Back in September, when a generation of progressives was being cancelled from the right for saying something negative about Charlie Kirk after his death—another group of liberals was being cancelled from the left for saying something positive about him. Ezra Klein was one of the people in the latter category. He landed in hot water with his fellow progressives, for daring to pen something approximating praise of the deceased right-wing podcaster.
"Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way," read the title of Klein's piece, published the day after his assassination. And to be sure—the authors of op-eds in the New York Times rarely get to choose their own headlines. But in this case, the title was not inconsistent with the contents of the piece itself.
Klein's point was that—in the very appearance in which he was killed—Kirk was trying to invite open debate and argument on controversial issues, which is of course how we should all try to resolve our political differences in a democratic society—instead of resorting to violence to try to silence people we disagree with. (Klein, then, was not saying he agrees with Kirk on the actual substance of his views—which he knows were reprehensible.)
I partially agreed with Klein—up to a point—and penned something similar on this blog the morning after the shooting—even before I had seen Klein's piece. I thought that Klein's point was correct, so far as it went—but that it needed a part two. That is—it needed a more forceful "on the other hand..." that acknowledged just what an unwholesome influence Kirk had actually been on our politics.
In the days that followed the assassination, I learned even more about what Kirk had been up to before his death, and I started to feel the need for this "part two" even more forcefully.
I began to question my own take after Kirk's death. I too had rushed in to praise the dead simply because his killing had been cowardly and horrific, and no one deserves to be murdered for peacefully expressing their views—no matter how abhorrent those views may be. But, this question is ultimately separate from that of how we assess Kirk's legacy.
I particularly felt the need to complicate my posthumous assessment of Kirk after I learned that his final days had been spent trying to gin up a digital lynch mob, by hand-selecting an isolated crime in North Carolina and using it to fan the flames of racial hate. I could no longer pretend—after seeing this—that Kirk had been elevated to a status worthy of praise merely because he had died violently and unjustly.
Then I was reading Wendell Phillips's great 1881 lecture before the Phi Beta Kappa society, "The Scholar in a Republic," and I find that he had something strangely apt to say about this:
Journalism must have more self-respect, he writes. Now it praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a good word from nine-tenths of our journals is worthless. In burying our Aaron Burrs, both political parties—in order to get the credit of magnanimity—exhaust the vocabulary of eulogy so thoroughly that there is nothing left with which to distinguish our John Jays.
I have no idea which contemporary figures Phillips had in mind at the time he wrote this—or what political context would have given meaning to these words to his audience in 1881. But when I read it today, of course—I could only think of Ezra Klein's piece.
Phillips seemed to be reaching out from beyond the grave to tell Klein (and, by extension, me), to have a bit more "self-respect." Just because Kirk had died—and died horribly and wrongfully—that does not mean we have to praise him.
Of course, we've all heard the Latin tag, "of the dead, speak no evil." Phillips had heard it too. But he has a gloss of his own to put on it:
De mortuis nil nisi bonum most men translate, "Speak only good of the dead." I prefer to construe it, "Of the dead say nothing unless you can tell something good."
Indeed, this was Ta-Nehisi Coates's preferred construction too. In his interview with Klein, Coates challenged the latter for writing his posthumous—and largely undeserved—praise of Kirk. Klein responded by saying that he didn't want to perpetuate a cycle of political violence by seeming to join a left-wing pile-on of dispraise against Kirk. To which Coates replied: "I think all of that is understandable. But was silence not an option?"
In the stock phrase, attributed proverbially to everyone's elder relatives (though I don't recall any of my own ever actually saying it): "If you haven't anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
But Wendell Phillips wouldn't actually have been content to leave it there, either. As much as he would have viewed "silence" as at least preferable to unmerited praise of the dead—he would not have viewed it as sufficient in the present case. "[I]f the sin and the recreancy have been marked and far-reaching in their evil," Phillips adds, "even the charity of silence is not permissible."
Phillips, then, probably would have been on the side neither of Klein nor of Coates, but of the Washington Post columnist who lost her job in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's slaying—merely for accurately quoting a number of the distasteful, racist things that he had said while alive.
For indeed: the "sin," in this case—the racism and xenophobia and extremism and sexism; the baiting of minority groups and the deliberate injection into U.S. politics of conspiratorial antisemitism—was truly "marked and far-reaching" in its consequences. So perhaps, we should say—with Phillips—that even the "charity of silence" must be withheld in the present instance.
A similar moral quandary surrounds the question of what—if anything—one should say of former Vice President Dick Cheney, now that he has passed on. (He is being laid to rest later today.)
On the one hand, Joe Biden's decisions to put out a statement in his praise and to attend his funeral come across as unifying acts of political decency and magnanimity across party lines. These acts take on a particular nobility and significance when contrasted with the response of now-president Trump who—even though he, unlike Biden, belongs to the same party as the late Dick Cheney—has snubbed the latter in death for the most petty and vindictive possible reasons.
(Trump was pointedly not invited to Cheney's funeral and did not attend. Neither did J.D. Vance.)
But still—it's also impossible to overlook what Cheney did in his life. As much as I appreciate him for being willing to cross party lines and put the Constitution before the GOP, in his final years—I also can't forget or forgive his role in the Bush-era CIA torture program, extraordinary renditions, and other grotesque early-2000s abuses of power.
To be sure, one could perhaps forgive these things if Cheney had apologized and asked for forgiveness for them—but he never did.
Here again, then, the "sin and recreancy" were indeed particularly "marked and far-reaching in their evil." Are not thousands of Iraqis dead, and human beings still detained indefinitely in Guantanamo without charge, and bearing the scars of torture, because of Dick Cheney's actions?
One of the kindest things Biden had to say about the deceased Vice President was that old standby of posthumous faint praise: he was good to his loved ones; he was a decent man in private life. "He believed, as I do, that family is the beginning, middle, and end," Biden's statement reportedly read.
To which I can only reply—with Lord Byron—"I grant his household abstinence; [...] I know he was a constant consort; own / He was a decent sire, [...] I grant him all the kindest can accord; / And this was well for him, but not for those / Millions who found him what Oppression chose."
Those millions in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance.
Byron wrote these lines in opposition to Robert Southey's posthumous praise of King George—which Byron, in common with the other romantic liberals and radicals of his generation, saw as a piece of shameless bootlicking flattery (which it was). So too—Byron would undoubtedly have as little patience as Wendell Phillips would with the people who heap unmerited praise on Charlie Kirk or Dick Cheney or anyone else, merely because they were dead.
Still, though, it's worth emphasizing that even in his satirical mockery of Southey's poem—which pictured the deceased monarch triumphantly entering heaven—Byron did not actually counter Southey by damning King George to hell instead. To the contrary, Byron proclaims himself a universalist on the subject of salvation, writing:
"'God save the king!' It is a large economy / In God to save the like; but if he will/ Be saving, all the better / for not one am I / Of those who think damnation better still[.]"
In this regard too (as in all things, really), I side with Byron. Of the dead, I say: speak the truth, whether good or ill. Don't cover over their failings and sins. Don't make them out to be better than they were. But don't damn them either. Just because we don't have to pretend that they were all good, merely because they are dead; we also don't have to pretend they were all evil, merely because they were not all good.
Charlie Kirk and Dick Cheney committed many evils, as we have seen—evils "marked and far-reaching" in their effects. Let us not deny them, nor draw a polite curtain of silence over them—because if we do, how will we ever ensure these evils will not come again?
But let us acknowledge and praise what was good in them too: the fact that Charlie Kirk, for all his failings, at least met his opponents with arguments and words and open debate, rather than guns or knives; or the fact that Dick Cheney, despite his appalling role in the Bush White House, at least showed some integrity and courage and loyalty to the Constitution when it came to the Trump era.
And so I say, with Bryon—God save Charlie Kirk and Dick Cheney too. It may be "a large economy / In God to save the like." But indeed— "if he will/ Be saving, all the better." They, too, were not all bad; though we shouldn't pretend they were all good either.
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