In the space of just a few months, the United States has been shaken by two momentous events that shed light on an ever-increasing political polarisation. For the first time in history, New York, one of the world’s most important cities and a symbol of American power, chose a mayor who embodies everything but the symbol of American-ness. You may like it or not, the fact is that Mamdani won by proposing a message of total rupture and disavowal of the classic American model. A few months before this, another event of very high magnitude shocked the American community as well as the conservative world in Europe: the political assassination of Republican Charlie Kirk, a well-known Republican influencer, active mainly in the world of university campuses. Kirk, known for his rigidly conservative – but not subversive – positions, had for years been at the centre of the defamation and delegitimisation machine that wanted him as an extremist and white supremacist.

Theact of delegitimisation becomes particularly dangerous when it occurs through the lens of extremism. In fact, we will divide this category according to three criteria, on the one hand the historical positioning of the political idea, on the other the inclination to subversion, and finally the attitude to fundamentalism (falsification and violence) of the idea in question.

This work of categorisation serves, in its own small way, to try to deradicalise the political debate, which is almost irretrievably made up of contrasts between factions and not between projects.

So let’s try to understand: what is extremism?

Historical positioning: from this point of view, by extremist we mean that set of ideas and attitudes characterised by a statistical positioning defined as outliers, i.e. basically a deviation isolated from the central tendency measures of mean, median or represented in regression: the inverse of outliers are obviously the positions defined as ‘ common sense’ or ‘common sense’. In Italy, outliers can be defined, for example, as the extra-parliamentary subversive parties for two reasons, one because they represent outliers, i.e. small minorities that represent little more than themselves, and the other reason is the subversion aspect.

Subversion: In fact, in addition to a merely quantitative criterion such as statistics, ‘extremist’, in common parlance, refers to a person with subversive ideas, i.e. one who does not seek to change the institutional political system in which he or she lives, but to uproot, destroy and overturn it without following the internal rules of the system to reform itself. Every democratic institution has internal mechanisms that allow it to amend, modify and participate in the political evolution of an institution in an organic and channelled manner. A person with subversive tendencies not only rejects the institutions as they are, but also believes that they must be changed by uprooting them, thus failing the institutional channels for amending, rectifying and evolving the system itself.

Fundamentalism, understood as the rejection of reason and propensity to violence: The previous two criteria usually serve as pillars for other typical characteristics of extremists, including:
– the promotion of the use of personal violence for social and collective purposes on the one hand, and
– the refusal to use reason on the other, i.e. the refusal to refute and falsify one’s own opinions through rationality and dialogue; obviously, where reason fails, arms come in to help. In essence, this is a person who does not accept to argue his own idea, is unwilling to change it even in the face of evidence, and is prone to the use of physical or verbal violence if one comes into conflict with his ideas.

With such definitions given, it sounds really complicated to call Charlie Kirk an extremist.

Probably many who read this article will find themselves to be more extreme than he is. In fact, moving on, the historical positioning of Kirk’s ideas cannot be said to be outliers . Let us consider two pieces of data that are a priori valid from whatever ideas Kirk might have had:

1. Deductively, the US is a de facto two-party system, anyone who knows the implications of this knows that two-party systems tend towards the centre, not the extremes. This means that there is a mutual recognition of the collective vision and national interest that leads the two main camps to share a good slice of the electoral programme. Kirk was akin to one of the camps, so his positioning by definition cannot be said to be extremist.
2. Empirically, the Republicans won the election democratically with both the popular vote and the federal vote: their ideas, right or wrong, are the ideas of the majority of American citizens who cast their ballots. So, even empirically, Kirk ‘s cannot by definition be extremist ideas. Those of the Republicans may be extreme positions for a citizen of Helsinki, or they may be too liberal for a citizen of Japan: this is why everyone votes where they have been socialised and where they are citizens, why a Texan cannot vote in Palermo and a Modenese cannot vote in Vietnam.

Making a brief historical recap:

Bill Clinton:

• 1996: Signs theIllegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which criminalises illegal immigration and strengthens controls; speaks of ‘deportation of the aliens‘.
• 1993: introduces the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, which obliges homosexual soldiers not to declare their orientation.
• 1996: he declares himself against gay marriage and signs the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Barack Obama:

• 2014: he claims to have tightened controls at the southern border with a record number of agents and deportations (over 2.5 million), earning him the nickname ‘Deporter in Chief’.
• Given the extremely high rate of child abandonment – at the root of the problems of poverty, crime and ghettoisation of young African-Americans – the African-American community is reminded by Obama of the centrality of paternal responsibility, stating that being a man is not just about conceiving children, but having the courage to raise them.

Turning to the subversive side, it does not appear that Kirk – as well as the Republicans – have advocated abolishing the US Constitution, or abolishing elections, or even setting up a clandestine shadow state. Mainly for two reasons: the Republicans inherit much of the anarcho-federalist culture whereby the state is not a friend, the less of it the better. It is hard to believe that they would even want to set up another clandestine one; secondly, because they do not need one, since in addition to currently governing the state itself, they belong to the first party in America and are not excluded from the electoral mechanism. Republicans normally work in Congress and have occupied all government positions permanently for almost three centuries, and Kirk has never had anything to say about this. It does not appear on record that Kirk has called for revolution or transgression of his country’s democratic mechanisms.

We end with fundamentalism

Quote: ‘When people stop talking that’s when you get violence, that’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity. We have to start thinking of a society where violence is not an option‘. One can argue at great length about the merits of his ideas, but if there is something one cannot argue about, it is this: democratic practice. Kirk committed his life and even his death to dialogue. We can tell each other many things about him, but what he died for was not just his ideas, which we have seen so far were not extremist ideas, but the practice of externalising them by engaging the public in a debate.

The fundamentalist is he who, in short, does not accept the presence of the different, in this case understood as an idea different from his own. Again, it is best to cite to give a concrete example of a spat with a true extremist conservative:

Kirk: what do you care so much about what they do in their private lives?
Homophobic protester: it’s against God, so are you a Christian or not?
Kirk: we live in a theocracy, yes or no? Being a Christian means interpreting appropriately what theology says for theindividual, but it also means being patient, forgiving, loving and kind. Jesus Christ spoke to everyone, Jesus Christ carried his ministry through Judea and Samaria, and dined with tax collectors, and dined with prostitutes, and ministered in every part of the Mediterranean. To be a Christian, my friend, is to have an open mind but to be firm in your faith. So you can have that belief, but if you say that there is something inherently wrong with communicating or associating with people just because they make personal decisions different from yours, then you, sir, are not a conservative. Thank you for being here tonight.

An extremist is almost always a fundamentalist, but what is more bizarre is that many self-styled moderates are fundamentalists. How many distinguished people who conform perfectly to social standards do we know but who do not want to hear reason? A large number of decent, educated people do not accept dialogue, do not accept changing their minds in the face of evidence, and most of them are willing to end the confrontation with verbal violence (when it goes well).

Dialogue is the main feature of democracy and is what we should all exercise the most, yet hardly anyone does: it is good to feel confirmed, it is bad when an uncomfortable argument gets in our faces and destroys our beautiful sandcastle.

The predisposition to fundamentalism is a widespread feature in all political spectrums and at all socio-economic levels: confirmation bias has been studied for years now and it is an accepted fact that people tend to create bubbles adorned with their own beliefs and woe betide anyone who scratches them. Charlie Kirk was the person who most sought to destroy this bias and break down those invisible walls that separate people. All this by dialoguing, confronting those who think differently, arguing with any kind of person who was more educated than him or less educated than him, with or without a degree (he himself lacked one). Dialogue with those who think differently is the greatest exercise in direct democracy that one can have in a representative democracy, and it is precisely that which is most lacking.

So yes, eliminating all the fake-news that portray him as a warmonger, racist, misogynist, anti-Semite and homophobe, I think Kirk can be called a role model hands down, not because of his ideas, but because of his dialogical and commendably democratic actions.