People visit a memorial for Charlie Kirk at the headquarters of his organization, Turning Point USA, in Phoenix, Arizona on Sunday.Eric Thayer/Getty Images
From coast to coast, from left to right, from young to old, one profoundly troubling question now haunts Americans: Is last week’s assassination of the founder of the conservative Turning Point USA organization a turning point in American life?
A deeply unsettled country – unnerved by the toxic nature of political life, apprehensive about the changes wrought by the fury of the national discourse and shocked by the rifleshot that killed Charlie Kirk – approaches the new week with new anxiety.
With Mr. Kirk set to be buried next Sunday and with tensions and recrimination rising, almost the only area of national consensus is that this is a very dangerous national moment for a country that, until the first decade of the new century, was a model of maturity, wealth, power and, above all, stability.
Everything else – whether tariffs should have been raised, whether taxes should have been lowered, whether vaccines are safe, whether the United States should continue to play an active international role, whether the Defense Department should be renamed the War Department – is a matter of acrid controversy, bitter contention and smouldering rancour.
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The worry sweeping the country is whether the U.S. – which has been engulfed in political upheaval for a decade and in cultural conflict for more than that – is tumbling into a dangerous cycle of violence. What is beyond question is that it already has tripped into a perilous syncopation of hate speech and duelling resentments.
Spikes of campus antisemitism have spawned a series of struggles over whether the government, which already has frozen or cut vital federal subsidies to many universities, has the right to influence, or even control, how elite institutions such as Columbia and Harvard select their students and what their professors can teach.
Crude, incendiary language fills social media. Political figures deliver speeches that often are less to persuade than to persecute. Americans are vilifying members of the opposing party in alarming numbers.
And the country has reeled from several instances of political violence following the two 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Since those pre-election incidents, two Minnesota state lawmakers have been shot (with one killed), two Israeli embassy employees were killed in front of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, and Mr. Kirk, who was known for his political pilgrimages to the country’s campuses, was assassinated while addressing students at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
“The surge in political violence has been around for a while but is increasing in intensity and volume,” said Stephen Marche, the Canadian writer whose 2022 The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future set out the possibility of a dystopian struggle south of the border, in an interview. “It now seems less shocking. These shootings swiftly become ‘last week.’ America’s entered a period like ‘the Troubles’ in Ireland. I don’t think that description is a stretch.”
The Kirk assassination, and the reaction to it, suggested that prospects of assuring peace in the streets and of returning the country to a more congenial state of politics were further endangered.
Charlie Kirk before he was fatally shot at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah on Sept. 10, 2025.Tess Crowley/The Associated Press
To be sure, political figures of both parties deplored the killing of the young political leader and pleaded for calm. Republican Governor Spencer Cox addressed Mr. Kirk’s youthful supporters, saying, “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”
But others issued combustible language. Before alleged gunman Tyler Robinson was caught or identified, Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina charged that “Democrats own what happened today.” The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, known to have Mr. Trump’s ear, wrote on X that it was “time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.”
And the President – who doesn’t engage in the pastoral aspects of the presidency that were practised by Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush, leaders who spoke for calm and conciliation in national crises – told reporters, “We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
In recent days, as the days of George H. W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler” outlook increasingly seem antiques from a long-ago time, even a far-distant country, rhetorical battles have continued unabated.
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Democrats are complaining Mr. Trump has ignored violence against their party members, including Representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona (shot in Tucson in 2011); the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California (assaulted with a hammer in 2022); and the two Minnesota lawmakers.
He did call Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania with what the Democratic governor characterized as a “gracious” message a week after an intruder broke into his home on Passover and set fires with a Molotov cocktail.
Republicans, meanwhile, are arguing the groundwork for political violence was laid by Democratic charges Mr. Trump has dictatorial tendencies and endangers democratic values.
“The leaders of the Democratic Party have consciously and deliberately said Trump is the new Adolf Hitler,” John Hinderaker, president of Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, a conservative-oriented policy group, said in an interview. “Every day for nine years they’ve said this. It’s a deliberate enticement to assassination.”
A half-century ago, amid the 1970s Watergate scandal, the prominent American columnist Stewart Alsop wrote of “dégringolade,” defining it as “a kind of slithery, sudden coming apart” he said was occurring in the U.S. The country survived that challenge. But the dégringolade of our own time seems far more difficult to overcome.