Leftists have a love affair with political violence.
It is in the DNA of the movement, which began during the French Revolution. Obviously, modern leftism is not the first political movement to USE violence–at some level, force and politics are intimately tied together, although stable regimes try to reserve the use of violence as much as possible. But in the end, laws are backed by the use of force, as are borders.
What makes the modern Left special in this regard is its totalitarian nature. Unlike most political movements, the Left is not just about gaining or seizing power; at its root is a belief that human nature itself is malleable and that the perfect society can be created if only we reshape the human beings within it.
The term “left” to denote a certain style of politics came from the seating arrangements in the French Parliament during the Revolution. The radicals gravitated to the left side of the room, and the moderates and conservatives to the right. As the left gained power and eventually seized control, they proceeded to reshape society through violence fundamentally–the Terror–and they eventually began a world war, which catapulted Napoleon to prominence. The goal of that war was to remake Europe, and much of the world, in the image of the French Revolution.
We all know how that turned out.
Ever since, what has characterized the left is a love of revolution–not just seizing power, but creating what the communists called the “New Socialist Man.” You saw it in the revolutions of the 19th century, World War I was sparked by a utopian anarchist, totalitarian desires drove the Soviet Union’s baleful history, as well as the sorry history of 20th-century China, which to this day is trying to reshape people with a social credit system.
It is in this context that you should see the not-so “New Left” in the United States. It is why a prominent leftist magazine is named “Jacobin,” after the radicals in France during the revolution, and why The Nation is promoting violence. It is why Luigi Mangione is a hero to many, and why “decolonization” is the goal of the rioters we have endured for the past several years now.
In case anybody wants to put whether the publishers of The Nation are interested in putting their money where their mouth is on this here’s the address of their headquarters pic.twitter.com/P4n5HeK3X2
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) June 11, 2025
The basic idea behind leftism is that any deviation from their ideal of what people should be and how they should live is “violence,” and hence, violence from revolutionaries is self-defense. That is why Luigi Mangione can be a hero, and why rioters who are trying to kill police officers are as well.
Police are the enforcers of the illegitimate regime, and hence enemies of the people. Defund the police is based on that idea, and never was a metaphor.
Now, being a left-leaning “mainstream” magazine organized as a nonprofit, The Nation cannot argue “go out and kill people,” and as far as I know, they would piously argue that they condemn violence, but not the cause. That is a dodge, as is the claim that attacking property is somehow benign.
he nationwide uprising against racist policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is stunning, not least for the amount of property destruction it has entailed. Responses to the vandalism and theft have varied, ranging from condemnations of violence amid peaceful protests, warnings of anarchist agitators, and an emphasis on criminal opportunism amid the chaos. But the mainstream media reaction has been surprisingly tempered in comparison to coverage of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. A story in USA Today suggested that while “people need not condone the riots…they ought to understand them.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has used the word “riot” in a headline.
While editorials call for peace, love, and the maintenance of order, there has, thus far, been minimal liberal pearl-clutching. There seems to be an understanding that too many lines have been crossed, too many innocent people murdered, too many communities over-policed and otherwise neglected to expect anyone to react “reasonably.” It is a testament to the real power of actual mass movements that the media establishment has felt compelled to cover illegal, expensive, and destructive protests with such care.
But what if property destruction is more than an understandable lapse of judgment and loss of control? What if it is not a frustrated, emotional reaction but a reasonable and articulate expression in itself? The destruction is too widespread to attribute it to a few bad actors, and in some cases—such as the attacks on the CNN headquarter and the widespread vandalism of Confederate monuments—too precise and symbolically potent to be attributed solely to an opportunistic “criminal” element. The fantasy of outside agitators—a perennial feature of politicians’ responses to radical political action—is a means of presenting the real threat posed by mass actions as something foreign to the action itself.
There are a number of reasons the destruction of property should be taken seriously rather than treated as an unfortunate externality or the expression of regrettably unchecked passions.
It is ridiculous to claim that destroying property–and let’s be clear, the rioters are doing much more than that–is anything other than violence. Any time somebody commits a felony, there is at least an implicitly violent act taking place, since felonious acts break the peace to such an extent that state violence is authorized by law.
If somebody takes your wallet under threat of violence, you could argue that the act was not violent–your money is only property, after all–but the reality is that there is an inherent violence in the act. It is why robbery and homicide are often in the same category in police investigations. It is why, in rational states at least, you can shoot home intruders. The social contract is broken so severely that society and the criminal are effectively at war.
This law is serious–if you break it, you have forfeited society’s protection. Locke explained this very well, and our polity is primarily based on Lockean principles.
There are a number of reasons the destruction of property should be taken seriously rather than treated as an unfortunate externality or the expression of regrettably unchecked passions. To begin with, pathologizing the act is tantamount to pathologizing the actor: Given the racial dimension of these protests, even apparently sympathetic explanations of theft and destruction risk of implying that people of color are reacting from feelings rather than carrying out reasoned, calculated acts with their own perfectly legitimate political logics. Attacking police stations, for example, makes rational sense. It is not the sudden, spontaneous expression of a disordered and irrational mob but the clear enactment of a political position, the fulfillment in some small but concrete way of the central demand being made by protesters across the country: Police need to be defunded, and some police stations need to disappear.
This moment calls for the left to define violence and nonviolence for itself—to decide what nonviolence means in the face of overwhelming state brutality and structural economic and racial injustice. Failure to do so results in a confusion of terms that has serious ethical and political consequences: Property destruction is not synonymous with the violence that is being protested. The notion that protesters are mistakenly employing violence and thus counterproductively adding to some imagined social sum total of violence is flawed. There is no such thing as undifferentiated net violence whose curve must be flattened.
People are not objects; broken windows and burnt cars are simply not commensurate with the violence of state-sanctioned murder or the structural violence of poverty that has placed people of color at a disproportionate risk of dying of Covid-19. Plateglass windows don’t bleed. They don’t die and leave loved ones grieving. They don’t contribute to the collective trauma and terror experienced by their communities. They just break, and then, at some point, they are replaced by identical sheets of glass.
The Left considers itself to be at war with society at a fundamental level. This is what distinguishes them from liberals, whom I keep insisting should be distinguished from leftists. Wanting to reform society to make it “better” through what I consider misguided policies is not declaring war on civilization–it is a disagreement about policies.
What is incredible—and incredibly revealing—about a wave of protests marked by widespread property destruction is the total impossibility of making capitalism sympathetic. Verizon, Apple, Nike, Macy’s, and the like cannot be reasonably presented as a social good. Many people may have implicitly understood this before these storefronts were smashed up and emptied. But now it is explicit: As corporate behemoths have attempted to assume the role of the victim, a broader segment of the political spectrum than one might have thought possible has had to confront the fact that they don’t really care what happens to a chain store.
Small-business owners are a different and more complicated matter. The image of the “mom and pop” shop conflates property and people—effectively presenting the destruction of property as a direct attack on an individual. Certainly there is a meaningful difference between a neighborhood grocer and a Whole Foods, but the figure of the small business is also one means by which a capitalist ruling class launders itself. This is not to say that small-business owners are not sympathetic and worthy of protection, only that we should be wary of how they are instrumentalized in the service of protecting a wealthy minority.
Liberals’ sin is being blind–often intentionally–to the inherent impulse to violence on the part of the left, with whom they believe they share values, but not tactics. They are fundamentally mistaken, which is why fellow travelers are always the first up against the wall after a revolution succeeds. Useful idiots, not evil people.
Leftists have bewitched liberals, spinning yarns about peace, love, and understanding in a way that enraptures many liberals. It is infuriating that they continue to buy into the con like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, but like Charlie Brown, they are not bad people. You can even sympathize with them to a certain extent.
But even if we do, we can’t shrink from the fact that the Left is, forever and always, at war with us. Their goal is to destroy everything that exists and replace it with their version of utopia. In France, that meant rejecting everything and everyone associated with the past–they even redefined time itself, if you can believe it, and made everyone remake their calendars to make 1789 the first year of a new millennium–history reborn. The Khmer Rouge did the same in Cambodia, declaring all past history destroyed.
The destruction of the past and remaking of the future is the essential goal of leftism. They are at war with all that exists today. Our task is to recognize that and fight back, defending civilization.
