The Young, Violent Political Left

You have to be awfully smart to believe something this stupid. In a Manhattan Institute survey of Democratic voters, 46% said they believed it was definitely or probably true that "the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him."

That's a startlingly high number for a party whose members are increasingly drawn from the ranks of college graduates and those with graduate school degrees. And for a party whose articulate leaders are prone to dismissing Republican talking points as "conspiracy theories."

It's uncomfortably akin to the finding of CNN's Andrew Kaczynski, who reported, after an examination of 4,700 social media posts from Cole Allen, the accused White House Correspondents' Association dinner assailant, that "he shared a lot of posts claiming the Butler assassination attempt was staged." Allen, a registered Democrat and small Kamala Harris contributor, evidently shared the view of roughly half of his fellow partisans.

This third assassination attempt on Trump within the past two years is not the only example of violent assaults by leftist or progressive Democrats. There's the 2017 wounding of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) -- then the House majority whip -- by a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) aiming to kill Republicans practicing for a two-party congressional baseball game, the 2018 would-be assassin stalking the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the killing of Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk in September.

There's been violence directed at Democrats as well, some of it perhaps motivated by political disagreement. The arson of Gov. Josh Shapiro's (D-Pa.) official residence was motivated by anti-Israel grievances. Other attacks have been by apparently delusional assailants (the killing of Minnesota's state House speaker, the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) husband).

After Kirk's death, a YouGov survey found that 25% of those describing themselves as very liberal, and 17% of liberals, said that "political violence can sometimes be justified." Only 9% of self-described moderates and 6% of conservatives agreed.

Interestingly, higher education is not an effective antidote to this view. A Skeptic Research Center survey asking whether "violence is often necessary to create social change" found 40% of those with graduate or professional degrees in agreement, far above the 23% of those with a high school diploma or less.

It may be worth noting that graduate degree holders include not just physicians and lawyers but also teachers and social workers seeking the higher pay that advanced degree holders receive under public employee union contracts -- just the people taxpayers pay to teach and counsel the young and needy.

Among young people, there's something Tom Wolfe might have called assassination chic, focusing on 27-year-old Luigi Mangione. He's a graduate degree recipient from the University of Pennsylvania and is accused of shooting a health insurance CEO in Midtown Manhattan in December 2024.

According to Jake Altman, the author of Socialism Before Sanders, Democratic Party leaders in Michigan regularly wear pro-Mangione T-shirts. The New York Times hosted Hasan "America deserved 9/11" Piker to explain why Mangione's alleged act was "not so negative." And The New Yorker called the Manhattan CEO killing "an effective act of political consciousness-raising." Meanwhile, Times columnist Ezra Klein has explained why he would include Piker on his platform.

All of which provides support for the talk radio host Erick Erickson's conclusion: "The fundamental difference, again, between left-wing and right-wing violence is that right-wing violence is roundly and loudly condemned and, more and more often, left-wing violence is excused, justified or explained away by the American press corps and Democrats."

America is not yet at the stage reached by the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s or among Japan's military rulers in the 1930s, in which the assassination of politicians became almost routine, a means to remove talented individuals from power and to discourage opposing views from being voiced.

But when putatively respectable individuals and institutions on one side of the political spectrum give voice to approval of violence and murder, the Weimar experience comes into view. When one side's leaders' rhetoric constantly portrays the opposition leader as another Hitler, it's not surprising that some of its followers take it on themselves to kill him.

In his manifesto, the would-be Washington Hilton shooter said he was acting against "a pedophile, rapist and traitor." Those are charges made by many Democrats even though there is no evidence linking Trump with Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, even though Trump was found not guilty of rape by a New York jury, and even though special counsel Robert Mueller admitted there was no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia.

Electoral politics is inherently adversarial, and there are plenty of reasonable bases for opposing Trump. But it's disturbing when large segments of the population, especially the young and educated, find violence and murder unproblematic. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Better advice came from their elders. Trump said immediately after the attack: "I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts in resolving our differences peacefully. We have to resolve our differences." Sanders, writing the next day, added, "A functioning democracy relies on the premise that people can express their political views without fear of being attacked or assassinated. Political violence is political cowardice. It is unacceptable in all forms."

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.