When I was a boy, I remember being told not to point my finger in accusation, because that meant I had three other fingers pointed back at me. It seems many on the American Left have missed that fact. Despite President Joe Biden’s frequent jabbering that Right-wingers pose a “real and existential threat to American democracy,” once again, the Left’s accusations are hypocritical projections of their own thoughts and behaviour.
As Biden mumbled back in September 2022, “And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognise the will of the people.” Few political statements could be further from the truth.
The Right’s behaviour is sometimes extreme, and even unlawful, but their beliefs are typically traditional and conservative. Extreme behaviour does not equate to extreme political beliefs.
The attempted assassination of President Trump was the kind of extreme behaviour we have seen among radical American leftists. If the motives of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, are identified as Left, we will have to include him as another example of the Left’s ongoing culture of radicalism, which indeed consists of both radical beliefs and actions. I will give details of some of those earlier examples below. Among these zealots, neither has any clear limits.
The beliefs of the Left change and become more radical over time because they are based essentially on will. Note their shift from “equality” to “equity,” or their movement from “free speech” to banning “hate speech.” At root, the Left’s “democracy” is essentially a collection of changing, radical policy preferences pulled from a foreign ideology, nearly all of which are removed from the fixed legal and cultural history of America, which Trump represents. Their concept of “democracy” is simple and substantive only: destroy the West.
For example, so often the radical Left claims to advocate for the traditional understanding of democracy—rule by popular majority—but at the same time it has long supported the existence of the free-floating, politically-insulated bureaucracy, which by nature and design exercises independent legislative, executive, and judicial authority.
This fourth branch of government is known as the “administrative state” in America and perhaps elsewhere, and it sits outside of the tripartite, confederal system the peoples of the States established in 1788. The now-conservative Supreme Court recently struck down the Chevron doctrine, however, which had allowed those leftist-dominant bureaucracies to independently interpret ambiguous federal statutes in their own favour. The Left wept, because now their bureaucrats are less able to destroy ancient American rights and liberties to further their exotic, progressive goals.
The political actions of the radical Left similarly know no limits. Set aside the Antifa riots for now. The Left has manipulated every available legal mechanism under the sun in an attempt to stop Trump. But they failed. And now with this attempt on Trump’s life, at least one among them must have abandoned even remotely legal procedures to exert their will and achieve their goals.
Today we must ask, does the ideology of the radical Left consider the use of violence and weapons against government officials, who are acting wholly within the confines of the Constitution, as justified, legitimate means to reach political ends?
Their history suggests it. Looking back at the summer of 2017, just months after Trump took the White House and the Republicans had finally gained control of both houses of Congress, a socialist Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire with his SKS, a semi-automatic rifle, at a congressional baseball game in Virginia, wounding a Republican congressman and three others.
By 2022, the Democrats had regained the White House, but again, the Supreme Court had shifted to the Right under Trump. And so, a radical Leftist, distraught over the pro-life Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision—which had put the abortion question back into the hands of the people—attempted to murder conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The would-be assassin was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home with a pistol, a crowbar, pepper spray, zip ties, and padded boots. He was charged with attempted murder.
And third, of course, Crooks, who nearly scrambled the former President’s brain with a bullet on Saturday evening. Why? We have not yet seen evidence of his motives, but one could make a guess that he thought that Biden cannot win in November. If evidence shows the now-dead Crooks indeed fitted into the existing mould of anti-Right shooters, his justification would have been that legal and customary mechanisms again failed to provide for his substantive goals. He ignored principle and procedure to serve his will alone.
By contrast, even the radical Right imposes limits on its ideas and actions. “But what about January 6!” one may cry. That is the Left’s prime example of how the Right is supposedly the party of anti-democratic radicalism, and it is being used to bolster the claims that the assassination attempt was akin to the behaviour of the Right. This provides the Left with moral equivalency.
But January 6 was not characterized by radical beliefs. Rather, it was marked by (some) extreme and unlawful behaviour to support conservative ideas and principles. The only person shot was as rioter. The participants were not waving the hammer and sickle or calling for the destruction of Western institutions, laws, and morals. These were people who were convinced that the election had been stolen, that the Constitution had been violated, and they saw it as their duty to fight for the principles contained in that written, concrete, and permanent document, which itself is inherently traditional and conservative.
The point here is not to justify the riot, but rather simply to point out that the Right is not trying to destroy the Constitution, the rule of law, or the will of the people. That full-frontal, mind-and-body assault is wholly promulgated by radical Leftists whose ideas and behaviours are intended, simply, to destroy the West. And to reach that goal, the most dedicated among them clearly will use whatever mechanisms they can—whether ballots, or bullets.
Angus Kirk McClellan holds a Ph.D. in American government and public law from Claremont Graduate University in California. He is a former visiting professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and was a postdoctoral research associate with the James Madison Program at Princeton University in 2021.
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