In an impassioned speech on Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, Vice President JD Vance argued that the American left has a much stronger propensity than the right to justify or celebrate political violence.
Like most people with an internet connection, I have seen many more people than I would like justifying assassination in the last few days. If you argue about politics for a living, and especially if you regularly stand up to make conservative arguments in public spaces, it is very hard not to take this extremely personally, to feel that a veil has been lifted and something generally threatening has been exposed.
At the same time, I would not exactly agree with the vice president’s framing. The polling he cites, showing that liberals are more likely than conservatives to justify taking joy in the death of an opponent, may capture something real (more on that below), but polling is sensitive to question-framing and to political fluctuations, and you don’t have to hunt far to find polls from the Biden era showing greater Republican sympathy for violence.
If I were going to generalize aggressively, I would suggest that the American left is more likely to support and make excuses for the kind of protest politics that can lead to rioting and a breakdown of civil order, and more likely to support deplatforming efforts that depend for their effectiveness on the fear that a speaker might end up assaulted. (This is, again, a generalization; I acknowledge that the right can riot and de-platform as well.)
But when it comes to politically motivated murder, extreme-right and neo-Nazi shooters are all too commonplace. And as I have argued many times before, a great many recent assassins and mass shooters don’t fit neatly into normal partisan categories, and our age of anxiety is creating monsters that defy ideological description.
Based on what we know so far, however, it looks as though Kirk’s assassin probably does have legible, left-wing motivations. And if those motivations aren’t proof of where the left stands right now, they still might offer a warning about where its radical fringe could go.
Even if many assassins aren’t normal political actors, there are periods in American life when a wave of violence is linked to a specific ideological disposition. We saw this happen on the left within living memory — in the 1970s, when acts of far-left terrorism became an everyday feature of American life. (If you doubt that description, the book to read is Bryan Burrough’s 2015 history, “Days of Rage.”)
Looking back on that era, left-wing radicalization seemed to follow from dashed utopian expectations — the peak of Great Society liberalism giving way to crisis and backlash, the belief that the New Left could renew and rule America yielding to the reality that Richard Nixon’s voters really were the silent majority. From this realization came a surfeit of apocalyptic thinking, radicalism flavored by despair, all of it worsened by the era’s social chaos and drug culture.
Our moment is different, but there are echoes of the 1960s and 1970s in the recent experience of American progressivism. A belief in a nearly inevitable leftward arc of history, a guaranteed multiracial Democratic majority, giving way to the repeated shocks of the populist era. A period of extraordinary cultural influence, of revolutionary zeal joined to institutional power, that peaked in 2020 and 2021 and has been dissolving ever since. An insistence that the election of 2024 had existential stakes, that democracy itself was on the ballot, followed by resounding defeat. A backdrop of apocalyptic fears, fear of climate change above all, amid a technological transformation that has left many young people unmoored from family and friendship.
As a longtime of observer of progressivism from the near outside, I have never seen it quite so anxious and adrift — so fearful of the future, so uncertain about its own goals, so existentially anxious and bunkered down. To the extent that polls showing a greater left-wing willingness to take joy in an opponent’s death ring true, it’s as especially toxic manifestations of this bunker mentality; they fit with the surveys showing that progressives are more likely to cut off friends and family over political differences.
And they also dovetail with the data showing greater depression and anxiety among young liberals and falling progressive birthrates relative to conservatives. It’s all part of the same darkening trajectory.
I have been writing about these trends lately because I think they are bad in and of themselves, and progressives (and not only progressives!) should be concerned about them independently of whether they lead to radicalism and violence.
But despair feeding further violence seems like a real possibility, a plausible escalation from where we are right now. And if so, progressives themselves need a pre-emptive response. Here I don’t have in mind just the (welcome) statements from prominent Democrats condemning Kirk’s assassination. I mean something more in the realm of moral and philosophical imagination, something that addresses the hard questions hanging over the left in 2025.
How do you love your country when it’s governed by a man you hate? Can love and friendship coexist with profound political divisions? What makes life worth living if the course of history isn’t what you thought? If everything feels like power relations, and power has slipped from your fingers, where can you find the good, the beautiful, the true? What makes humanity a blessing on the world rather than a blight?
Even if we aren’t headed back to the 1970s, even if Kirk’s assassination isn’t a harbinger, in answering these questions progressivism will find something essential: a reason for hope, and a cure for its despair.
Breviary
Tanner Greer on Charlie Kirk’s place on the right.
Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker on radicalization spirals.
Josh Barro on the Democrats’ John Oliver problem.
Noah Smith on progressivism’s Bluesky problem.
Mike Jay on the lure of the shaman.
Adam Smith on Paul Kingsnorth’s struggle with “the machine.”
Sonny Bunch on Robert Redford (R.I.P.).
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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