The Ideological Roots of Leftist Political Violence

What’s behind the alarming spike in leftist political violence?

In the past two years, President Donald Trump has faced three assassination attempts, with the most recent one arguably coming Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Members of his administration have also faced violent threats. Last year saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, and some on the Left have celebrated the assassination of a health care CEO, Brian Thompson.

Just last week, leftist podcaster Hasan Piker suggested in a New York Times interview that Thompson deserved to die because he “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” Piker argued that “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care” justified the assassination.

Also last year, Virginia elected Jay Jones as attorney general, despite the fact that he previously sent messages fantasizing about shooting Republican former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates Todd Gilbert. Jones stated at the time that he wished Gilbert’s young children would die in their mother’s arms, and he justified this death wish by saying, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Jones later apologized for the texts after they were made public during his campaign for Virginia attorney general.

Meanwhile, Democrats largely looked the other way while riots in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement took over city streets in the summer of 2020, claiming the lives of at least 27. Many of them demonized Supreme Court justices who had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, even as pro-abortion activists stalked these justices and tried to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.

The Right is far from perfect, but this torrent of political violence isn’t an accident. It arguably traces back to the Left’s ideological foundation.

Progressivism and Political Violence

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explained it well when he contrasted the vision of Progressivism with the principles of the Declaration of Independence earlier this month.

“Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration,” Thomas said. “Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”

Under Progressivism, “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”

Thomas noted that President Woodrow “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America need to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power.”

This arguably opened Pandora’s box. Totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, and China utilized state power to remake society, causing the deaths of millions. In the U.S., Wilson re-segregated the federal workforce and launched sterilization programs.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

Of course, the Left has rejected Wilson’s racist vision, but preserved the overall worldview. The Marxist theory that capitalism constitutes a form of oppression expanded in the 1960s to a social vision, in which the “oppressed” classes—racial minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and others—must rise up and overthrow the current system.

The Left has weaponized a culture of grievance to paint its opponents as oppressors. The Southern Poverty Law Center—which just made news last week because the Justice Department accused it of lying to donors by secretly funding members of the KKK—maintains a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters. This map demonizes conservatives as agents of “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Such a claim only makes sense if you follow critical race theory, which starts with the assumption that America is systemically racist and urges people to deconstruct our colorblind laws to find a hidden “white supremacy.”

This demonization is bad enough, but the Left also maintains that it is the government’s job to achieve near-perfect justice, effectively bringing the kingdom of God to earth. That’s why they misquote Martin Luther King Jr. on the “arc of the moral universe.”

King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this statement in his faith in God, citing Isaiah 40.

Today, however, leftists say they need to “bend the arc.” President Joe Biden said his party had “a giant opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

President Barack Obama praised civil rights marchers as people who did “their part” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently said that Americans have a “responsibility” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

That’s not what King meant, however. King meant that, because God is the ultimate author of morality and the universe, his justice will ultimately prevail.

It is vain hubris to believe that we ourselves can alter the moral structure of the universe. That’s the grandiose language of a tyrant who considers himself “king of the universe,” unbound by “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

If you legitimately believe that the morality of the universe is up to you, and you legitimately believe that your political opponents are hateful on the level of the KKK, is it any wonder you might take the law into your own hands?