Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a Charlie Kirk inside all of us

America is a nation forever trying to decide what it really is. From the very beginning, we have been both universal and tribal, expansive and exclusionary, magnanimous and mean. That tension is not a subplot of our story. It is the story.

Charlie Kirk, who was eulogized by President Donald Trump on Sunday at a memorial service attended by tens of thousands of his conservative followers, was not just an agitator. He was a mirror. He reflected back to us the deep hunger for certainty, the need for enemies, and the longing for a lost simplicity that pervades our culture. His rise was not a fluke. It was the predictable expression of something buried in all of us — the impulse to divide, to resent, to cling to identity when the world feels unstable.

The politics of racial resentment is as old as America. It has always flared most brightly in moments of change — when old hierarchies collapse and new groups demand recognition.

W.E.B. Du Bois saw this with crystalline clarity. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he described the “double consciousness” that haunts African Americans — the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of being both American and rejected by America.

During World War I, Du Bois urged Black Americans to “close ranks” and fight for a country that scorned them. But when the war ended, and racial violence surged, he thundered in response, “We return fighting.” The hope of belonging had once again curdled into resentment.

That same cycle would recur through the 20th century. When George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to block integration, he was not merely defending segregation; he was channeling the fear of white Southerners who felt their way of life dissolving.

When Richard Nixon adopted the “Southern Strategy,” he was not inventing racial resentment, but repackaging it in subtler tones — turning fear of disorder and crime into coded appeals to race.

Time and again, racial resentment has proved to be one of the most powerful currents in American politics. It is less about hatred than about belonging — about the terror of cultural displacement and dispossession, about the ache of humiliation, about the refusal to be unseen.

Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10 while giving a talk on a college campus in Utah, did not speak in the old language of white supremacy. He spoke in the modern dialect of victimhood. He told his followers that they were the silenced ones, the mocked ones, the marginalized ones. Universities, tech companies, Hollywood — all were conspiring against them.

The inversion is startling: Historically dominant groups now cast themselves as the oppressed. It may not withstand careful scrutiny, but it resonates emotionally. Kirk’s message was simple: You matter, and they are trying to erase you.

That message has power not only because it appeals to racial anxiety, but because it offers clarity in a time of disorientation. Globalization, automation, immigration, and demographic transformation have left many people unsure of where they belong. In that fog, Kirk supplied a story. It was crude, it was corrosive, but it was clear.

We should resist the temptation to treat him as an aberration. He was not a glitch in the system. He was a feature of it.

There is a Charlie Kirk in all of us.

That part of us prefers vengeance to reconciliation, rage to reflection, simplicity to complexity. That part grows louder when the ground beneath us shifts. And America right now is shifting — economically, demographically, culturally — in ways that unsettle everyone.

Nor is this impulse confined to one side of the political spectrum. The left has its own absolutists, its own purity tests, its own refusal to imagine the inner lives of opponents. The tendency to divide the world into victims and villains, saints and sinners, is a universal human failing.

The deeper danger is not Kirk’s rhetoric. It is our denial. As long as we pretend that the urge to tribalism lives only “over there,” we will never confront its roots within ourselves.

Part of us prefers vengeance to reconciliation, rage to reflection, simplicity to complexity.

As Du Bois once wrote, “Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States.” He could have said the same of resentment. The politics of grievance may win elections, but it cannot build a society.

The real work of democracy is not only in ballots and policies, but in daily moral choices: choosing curiosity over caricature, patience over outrage, complexity over simplification. It is the work of disciplining the Kirk within us.

His death closes a chapter, but not the story. Because the politics of racial resentment has never been about one man. It is about the American soul. And until we do the hard work of reconciling our universal ideals with our tribal instincts, we will keep producing more Charlie Kirks — each one a little louder, each one a little more dangerous.

Jack Hill is a regular Inquirer contributing opinion writer. He is a diversity consultant, child advocate, journalist, and writer.