Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is a man out of time. As a rare moderate Republican in office, he believes strongly in civility in our public lives. The country, however, has other ideas, and Cox and his approach have been put in the spotlight in the wake of the killing in Utah last week of 31-year-old far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
In the wake of the shooting, there has been widespread condemnation of it and statements of support for Kirk’s family. Local Republicans held a small vigil in Noe Valley Park on Saturday in Kirk’s honor, drawing 80–90 people. Governor Gavin Newsom posted on X, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.” He also put on hold his campaign of mean posts trolling Trump. Mayor Daniel Lurie called the murder “horrific” and expressed his sympathy to Kirk’s family and friends.
And so on.
Some people took the moment to share negative things Kirk had said over the years, to blame Democrats for the violence, to blame Republicans for the violence, and some noted the silence from many conservative leaders when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked in their home, or when two Minnesota legislators were assassinated. And more than a few fretted that America was descending into a new world of unleashed political violence.
That last one, to anyone who paid attention to their junior high school history teachers, is simply not true. Political violence is nothing new to America, and it appears to be making a comeback after a period of relative — keyword, that — decline.
Not only has violence erupted periodically in modern times — assassinations and attempts (remember Gerald Ford and Sarah Moore at the St. Francis Hotel in 1975?), the Oklahoma City bombing, and more— it was a regular feature of this country’s existence from the start.
We’re not heading into a terrible new world; we are reentering one we had hoped we’d left behind.
People use violence when they can’t get what they want through peaceful means. No one wants to be a slave, so life in the South involved citizens’ groups that terrorized Blacks before and after emancipation, that disrupted Republican meetings during Reconstruction (really, during Reconstruction, if you cared about civil rights, democracy, and freedom, you were a Republican), that assassinated abolitionist speakers and writers and politicians. Can’t defeat someone with reason? Beat them with a cane on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
There has been more. Attacks on opposing voter blocs, lynchings, using troops against 43,000 “Bonus Army” demonstrators, bombings, riots, rebellions, and on and on. In 1927, “man of the people” Al Capone helped “Big Bill” Thompson’s mayoral reelection in Chicago by sending “more than 1,000 of his loyal goons into the city on the primary day. Capone’s men fight, assault, and shoot Thompson’s political rivals and also throw hand grenades into polling places where Thompson wasn’t expected to perform well,” Adrian Naves tells us in Classic Chicago magazine. “So many hand grenades were tossed in those days that the event is now known as the ‘Pineapple Primary.’”
Returning to this type of a political scene seems dangerous to us — because it is. For most of us, though, we have been spoiled to grow up during an abnormal time of low levels of political violence. There’s been plenty of it since the Second World War, but one could reasonably experience or review it and think the curve we were on was bending toward more domestic peace. (To be an economic determinist just for a moment, it is easier to paper over differences when the economy is expanding for people at all levels; much more difficult when we reoriented our economy back to Gilded Age approaches to wealth and power.)
When violence happens, it makes many people who are either on the receiving end or who are sympathetic to those on the receiving end become a bit more inured to the idea of violence in their defense. In that environment, each act ratchets up the tensions and the potential of violence, and makes it harder for the voices of civility to be heard.
There are good people trying to offer off-ramps to escalating violence (I believe there’s even a major world religion heavily focused on grace and forgiveness), but we shouldn’t let California positive vibes blind us to the fact that we’re not heading into a terrible new world; we reentering one we had hoped we’d left behind.
“It has to stop,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said regarding the violence. “This is not who we are.”
Oh, but unfortunately it is. And we might have too few Governor Cox’s to bring out our better sides.