In Brief: Attempted Assassination Is the Logical Result of Marxism
The Left’s cherished “oppressor vs. oppressed” narrative justifies even a violent response to Donald Trump.
Two assassination attempts and a plot by the Iranians for a third have many folks thinking about the causes. J.T. Young worked an entire career in and with Washington, and he makes a key observation about leftist ideology and their typical extremist rhetoric and excuses for violence.
Marxism, the classic ideology of the left, sees all human history as a sequence of conflicts between classes. According to Karl Marx, the sequence does not end until the proletariat overthrow capitalism.
The classic leftist view not only makes violence endemic to society; it makes violence acceptable when wielded in pursuit of what the left sees as the inevitable revolution. Marxist rhetoric reflects this acceptance.
As Mao Zedong said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The godfather of the American left’s professional provocateurs, Saul Alinsky, in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, summarizes Lenin’s approach to violence when the Bolsheviks still lacked the means to carry it out: “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”
Today’s woke ideology is a bastardization of classical Marxism. In her White Album’s essays of the 1970s, Joan Didion aptly described what the woke movement would adopt: “the notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, ‘named’ and so brought into existence.”
The woke movement substitutes amorphous “identity groups” for Marx’s rigid “classes,” while retaining Marxism’s belief in universal conflict. And the woke movement’s rationale for violence is also the same as its Marxist forebears: the oppressed are justified in every form of their resistance.
As their violence has been thus justified, so it has been unleashed nationwide and on every conceivable issue.
Violence is endemic to the left’s prevailing ideologies, both classic and contemporary. Once the mind is set so, it becomes a mindset. It is only natural that it becomes embedded in their rhetoric. Thinking that way, they speak that way.
He concludes, “The left will not eschew violence because they see it as the legitimate response to the oppression they imagine all around them.”
