The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a devastating blow to conservatives, but almost as shocking was the response from parts of the left. Major figures issued the expected denunciations, yet plenty of ordinary progressives celebrated the violent death of a father and husband or mocked his memory online. Conservatives learned that some of their neighbors were perfectly willing to cheer the murder of a political opponent.

Since then, trade wars, foreign wars, and the usual daily controversies have offered convenient distractions from a much darker realization: Something about American politics has changed. The old assumption that nearly everyone still accepts the same basic rules can no longer be taken for granted.

Conservatives did not choose existential politics by themselves, and they cannot end it simply by wishing for a return to normal.

Denial is a common response when a problem is too large to contemplate. The possibility that a substantial number of Americans now see political violence as acceptable has implications the conservative movement would rather avoid. Yet reminders keep appearing.

Recent videos again showed people mocking Kirk’s death, including a drag performance and comments from streamer and democratic socialist Hasan Piker. It is much easier to argue about tactics, personalities, or the latest outrage than to ask what kind of political order produces people willing to celebrate an assassination.

Piker’s case is especially egregious because he met Kirk and debated him in person. He has built a career around revolutionary rhetoric and violent political fantasies, including lurid comments about landlords and capitalists, and “soak[ing] in the blood” of his capitalist enemies. That he remains a major online personality illustrates the asymmetry conservatives have noticed for years: Rhetoric that would end a career on the right is often treated as edgy entertainment when it comes from the left.

America has received an almost embarrassing number of blessings from God Almighty, which makes it easy to forget that our political experience is historically unusual. The United States occupies a vast, resource-rich territory protected by oceans and has fought remarkably few wars on its own soil. We have not faced sustained internal danger in generations. That security has encouraged an ahistorical view of politics as a permanently orderly process.

Modern Americans expect Mr. Smith to go to Washington, make a speech, win an argument, and then shake hands with the opposition. Every election is called the most important of our lives, but the ritual remains the same because the underlying disputes are assumed to be manageable. If the argument is over marginal tax rates, retirement ages, or entitlement formulas, that expectation makes sense. Those are technocratic disagreements inside a shared political order.

But some disputes are not like that. Consider the fight over the euphemistic “gender affirming care” for minors. One side believes the state must protect children from genital mutilation. The other believes the state has a right to seize children if parents refuse to go along. There is no clever tax-credit compromise that resolves the underlying question. One side’s victory necessarily means the other side’s destruction. That is what existential politics looks like.

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This is why Carl Schmitt has re-entered conversations on the right. Certain conservatives often reduce his friend-enemy distinction to a license for treating anyone who disagrees with you as a mortal foe. That isn’t the useful part of Schmitt. His point is that politics becomes political in the fullest sense when groups understand that a conflict touches the survival of their way of life. His framework is gaining salience because Americans increasingly encounter disputes that feel exactly like that.

The left supports policies many conservatives believe would permanently transform the country: open borders, abortion on demand, racial preferences in hiring and admissions, aggressive secularization, and aggressive state intervention in disputes between parents and children over gender. Some activists openly discuss prosecuting former Trump officials, restructuring the Supreme Court, and changing the composition of the Senate through statehood. Antifa militants have attacked federal facilities and officers. None of this requires believing every Democrat is a revolutionary. It requires noticing that the revolutionary faction has real power.

Progressives understand something conservatives still resist: America increasingly contains rival moral communities sharing the same geographic space.

Mass immigration, ideological sorting, institutional polarization, and the radicalization of political factions have eroded the common assumptions that once made bipartisan compromise possible. Our deepest disagreements are no longer simply about the size of government or the proper tariff. They concern rival definitions of family, justice, citizenship, equality, religion, and even human nature.

This is not without precedent. Shays’ Rebellion was put down by force. The Civil War settled secession through force on a catastrophic scale. Federal troops enforced school integration in Little Rock when state resistance defied constitutional authority. These cases are radically different in scale and moral content, but they share one uncomfortable fact: Political orders eventually enforce some answers and reject others. Two incompatible legal regimes cannot govern the same question in the same place forever.

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We are far closer to Little Rock than to Gettysburg, and conservatives should resist fantasies of civil war. But they should also stop pretending every conflict can be reduced to a policy seminar. About a decade ago, people on the right began asking whether conservatives “know what time it is.” Most still do not. People like Piker serve as reminders that the other side may understand the stakes more clearly.

The left, in its current radical form, cannot be treated as just another coalition with which conservatives alternate power while everything important remains intact. Elections will decide who controls institutions capable of reshaping the country for generations. Someone will win these fights. Someone will lose. The victor will alter the political order.

Conservatives did not choose existential politics by themselves, and they cannot end it simply by wishing for a return to normal. Ignoring that reality only guarantees that their children inherit a country they no longer recognize. Conservatives are not required to become nihilists, but they are required to understand the stakes before deciding how to fight. The hour is already late.