Robert F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk could not have been more different. One was a liberal lion from Massachusetts who championed civil rights and fought poverty; the other was a conservative firebrand from Illinois who built a movement around limited government and traditional values. Kennedy came from political royalty; Kirk rose from suburban obscurity. Kennedy quoted Greek poetry; Kirk quoted the Constitution. They would have disagreed about almost everything.
But on Wednesday, they joined the same tragic American tradition: political leaders killed by bullets. Both men died doing what democracy demands — standing before crowds, speaking their convictions, willing to risk their personal safety for causes they believed in.
The two men defy comparison, but their deaths illuminate something identical: Both lived and died in eras when America’s political divisions became so toxic that disagreement repeatedly turned to violence.
The question haunting us now is the same one that faced America after 1968: Will we let fear of the other side destroy the country we’re all trying to save?
Today’s divisions feel unprecedented, but the nation has been here before — and survived far worse.
While Kirk’s assassination feels like a watershed moment, America is not experiencing its most violent political era. Today’s political violence, troubling as it is, does not approach the systematic bloodshed of the 1960s, when assassins killed President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy within five years. That decade saw 43 people die in riots following King’s murder alone, with hundreds of cities erupting in violence that required federal troops to contain.
Yet even the 1960s pale before the Reconstruction Era, America’s true apex of political violence. Between the end of the Civil War and 1877, organized white supremacist groups systematically terrorized the freed Black population, killing at least 1,000 Black Americans in what amounted to a campaign of political terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan and allied groups overthrew democratically elected governments and drove Black officials from office at gunpoint.
What these three eras share isn’t just political violence — it’s the pattern that creates it. Each period coincided with massive technological and cultural upheavals that fundamentally threatened existing power structures. The Reconstruction Era brought railroads, telegraphs and the end of slavery — changes that remade American society and economy. The 1960s saw television brought into living rooms, while social movements challenged everything from racial hierarchies to gender roles. Today’s era features social media, globalization and demographic shifts that are reshaping American identity itself. In each case, the violence emerged in part from fear of losing a familiar way of life.
The divisions that seem insurmountable today are amplified by new technologies that spread both information and misinformation at unprecedented speed, creating the conditions where political disagreement turns into existential warfare.
Look at what we’re actually fighting about today: artificial intelligence, TikTok ownership, climate policies, gender roles and identities, immigration levels, educational curricula. These are policy questions, not holy wars. But we have let fear merchants transform them into tribal battles where compromise becomes treason and listening becomes weakness.
But history shows us the antidote. It is the same one that built the railroad, won two world wars, put a man on the Moon and created the internet: the radical American idea that strangers can become neighbors, that different voices strengthen rather than threaten the whole, that our diversity is our superpower when we choose cooperation over conquest.
This means our media must reward bridge-building over bomb-throwing. Our laws must protect democratic norms even when breaking them might benefit our side. Our approach to technology must prioritize human connection over corporate profit. Most importantly, we must recommit to the hardest American ideal: listening to those we disagree with, not to change their minds, but to understand why they fear what they do.
Kirk’s assassination is a warning. If we let fear of the stranger govern us, it will destroy not only those we despise — it will destroy us too. But if we choose the harder path of empathy and engagement, if we remember that America’s strength has always come from making room for the next wave of newcomers and their ideas, then, even now, America can remain what it has always been at its best: a country that moves forward together.
Cheryl Kelley is a former senior government official with experience across five Cabinet agencies, including serving as director of planning, management and budget. She is an adjunct fellow at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University and the author of “An Informed Citizenry: How the Modern Federal Government Operates” and the novel “Radical, An American Love Story.”
