debate me, bro” character to repackage his antagonist’s arguments into the most simplistic and caricaturable versions and respond with tautological arguments which tie his antagonists in knots because he — the debate me, bro character — literally or figuratively controls the mic.
This isn’t debating or it’s certainly no exchange of ideas or attempt at persuasion. At best it’s more like an MMA cage match, to which it has a lot of cultural proximity. Critically, the aim is almost never to persuade anyone on the other side of the argument. It’s a contest of strength, the aim of which is to humiliate the adversary for the entertainment and inspiration of one’s own side. It’s a builder of unity and enthusiasm for one’s own side.
Almost a decade ago I wrote about one of my favorite shows of my adolescence, The Wally George Show. I feel some special ownership of it, as many boys and young men in Southern California in the 1980s could. Because I was there when it was just an out-of-the-way low budget random thing on a tiny independent TV station. And me and all these other young fans watched it evolve into a genuine national phenomenon, a political-media type that was then taken up by guys like Morton Downey Jr, in a way by Rush Limbaugh. I wasn’t a conservative when I was in my early teens. I didn’t really have any politics. It was complicated. But that wasn’t the point. Wally was like pro-wrestling. It was a stylized form of entertainment that you didn’t need to believe in any more than you needed to believe that a pro-wrestler was spun around nine times and then body-slammed to be entertained. The model was pretty standard. Find stereotyped liberal or left-winger, the sillier and more outlandish the better. Wally is outraged and astonished that such a ridiculous person even exists. They each make their points. Wally’s live audience of teenagers and probably half drunk twenty-somethings, who are a mix of skateboarders, punks and skinheads, start to get rowdy. Wally gets angrier and angrier before he finally kicks the ridiculous liberal off his show.
A fun time is had by all.
As I explained in that post back in 2016, I think The Wally George Show is actually a kind of Rosetta Stone for our political age. For present purposes, though, I raise it because Wally is in a way that archeo “debate me, bro” guy. It’s all very similar.
Now if you think I’m going to decry this as part of our general civic decline, I’m actually not. The misunderstanding I posited above is one posited by a certain kind of well-meaning not quite liberal thinks what we need more of is debate. Debate is a good thing. It’s an exchange of ideas. It clarifies things and improves thinking. If it doesn’t bring people together, exactly, it at least douses the fires of the kind of polarization that today afflicts American society.
At a basic level, after Kirk was murdered, these folks saw “debate” in the “debate me, bro” slogan/world and thought, “‘Debate, that’s what we need more of! Dialogue! That’s a great thing!”
But that kind of debate, while sort of a cool thing in the abstract or between certain well-meaning people is basically totally alien to modern American public life. And that’s actually fine, at least within limits. It is a certain kind of gently-educated and well-meaning person’s fantasy of civic life. People in public life are basically never trying to bring clarity or encourage debate or whatever else. They’re trying to build power, build movements, win elections. When you step back and consider it, to think anything else is basically absurd. And that thing — the rough engagement of politics and public life — isn’t always or usually pretty, at least not if your model is some kind of town meeting, reasoned debate and finding the answers thing.
Kirk was a rabble-rouser and provocateur. He was seldom trying to engage with anyone who disagreed with him in any other than the pugilistic way I described above for the entertainment and inspiration of his fans. And he was able to galvanize a large group of discontented and grievance-prone young men and, to an extent, wrap many of them into a fabric of Christian nationalism. He was a very American type and it’s fine and probably even necessary to recognize it as a very American type — even if you find the content of his politics shameful and wrong.
This is what makes the valorization of Kirk and the disingenuous effort to remake him into a unifying totem around which everyone is supposed to unite willfully absurd. Kirk was an aggressive, frequently nasty — but to his own people very fun — partisan warrior. At least half the country was his enemy. Not because they said so — because he did. That was the essence of his activism. You might as well expect the country to build a monument to or hold a state funeral for Michael Moore. And no, I’m not equating the two. I’m simply noting the absurdity of the forced valorization of an individual who was at war with half the country.
It’s really okay to be a partisan warrior. But it’s not a national unity type thing.