Main Edition
US
FR
July 21, 2024 - 8:00am
A third of Democratic voters I surveyed in a snap poll on 18 July openly agreed with the statement “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.” Looking beneath the numbers, the new moral absolutism of the progressive Left picks out which Democrats support assassination and which do not.
The concerning news is that a third of Democrats support the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. The good news is that the other two-thirds of party voters really do disagree. I used a concealed technique called a list experiment which found that even when they could disguise their true sentiment, a solid seven in 10 Democrats were pleased the assassin missed.
This raises the question of which kind of Democrat backed the killing of Trump. Support for the statement hardly varies by age, race or education, but is connected to ideology and partisanship.
When I asked whether respondents agreed with the statement “White Republicans are racist”, 55% agreed and only 20% disagreed. But particularly interesting, as illustrated below, is how tightly people’s answer to this question predicts whether they support Trump’s assassination. In a statistical model controlling for various demographic characteristics, ideology and partisanship, this question came out as so statistically significant it relegated all other variables to irrelevance.
| Progressive Democrats far more likely to wish Trump dead |
| Democrat voters who wish Trump shooter hadn’t missed, by agreement with ‘White Republicans are racist’ (%) |
 |
For my new book The Third Awokening (published in the UK as Taboo), I conducted nationally representative surveys in 2020 which showed that two in three white liberals agreed with the “White Republicans are racist” statement. Those who did were twice as likely as those who disagreed with it to say that “people who disagree with me politically are immoral.” They were also nearly twice as likely to say that politics is important for their identity. In effect, woke beliefs make people moralise politics, increasing intolerance and totalising black-and-white thinking.
Those with degrees have been measured as more likely than others to hold this moralistic sensibility, with researchers overturning their previous belief that higher education made people more likely to believe that values are relative and that there is room for disagreement on morality. In fact, young people with higher education backgrounds are now more likely to believe in absolute right and wrong than those with just a high school qualification. Education in our high culture makes people less tolerant.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“Left-wing faculty members in the Anglosphere have a far more negative view of Right-wing voters than Right-wing faculty do of Left-wing voters.”
Surely the left wing would just say that is because the Right recognise the morality of the Left’s views.
As a right thinking person I would agree – this is how they justify it to themselves – personally though, I just think people on the left are misguided, they certainly fail to understand the secondary (inevitably bigger) impacts of their preferred policies, which have the opposite effect to what they want.
What always strikes me is that they want everything. Both diversity and unity or high trust; policing by consent but multiculti; open borders and a welfare state; a more powerful state but ever-expanding individual choice; pay rises all round yet low inflation etc. etc.
That’s absolutely true. The Left is could be characterized as schizophrenic, a brain disorder of huge consequences to civil society.
Quite. This is part of how the Left can condemn in moral terms those with whom they disagree: the implication that non-Left people know the Left’s arguments are factually sound, and can therefore only disagree through a desire to perpetuate harm.
It is of course nothing more than a pathetic conceit borne of the reality that the political Right has been winning arguments on the facts for decades, to which the Left has no answer except to pretend it’s not true.
“Left-wing faculty members in the Anglosphere have a far more negative view of Right-wing voters than Right-wing faculty do of Left-wing voters.’
This has always frustrated me. It’s the root cause of ‘wight-wing’ impotence – why leftists have marched through the institutions largely unchallenged.
But given the behaviour the left, which in my lifetime has never been liberal, and always fascist adjacent, it’s baffling why this lingering good will towards leftist remains? It’s like a trance, which has to be broken, or no progress, pushback, re-conquest, can be made.
To be fair to the ‘left’, the first victims of the fascist left were the liberal left, so there are good people on the left, only they were shouted down and silenced a long time ago.
Micro aggressions and safe spaces for me. Hatred and death for thee. Ideologues are extremely unhappy people so none of this is really surprising. I truly detest Biden and everything he represents, yet I felt sorry for him during the debate. So much so I could only watch a few minutes of the train wreck.
Even Trump seemed to feel sorry and even bewonderment at what was happening.
I wouldn’t say he oozed sympathy, but he seemed to realise that something was awfully wrong.
Love your first sentence Jim. But of what you say after, and I’m not really one to personalize politics one way or the other — but I didn’t feel at all sorry for Biden in his debate performance. He was the demoniser in chief, leaning on the inflammatory “Trump literally H*tl*r” rhetoric to glom onto power for reasons of ego, way past his ability to lead anything beyond a piano sing-along in a nursing home. I doubt it’s in his personality to feel humiliation, but if Biden ever does over that fateful performance, it’s totally on his own head.
The “Trump literally H*tl*r” thing isn’t that different to what JD Vance said about Trump.
Once again, I am the opposite. Despite having expressed support for Trump in 2016 (mostly due to a visceral dislike of Hillary), I now despise him. I don’t mind Biden, but I have a low regard for the Democrats in creating the current situation.
I don’t like Trump either. I think net zero and open borders are existential threat to the wealth and prosperity we enjoy in the west today. I will wait in the rain for 12 hours to vote for anyone who opposes those luxury beliefs.
I agree with your stated position with one proviso: “except Trump”.
I should say that I am from and old school “Thatcherite/Reaganite” background. I thought Reagan was brilliant, Bush Senior and Junior were ok, didn’t mind Obama, but thought Clinton was creepy.
Perhaps the most urgent task facing Republicans is to dismantle the mechanism for elite overproduction and ideological indoctrination in American universities. Tax their endowments, ban the favouring of donors’ family members in admissions, eliminate tax reliefs on fees, and impose blind entrance tests for entry into the higher professions and government jobs, rather than allowing elite universities offer graduates a golden ticket to wealth and position. These universities are distorting the US economy and tearing its society apart, and the State needs to least stop subsidising them to do that.
Do you support Labour’s policy of doing similar for pivate schools in UK?
Yes, yes and yes! We can dream. In reality nothing will ever stick to them. Despite surveys like this showing just how toxic they have become.
The Leftists are ordinary Red Fascists
I wonder how many Democrats would have liked Biden taken out of the picture instead? It might have been politically highly convenient.
Fortunately he has “taken himself out of the picture”.
I’m surprised it is only a third. The author talks about the “left” being more intolerant than the “right”. In reality (though not entirely), left and right have swapped places with the left becoming increasingly reactionary, intolerant and arrogant and the right becoming progressive and seeking solutions to society’s problems.
I disagree that the Right has become more progressive. What’s really happening is that the Right’s pragmatism has remained much as it ever was, but the pool of ideological alternatives has been shrinking around it, eliminating progressively more and more of its political competitors.
You are of course correct that the Left has become ever more reactionary as part of this.
I would have considered myself a Dem a little more than 10 years ago. Things have changed bigtime.
Likewise. Although my views had developed strong contradictions — which I didn’t express or examine — over the preceding years, the penny only dropped for me in 2019. As with Hemingway’s quip, my about-face happened suddenly.
I am the exact opposite. I would have considered myself a Republican until about 2018.
“In effect, woke beliefs make people moralise politics, increasing intolerance and totalising black-and-white thinking.”
I might be nit-picking at this otherwise excellent (and disconcerting) article, but I’ve always thought it’s the other way round. Wokery is the result, not the cause, of the increasing tendency over recent decades to merge moral convictions with political ones.
In a certain sense, it runs directly counter to the principle of separation of Church and State, though of course it might also be argued that it’s as much a consequence of implementing the principle too successfully: having separated the Church from the State by chasing the Church almost entirely out of popular legitimacy within our institutional landscape, it has left an ethical vacuum into which political opportunists enthusiastically leapt, which is what we now call Woke.
Now this is obviously just my own little conjecture about the origins of Woke which everyone else might disagree with – a pet theory, not an exhaustively reseearched position. Either way though, the fusion of moral and political power contains obvious threats to liberty because it undermines the dispersal of power essential to democracy. It is obviously sadly regrettable that people can be so stupid as to avoid romantically, socially and professionally those with opposing political views, but it is actually scary that as many as a third of voters for a mainstream party in a western democratic nation regret the failure of an assassination attempt on a political opponent.
It is even more worrying that they are prepared to assert it openly.
That’s an excellent analysis, and i think you’re right about wokery following on from moral absolutism.
I don’t think the Church has been “chased almost entirely out of popular legitimacy” so much as withdrawn from the fray, probably as a result of its own moral failings (which needn’t be re-iterated here) and also due to enhanced understanding of human psychology which leads more and more people away from the ‘belief’ paradigm. In short, no “chasing” was required.
«also due to enhanced understanding of human psychology which leads more and more people away from the ‘belief’ paradigm.» – Of course, now we understand human psychology much more deeply and we are sure that the fundamental differences in the psychology of men and women are the result of gender stereotypes, so a man can easily become a woman, and a woman a man.
…which has absolutely nothing to do with the point i made. I’m referring to the universal human facets which derive from the biological origins of conscious thought, such as connection, fear and love, irrespective of sex.
Your reference to human psychology and the Church struck a chord.
It used to be seminarians studied theology, philosophy and the like.
Our newest priest assigned to our parish has degrees in law and psychology. Nice enough man but milquetoast homilies.
It’s not nit picking, I also picked up on that sentence for having the causality the wrong way round.
I’m not so sure that it’s anything new though, it’s just that what are actually quite extreme beliefs (e.g. wanting Trump to have been killed) currently go largely unchallenged by society. At work this week someone said to me that it was a shame the assassin missed – I didn’t challenge it (though nor did I agree) because it would possibly be me that would suffer consequences, not them.
What really worries me about this is if the process continues – the assumption of moral superiority despite having clearly dangerous and immoral beliefs – violence will be the result, and it will come from the left, with people blind-sided to it until it’s too late because people always seem to think it will cone from the right.
“Wokery is the result, not the cause . . .” There is something to be said for that proposition. Although this kind of moralism is not a lefty monopoly; rather, what is interesting is how the left has converged on it with the right. Ad hominem has become not so much a logical offence as a positive way of life. There are no longer just opponents, but only villains, whether morally or intellectually (or both). So the left says: “you inbred mouth-breather” (intellectual deficit) or “you callous greedy pig” (moral deficit). The right says: “you brainwashed cretin” (intellectual) or “you godless secular humanist” (moral).
The reason ad hominem has become so crucial is that (whether religious, or secular) political moralism is evangelical. Evangelical moralism is not all moralism, but rather that specific set of moralism that thinks the big problem is individual turpitude.
Even American popular secular culture is a continuation of evangelical Protestantism, by other means. Cancel culture, virtue signaling, etc., are of a piece with Carrie Nation.
Given its base, it is hardly surprising that the Republicans carry on like this; but the Democrats, too?
Did you read the article? He provides data to show that ‘the left’/Democrats are worse than ‘the right’/Republicans, it’s the main point.
Just a detail, not ‘assert it openly’, that’s the point of his ‘list experiment’. But more broadly, I think most ppl on here will probably have had direct experience of, and not be surprised by, Kaufmann’s findings. But good on him for coming up with the data.
I wonder how many people did mean it, though.
“[W]oke beliefs make people moralise politics, increasing intolerance and totalising black-and-white thinking. Those with degrees have been measured as more likely than others to hold this moralistic sensibility, with researchers overturning their previous belief that higher education made people more likely to believe that values are relative and that there is room for disagreement on morality. In fact, young people with higher education backgrounds are now more likely to believe in absolute right and wrong than those with just a high school qualification. Education in our high culture makes people less tolerant.”
There is a subtlety here which is worth exploring. There is actually no inconsistency between believing that “values are relative” (meaning that there is no objective fact of the matter about morality, and that every moral system is relative to a society or culture) and holding fiercely and dogmatically to one particular set of values and denigrating those of others. This is actually what one should expect a genuine belief in moral relativism to lead to. For if one believes that values are subjective (personal), or intersubjective (communal), or derive from merely emotional reactions, or any combination of these, then it makes no sense to attempt to look for common ground with an opponent who has different ones: there is no such ground on which moral disagreement may be examined, discussed, and resolved, for there simply is no objective truth of the matter. There is only a war of wills: the only question is, as Humpty-Dumpty put it, “who is to be master”. (This way of thinking is perfectly in tune with woke attitudes in general of course)
It is only if one believes in an objective moral truths that one can entertain the possibility that one might, oneself, be (objectively) mistaken about them. This, not moral relativism, is a way of thinking which can lead to toleration of conflicting views and an aspiration to do justice to, and finally integrate, different perspectives, in order to arrive at an understanding of morals as close to the (objective) truth as humanly possible.
Very good comment
List experiments are works of genius.
Such a clever way of finding out people’s opinions on sensitive topics.
This is a great article. It allows for crisply stating and backing the argument that the Left and the higher educated are less tolerant and more absolutist in their views to the extent of wishing someone to be murdered.
When a Right-thinking person encounters a leftist, the assumption by that conservative person is that the leftist is simply floating along with the stream; his views are an understandable, unthinking error. But the leftist realizes that the conservative Right-thinker has made a conscious and perverse choice, and persists in it in the face of opposition. Hence the outrage and, especially, fear.
That’s a psychologically astute – and correct – analysis.
Since the 2016 U.S. election, many on the Left bought into Hillary Clinton’s version of the German post-WW I “Stab-in-the-back” rationalization. Had she merely been an adut and concluded that 1) she was not an overall popular candidate; 2) she ran a poor campaign and 3) she was out-hustled by her opponent, we would not find ourselves in the situation we are in.
There has always been a moralist theme in America: often for good (Reagan’s “shining city on the hill”) and sometimes for bad (Salem: 1692-93, TDS: 2015 – ). What we are seeing now is a particularly virulent strain of purtainism, this time on the Left.
The portion of the population morally bereft, historically ignorant and easily persuaded are easy prey to whatever hustle comes along. Those who know better have piled on, often for personal or political gain. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Kaufman’s “catastrophizing lauguage” and all it portends has come into play. A political party based on the belief of Welt macht oder neidergang brooks no rivals.
When a large number of your supporters are historically ignornat, indoctrinated but not educated, cocksure in their moral supremacy and morally bereft, it should come as no surprise that those not in the group are castigated and considered unworthy of belonging, perhaps even of existing.
Unfortunately the Left is so enamoured and entrenched in these beliefs that they will likely not re-join an America where they are not in control. Weltmacht oder neidergang brooks no rivals.
Of course higher education increases intolerance.
When you have communists running the education system, Right Think is the result.
It’s certainly objectively true in the US. There was purposeful infiltration of the education system in the 1920s by Communists (a party that was thriving in the US at that time) to indoctrinate children and young adults and destroy the family as the basic unit of society.
There’s probably more to it. What happened to universities and many other institutions seem to be following Conquest’s second law, and at least in today’s world there’s a good deal of consistency in progressives occupation of Western institutions.
The Left truly regard themselves as the anointed ones always doing battle with evil forces. They also incorporate their political beliefs into their personhood; i.e. who they are is largely what they believe politically. If someone disagrees with their beliefs, their personhood is attacked. Hence the demonization of political opponents. Conservatives and rightwingers don’t wear their beliefs that close to their personhood and hence don’t see their opponents as pure evil.
I look forward to Eric undertaking a survey of Unherd and its subscribers.
I thought Unherd aimed to be an independent, somewhat heterodox forum.
Based on its comments facility a great many subscribers seem pro Trump, pro Putin, and religious cranks.
Over to you Eric.
I’m not sure ‘wish he hadn’t missed’ is quite the same thing as ‘supporting Trump’s assassination’.
Yes, good point.
Seriously dude?
I think there would be plenty of people who would not in any way support political assassination, but who would have lost no sleep at all if Trump’s bullet had been just a little more accurate.
If you are unbothered by assassination, it’s quite the mental leap to pretend that you are not supportive of it.
It is America. People there get shot there every day of the week. That is of course a “bad” thing, but if somebody does have to get shot, I don’t see a problem with it being Trump. My views would be exactly the same if Trump had been in a car crash.
Only a third? I am surprised.