MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Who Will Stop America’s Slide Into the Abyss?

To the ghouls celebrating online, Kirk and his supporters represented something else entirely: fascism, Nazism, Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. How does one succumb to such delusion? Whatever the mix of ideology, grievance, envy, contempt, or pure nihilism, the hatred is spreading. Every year brings forth downwardly mobile graduates with debt, no prospects, a sense of entitlement, and mounds of resentment. Combine radical individualism with a culture without restraint, and you have the social equivalent of a Molotov cocktail.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last weekend, author Cynthia Ozick said, “This is a good country. It’s a great country. And now, it’s disintegrating.” That is why Kirk’s death feels like a watershed. It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology. Weak institutions, corrupted data, rampant distrust, political enmity, and an apparent inability to control criminality and the dangerously mentally ill tear us apart like a centrifugal force.

Exit question: “Is there a way back?”