Buenos Aires is a beautiful city. At least along the tree-lined boulevards of the Retiro. Domed buildings, charming streetlights, couples dancing the tango in pocket parks. “It’s like the love child of New York and Paris,” I told friends, after visiting.
So it was unexpected and jarring, on a walking tour, to suddenly have the guide start talking about thousands of Argentinians dropped to their deaths from helicopters during the 1970s “dirty war,” after the takeover of a military junta — about secret torture sites and desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” people who vanished without a trace into the machinery of state oppression.
You realize, once again, how fragile society can be. How quickly it can decay under a pretty surface. How easily, despite the Beaux Arts buildings and comfortable cafes, it all can go horribly wrong. How what should be the central, cherished values of any decent culture — respect for life and individual dignity, our ability to work out differences through debate and the ballot box — can quickly dissolve into horror.
The murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk is both a horror and another warning sign that our vaunted American civil society is hurtling into a ditch whose depth none can predict.
Not just a human tragedy — Kirk, 31, was married, the father of two young children — but a gear in a larger, grinding global disaster where the clanking mechanism of democracy is seen as no longer acceptable. This assassination happened against a background of norms and laws being shredded, of American soldiers sent into cities, supposedly to combat crime. But it doesn’t take a very active imagination to suspect the troops are, as Gov. JB Pritzker has said, there to acclimate Americans to the idea of armed military in our streets. Because though the Trump administration has not shown any special interest in the hard work of fighting crime, it does display a keen desire to paint its adversaries as criminals.
Before a suspect was even in custody, the usual MAGA screamers were at it. President Donald Trump blamed those calling out his excesses for the killing.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The comparison to the Nazis is used because Trump and his supporters say things reminiscent of the Nazis. The Reichstag fire was the pretext for turning Germany into a police state. Kirk’s death was immediately put to similar use.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” close Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
If not Kirk, it would be someone else. For days before Wednesday’s murder, that awful video of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a train in North Carolina, was shown in heavy rotation on right-wing media. Not because of a sudden sympathy for immigrants, but for their eagerness to spotlight certain groups of victims and criminals, part of an endless shriek of grievance, to demonize those who disagree with them and justify their repression.
This is a very old playbook. In the 1870s, it was called “waving the bloody shirt” — using the losses of the Civil War for an emotional appeal to gain political advantage.
“Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat,” said radical Republican Robert G. Ingersoll. “Every enemy this great Republic has had for 20 years has been a Democrat. Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.”
As Stephen Colbert said Wednesday night, “Political violence only leads to more political violence.” Democratic rhetoric is not responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk. Polarization and demonization run amok is. Once we let go of the traditions of democracy — unfettered press, actual debate, sacrosanct voting — we are lost.
The good news is that the lost can find their way back again. Democracy returned to Argentina in the 1980s. Their disastrous defeat in the Falklands War, after Argentina attacked a British outpost, coupled with general economic ruin, exposed the mismanagement of the junta — police states are both unpopular and incompetent. Life returned to normal, stained by the knowledge of what their society is capable of.
Theirs and ours. People want decency. They don’t want young activists gunned down on college campuses. It would be horrible enough as a unique event. But 10 minutes after Charlie Kirk was shot, two students were shot at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado. Both crimes are part of what has become an all too familiar pattern.