Leftists are violent. Is that any surprise?

There has long been a simmering threat of political violence lurking around the edges of American politics, occasionally rearing its ugly head.

President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre just days after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Less than 40 years later, President William McKinley was shot by an anarchist. In 1935, U.S. Senator and former Governor of Louisiana Huey Long was murdered in the State Capitol Building that he himself built. Infamously, both President John F. Kennedy and his brother, then-senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated in the 1960s.

More recently, however, the skulking shadow of political violence seems to have darkened and broadened. The summer of 2020 saw violent rioters burn down cities across the nation, two assassins attempted to murder President Donald Trump last year, Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed at their home in June, riots in major American metropolitan cities have targeted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents with violence, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, and a gunman opened fire on an ICE detention facility.

While not all of these attacks, assassinations, and acts of violence and terror over the last two centuries have been committed by leftists, almost all of the acts of political violence committed over the last decade, and particularly over the last five years, have been. It is becoming increasingly common to discover that mass shooters at schools or churches identify as transgender. When a bullet grazed the side of Trump’s head at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, it was practically impossible to theorize that the shooter was perhaps disappointed that the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president wasn’t far right enough. When Kirk was shot in the throat at a TPUSA event on a college campus, it was little surprise to find leftist slogans engraved on the bullets that ended the 31-year-old’s life.

There are two chief reasons that the Left so often resorts to political violence to achieve its goals. The first is largely political: leftism is revolutionary by nature. Both leftism and conservatism can be traced as distinct political entities to the French Revolution, when the social order, which had long reigned over the Christian world, was shattered (although both leftism and conservatism are rooted in philosophies and ideologies far older and more ancient). The violent spirit of the French Revolution (as many as 40,000 were executed by guillotine or firing squad and conflict and mass killings in places like the Vendée region yielded as many as 250,000 deaths, with some historians counting the Vendée killings as the first example of modern genocide) continued onwards, particularly in the 20th century.

The Mexican Revolution overthrew military General and President Porfirio Díaz but resulted in as many as two million deaths from 1910 to 1920. The Russian Revolution, led by the communist Bolsheviks, famously slaughtered the Romanov family and killed millions of Russians, ultimately creating the brutally repressive Soviet Union. Inspired by the Bolsheviks, the German Revolution of 1918 claimed thousands of lives and established the degenerate, decadent Weimar Republic. The Chinese Communist Revolution led by Mao Zedong established the communist People’s Republic of China at the cost of at least 10 million lives. As many as one million died in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939, amidst the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, which saw communist forces torture Catholic priests to death, rape nuns, and exhume and defile the corpses of Spanish priests and bishops. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara led the communist Cuban Revolution, killing as many as 20,000. Likewise, the Vietnam, Nicaraguan, and Ethiopian Revolutions claimed hundreds of thousands of lives collectively.

Such violence would garner horror, not mass support, in 20th-century America, so leftists set about developing and employing equally revolutionary but significantly less violent tactics. One of the most prominent and influential of those leftists was the Chicago-based “community organizer” Saul Alinsky. Although Alinsky did not explicitly endorse the use of violent tactics, he did advocate for setting the stage for violence in his notorious book Rules for Radicals. Two key elements for effecting change, according to Alinsky’s instruction, were the uniting of disparate groups against a “common enemy” and the use of “direct action” to generate conflict.

What was to prevent Alinsky’s conflict-oriented tactics from devolving into their natural end, violence? Frankly, nothing. Alinsky himself had some success with his community organizing and subsequently influenced future generations of progressives, including influential figures like former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Alinsky was able to achieve his goals without resorting to violence, but one must wonder what lengths he would have gone to if greater resistance had been put up, if his objectives hadn’t been so easy to obtain, if violence were the only means left to him to get his way. Alinsky was also dealing with a different America and a different American leftist than currently exist.

“Rules for Radicals” was published in 1971, two years before the Supreme Court would erroneously institute federal protections for abortion with Roe v. Wade and narrow the legal definition of “obscenity” with Miller v. California, subsequently allowing on a national scale both the slaughter of unborn children and the rapid spread of pornography. Nevertheless, Alinsky may have anticipated the future of leftism. Emphasizing the revolutionary nature of leftism, he dedicated “Rules for Radicals” to Satan:

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Here, Alinsky anticipated (whether wittingly or not) the second reason that leftists so often resort to violence, a spiritual reason: the desire to replace God. Now, this is not to say that leftists wish to be like God or try to live their lives in accordance with His will. God created the world and ordered creation, making man and woman in His image. Leftists seek to order creation according to their own wills, and to remake themselves in their own image, to blot God out of the situation entirely. This is why such evils as abortion, pornography, and “social justice” are championed by the Left: it is an effort to order creation according to their own wills and redefine morality.

This is also why it comes as little surprise that leftists are the chief progenitors of political violence today. Why should they balk at the murder of a Christian husband and father when they have spent the last 50 years praising as an inherent good the ruthless butchering of their own children in the womb? Why should they pity the slain man’s children when they have taken countless children to surgical theaters to amputate genitalia and fashion Frankenstein’s monster sex organs for them? Why should they agree to a civil conversation with an adversary when they proclaim that words are violence? (The thing is, they believe it. When they react to words and debate with violence, it is because they have been blinded to any difference between an opponent’s words and their own acts of violence.)

While the rejection of God and the desire to usurp His celestial throne has been around in one form or another since the Serpent first slithered into the Garden of Eden, leftism properly understood finds its origins in the bloody horrors of the French Revolution, repeated time and time again over the course of the last two-and-a-half centuries of world history. Leftism was born in blood, its language is blood, its law is blood. The political violence currently shaking the nation to its foundation is not a novelty, but a practice rooted deeply in leftism’s history and, indeed, the natural end of the leftist agenda.

Originally published at The Washington Stand