Prove Me Wrong

Michael S. Johnson

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech by former President Theodore Roosevelt, Paris, April 23, 1910

Whatever you think of the late Charlie Kirk and his political and evangelical messages, he was a citizen who stepped into the arena President Theodore Roosevelt admired as the ultimate in civic engagement …. and was shot dead, just like the two Minnesota legislators gunned down earlier.

What comes as a surprise is that one-third of college students surveyed earlier this year said that “using violence to stop a campus speech” can be acceptable. There was no difference in the findings when noncollege millennials and Generation Z young adults were asked the same question.

Those results were released by the conservative Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) the day before Kirk was assassinated. Kirk was on an Arizona campus to promote open and civil discussion among young people when he was struck down. He spoke his mind and then challenged his audience to “prove me wrong”, a phrase emblazoned on his t-shirt that day.

Similar survey results were also found in a YouGov survey. They are not only disturbing but depressing and unnerving.

A University of Maryland student told the Washington Times “A lot of my friends that day were like, ‘Well, I feel like I’m happy that Charlie Kirk is dead, but then I also feel guilty that I feel that way. I think of it is just he was spreading so much hate, misinformation, encouraging violence, and so I think that this scenario, a lot of people were not necessarily happy that he did but happy that his voice was silenced.”

I wish someone would ‘prove me wrong’ about those survey results.

Those of us of older generations know that what we witnessed in Arizona on Sept. 10 and what we have heard since then, will not be the last of it. History does repeat itself, if we let it. There will be others who enter the arena and face violence, venomous ridicule, and sometimes death for their public speech and activism.

The fingers of blame will wag in spasms of anger and condemnation in every direction. The incident will be exploited and inflamed. It’s a tragic version of Groundhog Day in America. There has already been politically related violence in the last few weeks.

Maybe that is one reason why younger people are accepting the reality of violence as a new normal, far more so than older generations. They know of little else than divisiveness, dysfunction, rage and retaliation. Will more violence make a dent in their psyche?

“A nation that sees its leaders vilify opponents, blame individuals (rather than their policies) for problems and spew rage and tantrums will understandably assume that it’s acceptable to treat anyone who disagrees with them with contempt,” Columnist Kimberely Strassel wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.

There has been much written since the Kirk funeral about ‘what’s next’ and ‘where will it end’ and ‘where do we go from here.’ The path forward is elusive. Our political attention-span won’t allow us to embrace long-term solutions, even though the problems we seek to solve have been created over a long term, getting more ingrained in society to the point that the easier, short-term, solutions are meaningless and even counter-productive. They don’t solve problems. They gloss over them.

In the meantime, the problems get worse. They become more impervious to resolution. They grow like vines around our body politic and tear at the social fabric that has kept us strong, civil and unified.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk may be another example of that downward path of decline. Columnist Peggy Noonan described it as a hinge point, “like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad.”

The days of our failed politics and social division cannot get much darker.

My friend Jerry Climer and coauthor of our book, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People, wrote on Substack recently about how we can move on, how we break the back of this kind of violent behavior.

“First, we look at the causes. Second, define the models of desirable behavior, and third, hold each other accountable for proper behavior,” he wrote.

There’s no shortage of legitimate causes, as Jerry pointed out: Politicians, media, political institutions, ideological extremism, political parties and excessive partisanship, academia, Washington influencers, a broken Congress and a lack of Presidential leadership, among many more; the most crucial is our tragic failure to treat people with mental health issues. There is more on those subjects in Fixing Congress.

Those causes, however, have roots that run much deeper, like the tap root of an oak tree that plunges down deep into the soil for long life.

The tap root of our problems today is easily found in any mirror. It is us. It is up to each one of us, to bring about fundamental change in how we behave, how we conduct ourselves in a civil society, and how we open our minds to that with which we don’t agree and who we elect to public office. We are not good at it.

And that is the paradox, as Columnist Gerard Baker points out in the Journal: “The overwhelming majority of Americans who are decent people, appalled by violence, eager to respond with constructive determination to do what we can to root it out. But the discourse is led by a small minority of opportunistic ghouls…”

In our Republic, the people ultimately rule whether they realize it or not, or like it or not. It is time for the majority to take the momentum away from those who, while maybe sincere in their rigid and radical patriotic zeal, are pitting us against each other and corrupting our civic life. United in the renewal of our decency and the preservation of our Republic, the citizenry can stop this rampage of rage and divisiveness. In unity there is strength and in strength there is the power to control the course of change.

Jerry’s next steps are to define models of desirable behavior and then hold each other accountable. There are plenty of models to choose from:

· The values that have united the country and given us hope for the future and confidence in our nation and its people: individual freedom, self-governance, civic responsibility, education and enlightenment, a form of religiosity, the rule of law and the Constitution, limited government, enterprise, innovation, social responsibility, and the strength of family, community and country.

· The virtues that make us good citizens: honesty, integrity, faith, fairness, compassion, civility, humility, credibility, courage, and benevolence. As Groucho used to say, ‘if you don’t like those, I’ve got others.’

· The Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” That is distinct from the rule currently practiced by our President today, do unto others as you think they did unto you.

· The tenets of democratic representative governance: civic education, smart voting, civic participation, pragmatic decision-making, civil discourse, commonality, government by consensus, and responsible and peaceful decent.

The best way to keep us accountable to each other is to set good examples in our social discourse, in fulfilling our civic responsibility and in the mutual respect we show others with whom we don’t agree.

We like categorizing the American experience, such as the first, second and third awakenings of religious belief; the agriculture, industrial, and technology revolutions; wars, and even fads and fashion.

We live in a time that cries out for a new awakening, such as a movement fostered, marketed, expanded and enriched by citizens willing to make it a seminal era in the nation’s history.

Institutions that are committed to civil behavior, civic education and civic engagement need to embrace this movement, define it, fund it and mobilize around it.

Politicians who believe in it must reinforce constituents who want it and muster the courage to speak against those who cling to extremist views.

The media must adopt and enforce a code of conduct that, within the bounds of free speech, reins in anonymous sourcing, misinformation, disinformation, unbalanced and biased reporting, and a host of other maladies causing the disintegration of journalistic integrity.

If you disagree, please prove me wrong.