Your Mourning is Mandatory

The grisly murder of Charlie Kirk brought about a massive outpouring of public support and mourning. From newspaper op-eds to moments of silence at major sporting events and flags being flown at half-staff, the response seemed to reach every corner of public life.

The reaction has been so dramatic that you’d think this had never happened before. You’d think that a politician hadn’t been murdered a few months ago, that there wasn’t an attempt on a presidential candidate’s life last year, that we hadn’t recently seen a violent attempt to kidnap the Speaker of the House and a sophisticated plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. That we hadn’t seen an attempted coup just a few years ago.

Of course, events can take on a symbolic meaning, and if this was what it took to drive us toward actually confronting political violence, it would be an unequivocal good thing. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, Trump and his allies are using the incident to advocate for vengeance against the left. They are leveraging the moment to exert control over the media, trying to designate inchoate left-wing factions as terrorist groups, and scouring the Internet to get anyone who was insufficiently polite about Kirk’s death fired from their jobs. 

Slightly less expected was how willing media elites were to come to their aid. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for suggesting that Kirk’s rhetoric might have fueled the environment of political violence that claimed his life. The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah for posting that she refused to engage in “performative mourning for a white man who espoused violence.” 

This all culminated with the brief cancelation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show at the behest of the Trump administration, after Kimmel said that MAGA had made efforts to distance themselves from the shooter. The comment wasn’t particularly offensive or untrue, but it was insufficiently reverential. The regime demands that you respectfully mourn its loss.

The Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin famously said that fascism is the aestheticization of politics. The fascist body politic is denied the ability to alter their material conditions, but it is granted the ability to express its frustrations. The administration cannot promise to put a stop to political violence or even make its constituents safer. But it can offer them a sort of aesthetic vengeance. It can lower the flags to half-staff and punish anyone who doesn’t demonstrate the due respect. 

What Trump has always promised his supporters, more than anything else, is a feeling. He promised to lift them up the cultural hierarchy, not by improving their lot but by subjugating their enemies. Some of his ugliest and most authoritarian policies have served that end. Deploying troops to blue cities isn’t meant to solve a real problem, it’s meant to produce a certain feeling in the viewer: fear in his opponents, the thrill of domination in his allies.

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