For years, America's political elite and the institutions in their control have led the public to believe that domestic political violence in the United States is almost solely a rightwing phenomenon. What if they are wrong?
In only the last several years, corporate CEOs and conservative influencers have been killed. Republican justices, presidents, and their staffs have been marked for death. Small-cell terrorist organizations have executed sophisticated attacks on law enforcement. And much it has been excused, even sometimes encouraged, by an intellectual ecosystem on the left that is, even now, incubating more political violence.
In Blood and Progress, National Review's Noah Rothman presents a careful examination of leftwing violence in the United States – and comes away with the conclusion that violence designed to advance political objectives is, in our time, more often a project of the left. Indeed, today's wave of left-wing violence and political terrorism has come to resemble similar waves of leftwing violence.
Rothman explores individual episodes of modern political violence, identifies their causes and effects, and considers the psychological disposition that leads thugs and agitators to conclude that violence begets positive social change. He compares those attacks to those committed by the leftwing terrorists during previous waves of similar violence at the dawn of the 20th Century and in the 1960s and '70s, finding a number of common threads in the process.
This book shines a spotlight on the degree to which progressive activists and prominent Democrats have excused and explained away violence over the decades. It condemns the suite of unworthy historical heroes and martyrs to which progressives genuflect, so many of whom themselves engaged in violence and criminality and encouraged the same from their acolytes. It identifies a troubling trend on the American right, which increasingly clings to the same rationalizations that justify left-wing terror and bloodshed. And it proposes some potential off-ramps that could avert the national cataclysm that awaits us if these trends develop unabated.
The book's objective is to train American political observers to recognize leftwing violence and to apply the same scrutiny and foresight to it that they reserve for violence that comes from the right. We cannot arrest the trend toward political violence in America if we are focused on only one side of the equation. Until we resolve to respond to political violence consistently and with consistent revulsion, we will get more violence. Noah Rothman is a senior writer with National Review, the foremost journal of conservative scholarly opinion and analysis in America since its founding in 1955. He is the author of Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America (Regnery, 2019) and The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun (HarperCollins, 2022). Mr. Rothman graduated from Drew University with a degree in Russian Studies and political science (2004), and he earned a graduate degree from Seton Hall University on diplomacy and international relations with a focus on security policy in the former Soviet space (2010). He lives with his wife and two sons in New Jersey.
