Civil Discourse in Fractured Times

When I heard about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, my first thought wasn’t about politics. It was about direction. Where are we heading as a country if violence becomes a substitute for dialogue? However deep our disagreements run, this is not the road I want us to travel.

I’ve spent the past few years engaging in political conversations on Facebook. People sometimes accuse me of arguing for the sake of arguing. That’s not what I’m doing. I have a deliberate approach. If someone offers only insults, I ignore it. But if they spell out a premise, I will engage. Not because I expect to change their mind, but because debate is never really about the person in front of you, it’s about everyone else who’s listening.

My intention has never been to convince the one I’m debating. My goal is to reach the reasonable observer. The person who isn’t steeped in talking points, who might be uneducated about the subject, who might still be open. That’s why it matters to keep discourse civil, to stick with reason, and to avoid the traps of insult or exaggeration. Because somewhere in the crowd, there’s someone watching closely, trying to sort out what makes sense.

I’ll admit I don’t always succeed. I get frustrated at times, and I’ve made flip comments I later regretted. But those are the exception, not the rule. The larger aim has always been to show that disagreement doesn’t have to collapse into hostility.

Violence ends dialogue. And in a strange way, so does the brand of “debate” Charlie Kirk became known for. His campus events and Q&A sessions were riddled with logical fallacies: straw men, false dilemmas, slippery slopes. These aren’t the tools of debate. They are tactics of performance, meant not to engage but to win applause from the already convinced. That erodes the very possibility of discourse just as surely, if more quietly, as violence does.

Civil discourse takes more than good intentions. It requires discipline. Discipline to pause before answering, to resist the urge for an emotional response that’s unhinged or defensive. Discipline to do the work of research, so your words rest on more than instinct or half-heard headlines.

It also requires an open mind. First to hear a new idea, and then to test whether it has weight. But the hardest part may be turning that openness inward: realizing that your own idea might not hold up, and being willing to let it go. That isn’t weakness. That’s maturity.

And it doesn’t stop at the personal level. Sometimes we must recognize that certain ideas don’t hold up for society either, no matter how entrenched they’ve become in our politics, traditions, or institutions. Letting go of what doesn’t work, whether in our own minds or in the collective, creates the space for something better to take root.

Online, this is even more difficult. The pace is fast. The tone is often hostile. And yet, if we can model patience, clarity, and respect in that environment, we create a small pocket of sanity in a space designed for outrage. In person, it looks like listening long enough to understand before you answer. Online, it looks like slowing down enough to type something that invites thought rather than shutting it down.

Civil discourse is not about point-scoring. It’s not about humiliating the other side. It’s about a willingness to hear, to test ideas honestly, and to admit when your own position may need refinement. If we lose that, what remains but the worst alternatives: silence, tribalism, or, in the end, violence.

What kind of country do we want to live in? One where disagreement makes us enemies, or one where disagreement sharpens us without breaking us?