People roughly like me who have openly opposed Woketarianism seem to be mostly hoping that something good could come from the Kirk assassination--the best possibilities being recommitment to free speech and open discussion, especially on campuses. And that would likely mean, among other things, disrupting the left's stranglehold on academia.
Mr. Kirk, however, was also very much a Christian. Now, I got over my evangelical atheism quite some time ago, and, though I still don't think that any of the Abrahamic stories are true, I've come to think that Christianity is a more-or-less beneficial force in Western Civilization--when, that is, it crowds out more harmful religions, and functions as a kind of stabilizing and civilizing influence acting more-or-less in the background. Religious fervor, however, is generally a bad thing. So, if Kirk's murder sparks such fervor--well, that will not be good.
I also have a longstanding view that the pendulum of crazy swings back and forth between our two major political factions. The left has obviously been in the grip of madness for about a decade, peaking ca. 2020-2023 with the George Floyd incident and the rise of CRT and BLM, DEI fervor, and, COVID/lockdown hysteria. The most worrisome thing about the right has obviously been the rise and fall and rise of Trump, the most mixed of mixed bags. He's done a lot of good, opposing Woketarianism, promoting (until recently) free speech, pushing back against CRT, transgender pseudoscience, DEI and open borders. And he gave us a good SCOTUS majority--and may still appoint another justice. But, of course, he's done more than his share of harm as well. I don't feel like counting the ways right now, but, since I think that civil public discourse is of paramount importance, it's not surprising that I'm not happy about how he influences that. Now, to be fair, the left has done more to turn public discussion vicious than Trump has--but Trump hasn't done anything to make things better on that front, to say the very least.
I've basically just expected the left to come to its senses eventually, if just by regression to the mean...and for the right (probably but not necessarily) to move rightward, toward the nutty end of the right sector of the spectrum. (Though I'm not impressed by "abundance" progressivism, I do think it represents the right kind of shift on the left--away from Woke madness and toward economic issues...even if I generally disagree with Klien et al. with respect to economics.)
But, of course, the nightmare scenario is: the blue team stays crazy and the right team goes crazy too...
I suppose I don't see any reason to rule this out, unfortunately. Other than that: if the right gets crazier, it will start losing the genuine centristish-liberals who have been backing the red team as the lesser evil. Well, that's not nothing... But it won't help much if the left stays as radical and crazy as it's been and the right becomes possessed by an equal and opposite crazy. That will just leave centristish liberalish types with a choice between equally bad alternatives.
Woketarianism, as many have noted, is similar to a religion--and similar to a cult in many ways. And the religious right is the component of the American right I fear the most. And we could end up with those two forces battling each other for supremacy...which would be very, very bad. Now, Kirk himself said that he didn't really rely on religious arguments to support his conservative arguments--he claimed to have non-religious arguments in support of them. Downright Rawlsian of him... At any rate, it's not in any way inevitable that we'll see an ascendance of the religious right like we did in the early-mid '80s...but there are certainly significant reasons to worry that we might.
[Addendum: one way in which a crazy, radical right is less harmful than a crazy, radical left: universities will fight the former tooth and nail, whereas it happily capitulates to the latter, as we've seen. (In fact, they don't even really capitulate...that'd be capitulating to itself. Academia is the source of crazy leftistm.)]
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