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.

Moral absolutism around identity underpins negative partisanship on the Left, which we see in the growing unwillingness of liberals to date and hire Republicans or Trump supporters. Just 7% of female college students — and 19% of males — at top 200 universities who don’t back Trump are willing to date a Trump supporter. Those who would not date a Trump supporter are far less willing to hire them for a job. Among college faculty, 40% would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job, and these people are overwhelmingly against the idea of having lunch with a Trump-supporting colleague.

There is increasingly a pattern of partisan asymmetry — especially in elite institutional settings — in which the Left is more prejudiced against the Right than vice versa. In both Britain and America, those on the Left are between two and five times more likely to unfriend people on social media, refuse to date, or otherwise discriminate against those on the Right than the other way round. 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.

When the primary points of focus for the Left were class and Government spending, interests governed emotions more, permitting compromise. The two sides might have disagreed, but this was a matter of the other side being selfish or misguided rather than immoral.

Now, identity politics has moralised the outlook of the Left, painting conservatives as evil rather than wrong. This fuels catastrophising language around “white supremacy”, “fascism” and “danger”, leading to a high-stakes emotional atmosphere. Given our new politics of identitarian sacredness and moral absolutism, we should not be surprised to see a rise in political extremism.

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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