"War" or Peace -- and the Several Steps In Between

Sept. 23, 2025

The draconian commentary over the assassination of Charlie Kirk is enveloping us in a darker and ever more threatening cloud.

A written report from ABC News summed it up thusly: “One word in particular was echoed by leading voices in the MAGA movement:  ‘War.’”  The story went on to quote Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and other illustrious observers.

These are perilous times.  Each new development sends a tremblor through the land.  Some, or maybe it’s many, lean into fighting fire with fire.

Steven Livitsky, author of “How Democracies Die,” is quoted as observing: “When you have intensely polarized politics to the point where each party is viewing the other not as a rival, but as an enemy, and is using rhetoric, regularly, that the other side is a threat to the country . . . that is a tinderbox political situation.”

The tinder in the box are the words being used, and they’re getting more combustible.  Just ask Jimmy Kimmel, not to mention many scores of educators who face dismissal for daring to speak their minds.  By all reports, the fire – though it goes unnoticed by many of us – is already burning hot in the dark recesses of the Internet.

Even efforts to walk us back from the edge buy into the basic phraseology.  Ezra Klein, one of the stable of columnists at The New York Times, wrote of Kirk: “We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets.”

With all due respect to Klein, we need to aspire to something better than argument as the core of how we conduct ourselves.  The growing acceptance that argument is our base case, the very best we can do, is a major problem onto itself.  Better than war, yes.  The gold standard, no.

If we can look past the current administration into the future, the question we need to address is what we want going forward.  Up until know I had thought that we, as a nation and as individuals, must make a basic choice.  Argument on the one hand.  Cooperation on the other.

Kirk is given credit by many observers, including by Klein, for showing up.  He engaged, proselytized about politics and Christianity and the combination of the two, won admirers and sparred with detractors.  From everything I read, he loved argument.  To hear his wife tell it, he got excited at the prospect of debating.  By all accounts, he excelled at it.

The to and fro since his death has brought me to realize there isn’t a simple on-off switch between arguing and cooperating.  The dichotomy I had in mind is