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The assassination of Charlie Kirk was yet another example of the sickening plague of violence in American politics. And it has been condemned on the left as well as the right. However, MAGA immediately proclaimed that “the left” was celebrating his murder. The immediacy of that fabrication, before the killer was even identified, was clearly part of a campaign to exploit Kirk’s death for political gain.
While we should vigorously condemn Kirk’s murder, we also shouldn’t bowdlerize his record, pretending that he wasn’t who he really was. For example, he certainly wasn’t a free speech advocate. Go read Jamelle Bouie:
Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.
The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.
Nor was Kirk willing to agree to any restrictions on guns in order to protect lives.
What I want to focus on here, however, are Kirk’s views on gender and society, because I think much of his widespread appeal was based on those views.
Kirk was a counterrevolutionary, a revanchist, who deftly exploited a vision of a lost American gender ideal and the accompanying feelings of dislocation and humiliation on the part of men. Specifically, he wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin (winner of the Nobel in Economics in 2023) has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
It's important to understand that this revolution in American gender roles took place more than thirty years ago -- before many of Kirk’s followers were born. In essence, Kirk rejected contemporary American society, harkening back to a form of social relations most modern Americans have never seen – particularly the young men (and sometimes young women) that he sermonized to on college campuses. This extreme position clearly resonated with an undercurrent of resentment among these young men. I’ll discuss the reasons for that resentment in a later post. For today, I want to talk about what, specifically, Kirk was rejecting.
Despite what you may think, Goldin’s “quiet revolution” didn’t refer to the phenomenon of increasing numbers of women in the paid labor force. In fact, that trend began in the 1940s, and had mostly culminated by the late 1970s. The chart below shows the share of jobs in America held by women, which is close to 50 percent now but was already substantial by the early 1970s:
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Source: SHRM
Instead, Goldin’s “quiet revolution” referred to a radical change in the nature of the kinds of jobs that American women held. While many women held paid jobs by the early 1970s, young women still tended to see work outside the home as occasional and provisional, as a way to earn modest amounts of money rather than as a fundamental part of their identity. The revolution, according to Goldin, happened when young women began to think about jobs in the same way young men always had — that it wasn’t simply “work” but a career.
To illustrate her point, Goldin offered one particularly striking chart based on surveys of college freshmen. In the chart below, the value on the left axis is the difference between the percentage of men saying that each aspect of success was “essential” or “very important” and the percentage of women saying the same. In the 1960s, men and women had very different ideas about what made for a good life. By 1990 most of those differences had vanished:
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Source: Claudia Goldin
This radical change in women’s career perceptions had huge effects on how women lived their lives. This, of course, had large ramifications for men too. More women now went to college. But even more important, more women finished their degrees with the intention of using what they had learned to build a career. The old joke about a woman going to college to get an MRS rather than a BA lost its sting. Women also delayed marriage because they wanted to get a good start on their careers before taking time out. In the 1960s the median female college graduate married at the age of 22; by 1990 that age had risen to about 26.
What accounts for this phenomenon? Goldin suggests several factors, such as access to contraception and anti-discrimination laws in addition to a multiplier effect — the larger the fraction of women delaying marriage, the easier it was for others to make the same choice without facing social opprobrium or feeling that they had missed their chance. Furthermore, rising divorce rates led many women to doubt whether marriage was a safe haven that obviated the need for an independent career.
In essence, Charlie Kirk argued that Goldin’s quiet revolution was all a mistake and should be reversed: “Having children is more important than having a good career … I would also tell young ladies, you can always go back to your career later, that there is a window where you primarily should pursue marriage and having children.”
This was a value judgment rather than a statement of fact. As any woman can tell you, “you can always go back to your career later” is simply false if it’s meant to imply that you can enter the work force later in life and have anything like the career you could have had without that delay.
What we can say, however, is that Kirk was calling on America to stop being the society it is and go back to being the kind of society it hasn’t been for generations. Or, rather, he wanted us to enact his fantasy about what our society once was like. If you imagine that America before the quiet revolution was a nation in which all marriages were happy and all stay-at-home wives were contented, you should read Betty Friedan — or the novels of John Updike.
Notably, Kirk’s revanchism was never accompanied by any substantive descriptions of policies to create the social change he wanted. Were there any proposals to make it less costly to have children? To provide subsidized daycare, medical care, parental leave? No, I suspect because although such policies would make having children easier, it would also make women with children less dependent upon men.
But while Kirk wasn’t offering anything you could call a serious policy program, his arguments did, as I said, resonate with many young white men — men who resent their status in modern America and believe that their lives would be better if we returned to an older social order.
I’ll talk in another post about where that resentment comes from. But let me admit that we have created a society that appears to be problematic for many men. You can even see the problems in basic employment statistics. The chart below shows the percentage of men in their prime working years who are not, in fact, in the labor force. This percentage was negligible in 1960, but is substantial now:
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I think it’s safe to assume that this rising percentage of men without jobs mainly reflects social distress, not large numbers of men choosing to be house-husbands. And it’s probably inevitable that some men will blame their frustrations on the rise of career-oriented women.
That’s not the real story. I’ll talk about what happened in a future post. But for now, the important thing to say is that the horror of Charlie Kirk’s murder shouldn’t prevent us from admitting that his influence was largely built on catering to male resentment.
MUSICAL CODA
