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In the 20th century, the aggressive actions of a handful of tyrants led to the deaths of around 100 million people. They were the aggressors in multiple wars, killing people all over the world. They imprisoned, starved, tortured, and/or killed millions of their own citizens. They destroyed cities and societies. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Castro, Lenin – the violence and death they unleashed are difficult to fathom.
In the 1960s and 1970s, organizations like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army bombed buildings, hijacked planes, killed police officers, and called for violent revolution against the United States. These organizations were well funded and well organized, and they considered their violence to be a virtuous response to an unjust world.
The 1980s and subsequent years led to the rise of urban gangs in black neighborhoods. Previously poor but safe neighborhoods turned into war zones, with skyrocketing rates of drug dealing, murder, rape, and so on. Residents are still afraid to leave their homes in such neighborhoods.
More recently we had the Black Lives Matter riots, which burned cities across the country for months. BLM was well funded and well organized, controlling and ultimately destroying neighborhoods across the United States.
The recent murders of insurance executive Brian Thompson, the schoolchildren at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Charlie Kirk, and others brings our attention to a new category of killers: young white men from stable, loving, middle-class American families who apparently become emotionally fragile and politically radicalized by social media, recently developed sexual perversions like trans-sexualism or furries, video games, and 21st century nihilism.
Those five subgroups have something in common – they tend to be violent, unpredictable, and dangerous.
What else do they have in common? Seemingly nothing. What does Mussolini have in common with BLM’s leader Patrice Cullors? What does Luigi Mangioni have in common with a drug dealer in a Chicago street gang? It’s difficult to see parallels.
Except for one obvious shared trait: All of them are leftists. All of them would vote Democrat. All would strongly disagree with conservative ideology and the Republican Party.
One might think that a typical Democrat voter might be concerned that most of the most dangerous and violent men of the last 150 years have been fellow leftists.
But it also makes me wonder: What exactly is it about leftism that tends to lead to violence?
I have a few ideas, but I’d love to hear yours first. What do you think?
Discussion (124)
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Two problems: 1., correlation is not causation, and 2., what we call today's "left" is not a traditional leftist political ideology.
My explanation would be simple economics: The party values energy, enthusiasm, involvement, exuberance. Anger does that, and violence is a side effect of anger. You can get angry people to do things that calm people wouldn't ever imagine doing.
Anger is also an effective propaganda tool. How many times do you see a commentator on MSNBC or CNN screaming mad about something? The viewer might not now what the issues are, might not know what the position to take, good or bad, but the message is that this person in an important position sure is mad about something so it must be serious.
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Self-righteousness.
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True, obviously. But with such a consistent trend, one wonders whether there may be a connection.
.
That's my point. They have nothing in common. And I really have no idea what today's Democrat party would consider to be it's over-riding philosophy.
But yet all those very different people are all Democrats (or would be, if they were alive today).
I find that interesting.
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Leftists are generally collectivists - the collective is more important than the individual; the individual must submit to the collective.
Individuals do not always willingly submit to the collective.
Violence is required to force individuals to submit to the collective. "Force" is not always direct. It includes creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that encourages compliance.
Therefore violence is primarily a tool of the left.
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I'll suggest economics again, and that the over-riding philosophy of the Democrat Party is "Governments have an infinite supply of money, so our job is to come up with excuses to spend as much as possible while pocketing a percentage."
This would be very consistent with what we observe.
It also addresses the correlation/causation issue. Perhaps violent leftist movements in the past, regardless of what they claimed, were really, at some level, about pilfering the treasury.
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