Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, historically minded commentators have identified ominous echoes of the 1850s in the highly polarized present, with invocations of “civil war” on the rise. But the cold civil war between our two major political parties erupted a decade ago, and its decisive Gettysburg battle took place last November. A new civil war is now erupting within one of the major political parties, not between them. It is the war for the Democratic Party’s new center. This war was silently declared the moment Kamala Harris’s defeat was announced, and the shot that took Kirk’s life was its unwitting opening volley.
Since Kirk’s alleged assassin was 12 years old, Democratic Party-aligned media outlets have ‘“Hitlerized” Donald Trump and his supporters. “What do you do to Hitler?” asks the Trump administration’s David Sacks. “You have to stop him at all costs, right?” The ability to discern this logic is not limited to Republicans or Trump supporters. “Years of liberals demonizing Trump led to the killing of Charlie Kirk,” concluded The Militant, a socialist weekly.
Back in February, veteran political strategist James Carville urged Democrats to abandon the “resistance” mode they embraced during Trump’s first term and adopt a politics of “strategic retreat.” But was “rolling over and playing dead” the only strategic alternative to reviving the failed anti-Trump elite insurgency? This was the question asked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028, on the first episode of his podcast, which he launched during the bounding early days of Trump’s second term.
Newsom asked the first guest on his show to provide the Democrats with a new strategic vision. “You have to go to war with your own party” was his reply. He then singled out three areas—border security, urban crime, and housing affordability—in which Democratic Party policy had strayed far from the sentiments of the electorate. Yet a fourth issue stalked the episode’s post-election reckoning: transgender policy. After 2020, the Democratic Party decided to support transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, a policy opposed by 80 percent of the electorate. “The most effective ad of this election cycle,” Newsom’s guest led his host to consider, “you know what it is!” Newsom did know: “Trump’s for you, she’s for they/them.” “It was devastating,” Newsom acknowledged. “It’s a brilliant campaign commercial.” Newsom’s guest pushed the point. It wasn’t just “the Willie Horton ad of 2024,” Newsom’s guest insisted. “It reflected a truth that the voters felt,” the truth that “their country was slipping away.”
That guest was Charlie Kirk.
At present, there is no evidence to suggest that Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was aware of Kirk’s dialogue with Newsom. But Robinson’s alleged actions and words—silencing a Trumpian conservative during a campus debate, and justifying this decision on the grounds that the speaker represents “hate”—are consistent with the ideology and policy of the very kind of Democrats whose “woke” politics Newsom and Kirk pointed to as liabilities in 2024.
“The bullet that forever silenced Charlie Kirk was aimed at Gavin Newsom by proxy.”
In this sense, the bullet that forever silenced Charlie Kirk was aimed at Gavin Newsom by proxy as well as at Donald Trump. Robinson took a political shot across the bow of the entire Democratic Party, warning those in the party seeking moderation and rapprochement with MAGA of the radicalized opposition that awaits them within their own party’s ranks.
Democrats’ eagerness not only to ignore the evidence that Robinson was motivated by the ideology of the anti-Trump resistance, but to believe the opposite—that Robinson was a far-right Kirk hater—is, among other things, an attempt to paper over their coalition’s internal fractures. By insisting that the violence of September 10 emerged out of a split within the right, Democrats are attempting to project the civil war within their own party onto the other side.
If the Newsom-Kirk dialogue suggested one version of Democratic Party realignment, establishment voices within the party appear to prefer another. “As Republicans have improved their margins with working-class voters,” Michelle Goldberg noted in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election, “Democrats have made gains with educated suburbanites” and with those, such as never-Trump Republicans, “who fundamentally trust American civic institutions.” Goldberg described this pattern, most visible in states like Arizona and Georgia as the political “opportunity” the Harris campaign was trying to seize.
A week after the Kirk interview aired, Goldberg demanded to know: “What on earth is Gavin Newsom doing?” She characterized Newsom’s podcast as a “protracted exercise in self-harm for both Newsom and any liberal who decides to listen to him.” She went on to say: “It was especially ill-advised for Newsom to roll out his pivot on trans women in sports in a conversation with Kirk, a man who once described trans people as ‘disgusting, mentally ill, neurotic, predatory freaks.’” Goldberg concluded by downgrading Newsom’s presidential prospects.
If the history of prior realignments is any guide, the new civil war within the Democratic Party may not be resolved for well over a decade, and the party may need to suffer losses over several cycles before it can finally mount a presidential candidate capable of recapturing the political center. Circa 1984, Democratic politicians like Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas were among the most recognizable “New Democrats,” whereas Bill Clinton—the eventual standard-bearer of the party’s quasi-Reaganized new centrism—was still a relatively obscure figure.
Now, as then, some centrist voices aligned with the Democratic Party are vilifying the Republican president while urging Democrats to selectively integrate some of his most characteristic political positions—a kind of unconscious nod to the reality of Trumpian realignment. And now, as then, other, more original centrist voices within the party have parted with the vilification of the Republican president entirely, and some among them are pursuing their party’s Trumpian realignment in conscious and explicit terms.
On September 17, exactly one week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a Democratic policy research initiative comprised of two former staffers of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) released a mission statement with the words “to spark a realignment” as its subtitle. “For three straight presidential elections, President Trump has made inroads with core elements of the coalition that has traditionally supported liberal politicians,” the Searchlight Institute’s mission statement observes. Much of the statement reads as if it could have been written by Charlie Kirk. “Democrats have a choice,” Kirk told Newsom earlier this year. “You could say to those people, you’re racist, you’re Nazis, you’re fascist, you’re terrible. Or you can listen and be like, why is it that a steel worker in Pittsburgh who’s voted Democrat his entire life is voting for Trump?”
“Disagreement can be perilous during periods of intra-party conflict.”
Disagreement can be perilous during periods of intra-party conflict, especially for party intellectuals. Consider Van Jones and Ezra Klein. Both Jones and Klein have spent years urging their party to become better attuned to the motivations of Trump voters: Jones by interviewing them in 2016 and 2020, and Klein by including conservative and Trumpian voices among his podcast’s guests. “Democrats need to face why Trump won” ran the title of a March 2025 episode. In the aftermath of the assassination, Jones said of Kirk: “He was not for censorship, he was not for civil war, he was not for violence. He was for open debate and dialogue.” When Klein eulogized Kirk in similar terms, he argued that neither Trump nor his opponents would win a partisan civil war, implying the need to meet in the middle. Jones has so far evaded the charge of racial and other bigotries from his own side, but Klein has not been so fortunate.
For Kirk, Democrats’ fear of disagreement was not merely one electoral liability among other single-issue concerns, but a meta-liability that has driven the party to adopt unpopular positions across the board. College campuses are key to its operation because the Democrats have become the party of the educated and credentialed, so that campuses have become the sites, in Kirk’s words, of Democrats’s “upbringing,” the places where Democrats are made. But institutions of higher education don’t “foster debate like [they] used to” 30 years ago, in Kirk’s view, leading to the atrophy of Democrats’ “intellectual muscle.” Victims are elevated, critics are silenced, and campus intellectual culture becomes “monolithic,” “centralized,” “top-down,” and “quasi-authoritarian.” This fosters the Democratic Party’s current “minoritarian, hectoring, hall-monitor/assistant principal vibe” against which “young men are rebelling.”
If the thesis advanced by this article is correct, then “new centrist” Democrats will have to undertake the gradual, decade-long recapture of the institutions and professional associations in which their preferred policy agendas are, as yet, very far from hegemonic. The Trump administration’s weaponization of cancel culture, hate speech laws, and even the IRS against its political opponents might provide an opening for a reassertion of older civil-libertarian principles that were forgotten when Democrats deployed these same instruments against conservatives.
Yet here too, the idea of a party-line war between Republicans and Democrats misses an important dimension of the new political battlefield. In the minds of its supporters, the Trump administration’s multi-pronged attack on the “progressive tax-free foundations” is motivated by the fact that “Democrats increasingly rely upon [these] networks for political organizing and campaign activity.” The weakening of these entities might strengthen other factions within the party. Indeed, some of Trump’s allies have called upon him to “publicly and repeatedly support and praise Democratic officials…who publicly stand against Far-Left Extremism” in our post-Kirk political environment. This would have the effect of elevating realignment Democrats over resistance Democrats, using state power to transform the party’s power base from without.
But as realignment gathers strength, some of the young people weaned on the Hitlerization of Trump may be willing to sacrifice their lives—or to take the lives of others—to keep the flame of resistance alive. This dynamic may be exacerbated, not mitigated, by the Democratic Party’s inevitable moderation of its rhetoric and policy positions. The “Days of Rage” were sparked not by Richard Nixon’s law-and-order politics, but rather, by the Democratic Party’s nomination of a pro-war critic of Black Power for president. Similarly, the 2020 Black Lives Matter “days of rage” redux could not hope to pressure Donald Trump, but certainly did pressure the Democrats.
As during the 1970s, today’s young radicals may find themselves not merely overeducated and institutionally marginalized, sociologically speaking, but also politically cut adrift by a party center that recognizes them for the electoral liability they have become. Every young radical must then face an existential question: Is the Democratic Party’s resistance wing worth killing and dying for?