The US is at a dangerous crossroads after Charlie Kirk shooting

It was a ruthless week in America, and I am not the only one who wonders if the country can withdraw itself from this wrapping of hate and violence.

After one of the most shocking assassinations in the history of the United States, the Governor of Utah told the Americans to reject the political temperature.

But almost no one I’ve been talking about since Charlie Kirk’s death, thinks that the country will choose. At least not soon.

Recent history is full of examples that America chose not to come together after a tragedy. 14 years ago Democratic Congress Member was hit by his head In Arizona. Nor when eight years ago, when Republican congress member was shot during the baseball training.

The Americans did not even come together even in the face of a global epidemic. In fact, Covid made the sections worse.

The reason is simple, but it’s hard to change. The incentives that nurture American political life reward the people and platforms that increase heat, not those looking for tension.

If you work on policies and rhetorics that appeal to your political base instead of the political middle, you are more likely to choose to the political office (this is a gerrymandering’s internal instability – the original sin behind America’s dysfunctional, divided policies).

Likewise, in the media, open people about politics are more excessive and create anger – more eye sphere and ultimately the way to get more advertising dollars.

This incentive structure is what makes Utah Governor Spencer Cox an American exception.

After being killed, Charlie Kirk called the Americans to “login, close, touch the grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in the community”.

It sounded very sane, very healthy – a division of division, an effort to compromise.

Division and political violence are not new phenomena in America. 160 years ago, the country entered the war with him and never stopped.

In the 1960s, a US president was killed for five years and his brother was killed while campaigning to become president. In the same period, both of the country’s leading civil rights leaders were assassinated.

In the 1970s, President Gerald Ford was shot in two separate cases. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan hit a bullet as he walked into his limousine.

And of course, only last year, Trump, a victim of an attempt by an armed man in Pennsylvania, the victim of an attempt and his hearing began to be killed by Kirk.

What makes this period so different from the 1960s and 70s is what the Governor Cox is worried.

While he was carefully away from saying things that would divide the Americans even more, he was not so kind to social media companies that he clearly accuses him for tragedy.

“I believe that social media plays a direct role in every assassination and assassination attempt we have seen for the last five or six years,” Cox said in an interview on Sunday. He said.

He continued to say that “cancer” was very weak because they did to American society.

Most technology companies remained silent in their official capacity. However, X’s billionaire boss Elon Musk was weighed, claiming that “the radical left celebrated the cold -blooded murder of Charlie Kirk” and “impossible with bad fanatics celebrating the murder”.

He also said about the impact of social media: “Although the discussion on X has become negative, it is still good to have a discussion.”

The traps of this system that blend social media with politics worries even the most passionate ones in politics regardless of who they support.

At the beginning of this week, the 19 -year -old Kaitlin Griffiths, the head of the organization of Charlie Kirk of Utah State University of Utah, made it clear: Rolning Point Usa made it clear: “Social media is definitely really difficult for our society.

“You can’t even chat with someone who doesn’t agree with your political beliefs – and I think it’s honestly tragic.”

Tragic and ironic, because Kirk saw critics as a free speech champion, even when they did not participate in this framework. Nevertheless, his death can lead the country further than civil discourse.

In the days after Kirk’s death, the country’s political camps had already retreated to rival narratives.

Many on the left are eager to explore the ways of radicalized by Kirk’s murderer’s murderer by internet subcultures and group conversations. Many on the right prefer to open it if the suspect is part of a left -wing conspiracy.

Both groups do not seem to be willing to give priority to reconciliation or recovery.

The truth is that those who read extremes believe that the left right may not be the most useful way to look at the division of this moment.

“It is better to look at what causes people to be managed, R Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior man at the Carnegie International Peace Foundation Foundation, specialized in polarized democracies.

“It requires a desire to reduce the temperature … [and] It requires people to have a little more courage than they show.

“As a society, I think it is more useful to focus on how to turn a page and open a new chapter, because it’s like a bad marriage. And like a bad marriage, you can just lose by pointing to fingers.”

As for the question of America’s algorithms that stopped divisions, it would take the leader of a tremendous power with a equally enormous commitment commitment.

“I’m not sure how we got out of this, Druce said the policy writer David Drucker. He continued: “Both sides and parties not only the political figures, but ‘parties’ to say, even if I want to stop the accusations and just say ‘stop’.”

“Usually only one president can make it easier.

Trump is not a president. Often, when he has an enemy to fight, he seems to be politically most powerful.

As far as I understand, Trump believes that the people on the left want to destroy the maga movement. And since Kirk’s death, he received a very different tone from the Governor of Utah.

“I’ll tell you something to get into trouble, but I don’t care less,” he said when asked how the nation can be corrected. “Most of the time the radicals on the right are radical because they do not want to see the crime … Radicals on the left problem.”

And after the murder of Kirk, Oval went further to his words: “Radical left political violence damaged too much innocent people and took life too much.”

The framework of the president – this is not only the title deed of a twisted individual, but the radical left wider – it is echoed by other White House officials.

“As God, we will use every resource we have to define, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks with God as God,” Trump’s Assistant General Manager Stephen Miller. He said.

“It will be and we will do it with Charlie’s name.”

However, a series of work He argues that more cases have been carried out by people with “right-wing” ideologies that have been politically motivated in the United States and violence-Right wing “ideologies for years, but more data are required to obtain a definite conclusion.

Some people, some people I talk about to point out the gloomy times in the US history as a source of comfort.

“A small number of periods in America have been political or severe for years. [in the 1960s and early 1970s] Shaped by Vietnam and Watergate “former Republican Congress member, returned to the effective TV server, Joe Scarborough told me.

“But the country progressed, celebrated its two hundred years, and went beyond its violent divisions. He will do it again.”

Among the optimists I talked to was the democratic senator Raphael Warnock, one of the country’s most senior black authorities. He condemned the political violence as the most “anti-democratic” action, but reminded me of the progress of America on issues such as race.

“The story of any family is always more complex than the stories we tell ourselves at the family meeting.” He said.

“My father had to give up his seat [on a bus] While we wear a young man’s uniform, but now I’m sitting in a Senate seat. “

Their hopes encourage – but I still don’t see a clear way.

Recently, as I was preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the establishment of America, I think a lot about a conversation with a historian and filmmaker Ken Burns earlier this year.

“People say that history is repeating itself, Bur Burns said. “Never never.”

Instead, Burns prefers an excerpt that many of them attribute to the author Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but usually rhymes.” In other words, even if it seems to be the past – things never be the same twice.

This moment of tension seems to be rhyme with many other disagreements in American history, but it does not repeat them.

Yes, American historical is full of anger and conflict – but I’m not sure that the social and political systems of this country are always very fast to reward companies and people who stop these feelings.

In the meantime, the United States will weaken, will not be bigger.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates once told me that the biggest threat to the national security of America is the rising China, a decreasing Russia and the country’s own internal parts.

America’s enemies certainly know how much this superpower does. They work online to separate people even more. And the Americans make it easier for them.

Best Picture Loan: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images and Charly Triballeau/AFP Getty Images

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