(NewsNation) — What did we learn about America this week?

The country continues to mourn after the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old influencer, evangelist, debater, media personality and political organizer.

Charlie combined all of those roles into one, bringing a spiritual quality to his politicking, the glamour of media to his college debates, and his persona as a man who loved his family and loved his God to everything that he did.

He was a once-in-a-generation talent who pretty much singlehandedly was responsible for flipping the youth vote toward Trump.

In the last election, Trump won nearly half of voters under 30 years old in a 10-point shift to the right in just four years. Among young men, it was even starker: They shifted to Trump by 14 points.

It’s truly astonishing, and it explains a lot of the reaction not just to Charlie’s murder but to the entire Trump phenomenon. Throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, the Left felt locked out of power. Ronald Reagan won nearly every state in the nation in a repudiation of leftist politics.

But the Left still had the culture. They controlled the arts, universities, literature and the media. Hollywood was liberal, and in many ways, this was good. We made great strides as a nation on important issues like race relations and gay rights.

But a shift came with President Obama’s victory, a victory for the Left that gave them not just the cultural power of this country but its political power, too, and they got drunk on it. They convinced themselves that the days of competing with Republicans were over. They wrote books about the emerging Democratic majority. They allowed themselves to see the Right as the backward holdovers of a bygone era, preverbal neanderthals in a world now peopled by articulate Homo sapiens.

The Democrats seemed to believe that power was no longer something they had to fight for with good ideas. It was now their birthright.

And then came Trump.

In 2016, he wrested political power from them. They called him illegitimate. They impeached him twice. And two-thirds of Democrats convinced themselves that Vladimir Putin had messed with the voting machines on Election Day.

But then Trump committed an even worse crime. In 2024, the cultural power shifted right. In the blink of an eye, wearing a MAGA hat and doing the “YMCA” dance became cool. Believing in God became edgy. Being a committed father and husband became subversive.

While the Democrats, encumbered by all the institutions they controlled, including corporate America, became cringe and lame and fake and old.

And that happened, in large part, thanks to Charlie Kirk.

He was the nexus where the political and cultural forces met, shifting the nation to the right. And that shift has exponentially accelerated in the weeks since Charlie’s assassination, especially among the young.

Last Sunday, millions of Americans went to church to honor Charlie’s memory, many for the first time in years.

To me, this explains the hatred that Charlie inspired on the Left as it does the hatred of President Trump. Many Democrats don’t feel like they lost an election or their grip on the culture. They feel like they lost what was theirs in perpetuity.

And it’s ironic. They paint Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, but they are outraged that they still have to compete in one. Until they learn this lesson, they are going to keep losing elections.

I, like two young men who spoke to my colleague Elizabeth Vargas, did not agree with Charlie Kirk about everything. I opposed banning abortion, and my religion doesn’t hold that life begins at conception. I am a big fan of the Civil Rights Act, and I think Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

But Charlie Kirk still invited me on his show. He believed that if he wanted to change the culture and the political landscape, he owed the other side an explanation. If he disagreed with you and he wanted you to change your mind, he believed that it was his job to convince you.

And that, at the end of the day, is what it means to be an American, to have enough faith in our fellow Americans to choose persuasion over force.

That’s what we learned about America this week.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of NewsNation.