On Civic Responsibility
Last year I wrote “we are a sick people” about the responses to the highly publicized deaths of a healthcare CEO and a troubled man on a subway. In large part, I did what I’m about to critique now.
Reading “The Anatomy of a Near Perfect Response to Political Violence” about responses to the “assassination” of Charlie Kirk by my brother, Dr. Michael Strambler, put me in my thoughts this morning. What follows is my best attempt to use the gifts of my mind to further the conversation.
I didn’t write anything about Kirk’s passing. Too much of it felt like reading someone else’s email. When I addressed the issue on a podcast, it was from an outsider’s perspective, knowing too little about it to offer meaningful insights.
When that's the case, I make sense of an issue by drawing on the insights of other voices.
Enter Judith Shklar. She once wrote that liberalism at its core is the “politics of fear”—a refusal to let cruelty be the dominant experience of life. In other words, liberalism is, at bottom, a project to make sure no one’s daily life is ruled by cruelty or fear. It is less about promising perfection than about refusing to let cruelty become ordinary.
If that’s right, then the moral focus, especially in moments of political violence, should be on the structures of cruelty that surround us, not the emotional expressions of those who have lived under it. Yet too often the opposite happens: the policing of emotions substitutes for the contestation of power.
When Charlie Kirk died, much of the immediate commentary split along familiar lines. On the right, martyrdom; on the left, some measure of scorn or indifference. What struck me, though, was not those reactions themselves but the way certain voices rushed to label them irresponsible, to declare that “our side” should rise above, should meet tragedy with solemnity, should perform civic grace. In my life, compassion is a given, especially in matters of death, so the need to prove it by showing downcast eyes and a hand over the heart is an unnecessary performance.
There is, to be clear, something honorable in choosing restraint. Bernie Sanders’s statement on Kirk’s death was a model of this: honest about his deep disagreements, but unwilling to cross the line into dehumanization. That was Sanders’s choice—and it may even be the right one for political leaders whose words carry the force of example. But to turn that choice into an obligation for everyone else is to misunderstand the nature of democratic life.
Another voice I’ll raise is Hannah Arendt, who reminded us that politics is built on plurality. In a democracy, there will be competing responses, competing emotions, competing registers of speech. Anger is no less political than compassion. Silence can be dignified, but so too can bitter words. To insist that one emotional mode is the only legitimate one is to narrow the very space where politics breathes.
It is especially fraught when Black Americans are among those admonished for their tone. Kirk’s career was in no small part dedicated to amplifying anti-Black stereotypes and resentments. For those on the receiving end of that animus, contempt may not only be understandable—it may be the most authentic response. W.E.B. Du Bois called this “double consciousness”: the pressure to filter even justified emotion through what is acceptable to a wider, whiter audience. Civic responsibility cannot mean endlessly managing how one’s pain appears to others.
And there is, finally, the question of proportion. We live in a time when democratic norms are under sustained assault, when power is being centralized in ways that erode basic liberties, when cruelty toward immigrants, minorities, and dissenters is not incidental but programmatic. In such a context, the great civic irresponsibility is not an angry post on social media—it is the authoritarian turn of the state itself. To focus on the etiquette of the powerless is to miss the real drama of our moment.
John Stuart Mill argued that the freedom of expression is valuable precisely because it allows society to see itself honestly, to let dissenting voices speak even when they grate against prevailing norms. It is necessary to condemn political violence. But to conflate harsh words about a political figure with violence itself, or to ask the marginalized to soften their responses for the sake of civility, is to confuse civility with justice.
Civic responsibility matters. But it should be directed at those with the capacity to shape laws, deploy force, and remake the lives of millions—not at the powerless expressions of those already living under the weight of political cruelty. The test of our democracy is not whether everyone reacts with perfect grace to the death of a polarizing figure.
The test is whether we can build a society in which cruelty is never allowed to set the terms of our public life. That is the civic responsibility worth fighting for.
