Cartoon by Dale Cummings

Charlie Kirk’s murder and its aftermath are symptoms of a fragile democracy

Analysis by Karen Tumulty

The Washington Post: At no time in living memory has this country’s democratic system appeared more fragile. A question now is whether the values upon which that system was built are capable of repairing it.

The murder on Wednesday of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus, videos of which played endlessly on social media, was the latest episode in a rising tide of violence aimed at figures across ideological and partisan lines. It is happening with an intensity and frequency unlike any seen in more than half a century.

At the same time, shared norms and institutions are giving way to zero-sum politics, led by a president who is stretching executive authority in unprecedented ways while turning an already polarized country into even more of a red-versus-blue battleground.

Family members of Tyler James Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect in Kirk’s killing, described someone steeped in online culture who had become “more political” in the run-up to the shooting. Unfired bullet casings discovered by investigators were said to have been engraved with messages, including one that read “hey fascist! catch!”

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, called what happened “much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment.”

“This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” Cox added during a news conference on Friday. “It’s a choice, and every one of us gets to make that choice.”

One place where the country has traditionally made such choices has been at the ballot box, which is why the stakes of next year’s midterm elections loom so large.

The party that holds the White House is at a historical disadvantage; it almost always loses seats in Congress. And the Republicans’ current majority in the House is a slim one.

So Donald Trump is squeezing out what marginal gains he can, encouraging gerrymandering efforts in Republican-led states, starting with one that could pick up five seats in Texas, a move that could be met in kind by California and potentially other Democratic strongholds.

What Democrats discovered in 2024 is that framing an election as a clash between the abstractions of democracy and autocracy had limited appeal at a time when many in the electorate were more concerned with grappling with the financial stresses of day-to-day living.

As Democratic political strategist David Axelrod put it then: “If you are talking about democracy over the dinner table, it is probably because you don’t have to worry about the cost of food on your dinner table.” Axelrod continues to view the democracy argument as one that appeals primarily to economically comfortable elites.

But elevating the state of democracy as an issue could have more resonance now, other Democrats contend, with Trump back in office and pushing bounds in ways that might have seemed unimaginable before.

“The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you, you’re overreacting,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said Friday in an interview.

“Well, when their neighbors are getting picked up [by immigration authorities], when they’re seeing this now, now it’s in action,” Walz added. “It’s no longer like, look, Trump is going to do whatever he wants. He’s going to step over the rule of law. He’s going to go around Congress. He’s going to defund things that he has no authority to do. All of those things are happening.” >>>