For decades, academic and popular histories have treated political violence as a phenomenon defined largely by its distance from the naturally occurring liberal center. “The rise of the right” is cast in apocalyptic terms — more Darth Vader than ordinary politics, its actors, many of whom bear little resemblance to traditional conservatism, depicted as aberrations: dangerous, irrational, and fundamentally alien to the democratic order, operating in secret and speaking in code to thwart liberal heroes.
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Liberalism, and violence associated with the Left, by contrast, is rarely examined in the same way. In Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, National Review senior writer Noah Rothman challenges that asymmetry. The book does not simply recount episodes of left-wing political violence, but interrogates the intellectual frameworks and institutional networks that have sustained and normalized them. In Rothman’s telling, these episodes do not remain isolated acts. They are absorbed, reframed, and ultimately transformed into a kind of folklore within segments of the liberal intellectual class.
As Rothman moves from one episode to the next, a pattern emerges that is more damning than any individual case: the treatment of the violence — and, in some cases, its near-erasure, once it becomes politically inconvenient — becomes more consequential than the events themselves. From early anarchists attempting to poison the wealthy, to bomb-planting radicals who either fled or were quietly rehabilitated into polite society, to more recent radicals whose actions have been softened into slogans, left-wing violence often undergoes a process of reinterpretation and euphemization in political discourse.
Blood and Progress is at its best when it shows the machinery behind this process. Rothman documents how Democratic leaders — including figures such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former President Barack Obama — lent legitimacy to movements that were producing violent actors at their edges, offering the “voice of frustration” framing that has become a standard pressure-release valve after blood has been shed in the name of progressive values. He also does well in explaining what’s become known as “the omnicause,” a growing ideology that bundles individual, and often contradictory, grievances into a single revolutionary identity. This new movement gives participants a sense of tribal belonging, validation within elite cultural institutions, and a framework in which violence against oppressors is not only excusable but reframed as morally coherent. It explains why Greta Thunberg suddenly cares about Palestinians, or how race and ethnicity have been added to the ever-growing acronym of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.
These dynamics are often reinforced by institutions that trade in moral and intellectual capital, where explaining violence as a product of injustice signals sophistication and empathy while conferring status — both on those offering the explanation and, indirectly, on the actors themselves. This is not incidental. There is a reason such movements are more visible at institutions like Columbia University than at places like Eastern Michigan University. Institutional acceptance at the highest echelons of society functions less as a passive backdrop for debate than as a force multiplier.
Rothman circles the question this raises but does not quite resolve it. He asks whether those offering these rationalizations actually believe them, or whether the language is simply useful for political purposes. What his work makes clear, however, is that this is not merely a matter of confusion or bad faith, but a patterned vocabulary — repeated across media and academic settings — that recasts violence as “understandable,” “contextual,” or even a form of expression. When elite journalists, academics, and politicians repeatedly describe left-wing violence in terms such as “fiery but mostly peaceful” and adopt the moral language that softens or justifies it, the distinction between incompetence and complicity begins to collapse.
The author’s reluctance is understandable — we should expect cultural power brokers who routinely claim moral authority to have standards, after all — but it is no longer defensible. Liberal institutions, journalists, and politicians have had decades to notice the pattern Rothman documents: the rehabilitation of bombers, the canonization of cop-killers, the “voice of frustration” framing deployed so regularly you can set a watch to it. At some point, repeated failure to notice becomes indistinguishable from a choice. The purpose of the system is what it does.
The difference is striking when you see it all together in one book. On the Right, political violence is typically, and rightly, treated as disqualifying — a violation of the norms that define legitimate political action. It is something to be condemned and pushed outside the bounds of acceptable politics, not incorporated into the movement’s moral vocabulary. George W. Bush didn’t say that abortion clinic bombers were understandably upset. The QAnon Shaman didn’t have teachers asking students to write him letters while he sat in jail.
Rothman is good on this distinction in practice, but the final chapter strains under the weight of anticipated objection. The obligatory treatment of Jan. 6 feels like a concession to a hypothetical critic, and it muddies what is otherwise a clean argument. Being enraged by a specific political grievance — including false ones based on conspiracy theories — is vastly different from believing you are among the anointed who hold a moral obligation to overthrow capitalism. The Weather Underground bombed buildings not because they thought an election was stolen but because they wanted to launch a revolution and overthrow American democracy. That is a different psychology, and it produces a different political culture — one that embraces violence, turns Luigi Mangione into a heartthrob, and sees Tyler Robinson’s deranged messages labeled as “touching.”
Blood and Progress is valuable because it forces the reader to notice the difference. The reader sees how language surrounding political violence evolves depending on the politics. What it avoids, just barely, is stating the conclusion its own evidence demands. Rothman writes like a man who believes that politicized cultural institutions can still be shamed into honesty — that if he documents the asymmetry carefully enough, the people leading them may feel its weight. It is an admirable posture, but in many ways, it’s going against the natural state of politics.
Violence in a democratic system is as inevitable as a toilet in a house: It is part of the structure, even if it stinks. The framers understood this. George Washington grasped it when he put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Alexander Hamilton understood it more personally when the sitting vice president shot him dead. The system they built includes mechanisms for absorbing attempts at violent balkanization, which is why it produces stability most of the time. But the existence of a system that makes the disease palatable does not make it acceptable. Nor does it mean we should indulge the idea that those who perpetuate it have a point, or that events simply got out of hand. Rothman’s book makes clear what is required. Political and cultural leaders on the Left must remember to flush.
Carl Paulus is a political historian from Michigan who formerly worked on Capitol Hill.
