What Is Causing Leftist Violence in America?

With the third assassination attempt of President Donald Trump, many Americans wonder why there is so much leftist political violence. In addition to Trump, other members of the Trump administration have also faced violent threats, and Charlie Kirk, a prominent Trump supporter, was assassinated last year. Even though the Right has its problems, the violence traces back to the ideological foundation of the Left, according to Tyler O’Neil at The Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explained it well when he contrasted the vision of Progressivism with the principles of the Declaration of Independence earlier this month.

“Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement –with the possible  exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War – to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration,” Thomas said. “Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”

Under Progressivism, “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”

Thomas noted that President Woodrow “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it form Otto von ‘Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired.

Progressives like Wilson argued that America need to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power.”

This arguable opened Pandora’s box. Totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, and China utilized state power to remake society, causing the deaths of millions. In the U.S., Wilson re-segregated the federal workforce and launched sterilization programs.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

Of course, the Left has rejected Wilson’s racist vision but preserved the overall worldview. The Marxist theory that capitalism constitutes a form of oppression expanded in the 1960s to a social vision, in which the “oppressed” classes – racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, women, and others – must rise up and overthrow the current system.

The Left has weaponized a culture of grievance to paint its opponents as oppressors. The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] – which just made news last week because the Justice Department accused it of lying to donors by secretly funding members of the KKK – maintains a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters. This map demonizes conservatives as agents of “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Such a claim only makes sense if you follow critical race theory, which starts with the assumption that America is systemically racist and urges people to deconstruct our colorblind laws to find a hidden “white supremacy.”

This demonization is bad enough, but the Left also maintains that it is the government’s job to achieve near-perfect, effectively bringing the kingdom of God to earth. That’s why they misquote Martin Luther King Jr. on the ‘arc of the moral universe.”

King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this statement in his faith in God, citing Isaiah 40.

Today, however, leftists say they need to “bend the arc.” President Joe Biden said his party had “a giant opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

President Barack Obama praised civil rights marchers as people who did “their part” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently said that Americans have a “responsibility to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

That’s not what King meant, however. King meant that, because God is the ultimate author of morality and the universe, his justice will ultimately prevail.

It is vain hubris to believe that we ourselves can alter the moral structure of the universe. That’s the grandiose language of a tyrant who considers himself “king of the universe,” unbound by “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

If you legitimately believe that the morality of the universe is up to you, and you legitimately believe that your political opponents are hateful on the level of the KKK, is it any wonder you might take the law into your own hands?