Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s 1978 book The Spirit of Liberalism is a penetrating defence of liberal principles by a conservative political philosopher, but it also reproaches liberals’ failure to resist an onslaught from the radical Left. “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism,” Mansfield writes. “Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

More than a half-century later, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein furnishes a good example of the spineless tendency Mansfield identified. His responses to the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk and to the legal ordeal of anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil betray a sentimental belief in an arc of history that bends naturally toward justice. There is no sense of the fragility of progress, or of the urgent need to defend American liberalism from its enemies at home and abroad.

Condemnations of political violence poured forth from almost all quarters after Charlie Kirk was shot to death on 10 September 2025. Condolences were offered to his bereaved family and tributes soon followed that saluted his tolerance of opposing views and his commitment to vigorous debate. One of these paeans was written by Klein, who applauded Kirk’s legacy in the pages of the New York Times. Although he acknowledged that he doesn’t share Kirk’s worldview or sympathise with his ideological commitments, Klein maintained that Kirk had “practiced politics in the right way.” Klein: “I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.”

So, was a taste for disagreement really central to Kirk’s MO? Will moxie and fearlessness in the political arena be his lasting legacy? It is true that Kirk was always willing to debate his views, albeit on his own terms and against conspicuously inexperienced collegiate opponents. In a culture that has turned firmly against the art of argument, this was not nothing. “When people stop talking,” Kirk liked to remark, “that’s when you get violence.” Well, okay. But surely the quality of debate—that is, its moral and intellectual content—matters as much as the mere fact of its occurrence. And by this standard, Kirk really did not deserve much praise. At a time of pervasive distrust, America is in need of a determined effort to restore confidence and diminish our mutual contempt. This was not a project that particularly interested Kirk, but Klein was either unable or unwilling to say so.

The problem with Kirk was not that he was an activist of strong convictions or that he was divisive. Division is an inevitable and ineradicable feature of any free society, as well as a necessary component of activism across the political spectrum. The problem with Kirk was that his mode of engagement produced a lot of heat and smoke but rarely much light. His overriding purpose was to humiliate his antagonists and encourage a sense of siege in his supporters. At a time when American public life was already fraught with extremism, resentment, and conspiracism, Kirk bombarded his listeners with more of the same. Instead of helping Americans develop cognitive tools to protect themselves from the cacophony of political discourse, he contributed to that discourse’s slide into bitter recrimination.

“Democracies,” the English philosopher Roger Scruton once observed, “owe their existence to national loyalties—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition.” But judging by his activism, Kirk seemed to be unmoved by that supervising loyalty or the importance of unity. His mission was to inflict a final and unarguable defeat on the liberal constitutional order, and to be Donald Trump’s most servile courtier as Trump corrupted the Republican Party and the American republic.

It should not be a breach of etiquette to point this out, even in the wake of an assassination. There are greater agents of discord in the political arena than Kirk was, but his influence on American politics was poisonous. He may not have been a bigot, but he was a culture-war maximalist who enjoyed denigrating his opponents, a dedicated foot-soldier in the postliberal war on America’s foundational creed, and an adamant Christian nationalist with no appetite for nuance. He was not an aberration on the populist Right—on the contrary, he was the personification of a movement that raised a mob on 6 January 2021, and he energetically recycled Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. What prompted the idea that liberals must find a good word to say about a demagogue should any harm befall him? Hagiography from conservatives was inevitable, but why did Klein feel he ought to add to it from the liberal centre?

Ezra Klein’s misplaced generosity towards Charlie Kirk may reflect a belief that America’s current fever will eventually subside, and that the country will recover its sense of balance and vitality. But this looks less like confidence in the American system than complacency about the threats arrayed against it. Although American democracy still appears to be protected by its division of powers, the fabric of its civic virtue is torn and frayed. And as Edmund Burke once remarked, manners are of more importance than laws and morals:

The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.

Klein seems to understand this advice because he is unfailingly courteous in his own discussions and debates about politics. So why did he expect so much less of Kirk and why was he prepared to overlook the deleterious effect of Kirk’s conduct on American politics?