They say history repeats itself—first as tragedy, and the second time as farce. This aphorism certainly seems true of the two assassination attempts against former President Trump. The young Thomas Crooks’ shooting at a Pennsylvania rally in July nearly succeeded. He actually wounded Trump, and unfortunately killed a local fireman.

By contrast, Ryan Routh’s attempted attack at Trump’s Mar a Lago golf course was shambolic. His pawn shop SKS looked incapable of hitting the broadside of a barn, and his sniper’s nest did everything possible to make itself visible. Like Routh himself, it was all quite ridiculous.

More ridiculous, though, were his stated motives. While Crooks so far looks like a nihilist seeking fame in the manner of school shooters, Routh is very ideological. Yet his ideology is completely banal and consists of beliefs commonly held by mainstream Democrats.

Essentially, Routh tried to kill Trump because he was extremely committed to mainstream media talking points. He mentioned the importance of the war in Ukraine and how Trump was a threat to democracy on social media. In his handwritten manifesto, he stated how Trump was “unfit” and did not “embody the moral fabric that is America.”

These ideas were entirely indistinguishable from what one hears nightly on CNN or from the Harris Campaign. They are so familiar and accepted that Routh had previously been interviewed numerous times in the media. His sincere parroting of mainstream talking points permitted the media and many others to overlook his obvious weirdness.

In other words, the now-mainstream views of the Democrats and the media are simultaneously very common and objectively extreme. For their votaries, Trump is not simply going to do a bad job or enact bad policies but represents a sui generis threat that lacks all legitimacy.

The Democratic Party Now Amplifies the Crazies’ Craziness

Historically, the media and both major parties did a lot to obscure the outright radicalism of many Americans. A familiar scene is when the media asks a man on the street his views on things, and it becomes apparent he believes in the most outlandish conspiracy theories and is comfortable with extreme violence against political enemies. Similarly, open comment sections in the media invariably show a torrent of criticism of the mainstream consensus, and that is why they have mostly disappeared.

Thinking the world is like a sedate NPR segment or a genteel conference at the Mayflower Hotel is a form of self-deception. Mixing in with the actual constituents, it’s not unusual to hear about calls for reparations on the left, restricting the franchise on the right, or mass imprisonment of political enemies by either side.

While this is not exclusively a left or right phenomenon, extremism does seem a little closer to the surface on the left. Let’s not forget, the Democrats gave us the 2020 inaugural Green Zone and Biden’s 2022 Philadelphia speech condemning the “MAGA Republicans.” Trump is admittedly blunt, but for all his supposed lack of couth, the actual consensus beliefs of both major parties—forever wars, open borders, a surveillance state, and enormous deficits in perpetuity—are more objectively extreme than any of Trump’s proposed policies.

Republican Party politics used to function to channel the untutored sentiments of the Republican base. This is not necessarily a bad thing. All parties exist to focus their messaging in order to achieve tangible results. But, over time, this led to the party’s elite showing more and more contempt for their base and indifference to their welfare and desires. People are OK with “toning it down” as part of coalition politics, but no one likes to be lied to or used.

The Democrats have done something similar. This is why they have the superdelegates in their primaries. The party’s leadership sees that, left to their own devices, the raw expression of Democratic voters’ feelings has led to far-left, losing candidates like George McGovern (1972) and Walter Mondale (1984).

Even if such a candidate were somehow to succeed in the general election, then the integrity of the “system” and the economic interests of the donor class would be in jeopardy.

Wokeism is a “Shiny Object” to Distract From the Allure of Economic Populism

A lot of people are left behind and stressed out by the economy. This is why the Democrats’ growing identification with college-educated professionals and Wall Street is driving some Bernie voters into the arms of Trump, whose economic populism is popular.

The Democrats’ barbell coalition of the government-dependent poor and system-dependent professionals does not make much provision for the working poor. Moreover, like pre-Trump Republicans, they are scared of economic populism mostly because it could hurt the professional half of the coalition. Winning is a secondary concern; properly framed, economic populism could be a political winner—though an expensive one.

The Democrats shut down the populist revolt in 2016 by engineering Hillary’s dominance of a small field. In 2020, they orchestrated the withdrawal of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren in favor of Joe Biden. Having rejected both economic populism and their earlier antiwar positions, the party embraced radical positions on social issues to appease left-oriented voters uneasy with these changes.

It became apparent in Barack Obama’s second term that Democrats were no longer the moderates of the Bill Clinton era. For every concession they made to the business class or the military-industrial complex, they doubled down on a quasi-Marxist critique of the world.

Instead of the oppressors being the capitalists, the dimensions of oppression were now race, sex, and sexuality. This understanding of the world means whites, men, and heterosexuals were the bad guys who need to be brought down a peg or two in order to create authentic equity. This seems to be what people mean when they use the terms “woke” or “wokeness.”

The mainstreaming of wokeness picked up steam during the economic crisis of 2008 and the contemporaneous Occupy Wall Street movement. This movement criticized the extreme inequality of finance capitalism and the corruption sustaining the status quo. Left unattended, it represented a real threat to elites, who united in their opposition to it.

Not merely the province of the media and academia, wokeness became something that corporate America now fully embraced. The old ethos of “staying out of politics” gave way to “we’re all in this together” and “standing with George Floyd.” Some brands went too far in showing their woke bona fides and committed brand suicide, such as Gillette, Bud Light, and Aunt Jemima. But mostly, it meant companies could play hip and progressive while not paying their workers more, reducing benefits, and otherwise maximizing profits.

Allowing the donor class to fend off economic populism while also attracting young voters, wokeness emerged as a central tenet of the left and became the glue holding together the Democratic Party’s disparate coalition members.

The unity of government, media, academia, and corporate America was remarkable and creepy. The cultish tone manifested what Thomas Sowell described in The Vision of the Anointed: a quasi-religious sense of “us vs. them” that dehumanizes one’s opponents as heathens and heretics.

Without a Common Culture, Politics Will Only Get Uglier

Both sides now are so strongly opposed to one another on the level of principles and taste, it does not seem likely the gap will be closed. The left’s secular religiosity demands a remaking of society. For them, the whole thing must be bulldozed and replaced before the promised day of equity and harmony can arise. The right is mostly engaged in a fighting retreat and lacks a compelling alternative vision.

This ideological gap is being further augmented by an identitarian one, as a new wave of immigrants flattered by woke multiculturalism join in on the condemnation of the American founders, their traditions, and our people.

Returning to the guys trying to kill Donald Trump, truly “lone gunmen” don’t get far. In functioning societies, they are rejected along with other forms of political violence. Indeed, that is part of the point of politics: to create rules and space to resolve peacefully disputes between groups with competing interests and ideas.

But, when people are at each other’s throats because of a crisis of the political regime’s legitimacy, both sides deem the old means of resolution to be inadequate, slow, and overly solicitous of their neighbor-enemies. Thus, today, politically violent actors find many defenders. After the two recent assassination attempts, there were many unfunny jokes about how the shooters should work on their marksmanship and better luck next time.

In parallel with this actual violence, recipes for violence and chaos are afoot. High-up officials—including congressman Jamie Raskin (R-MD)—have floated truly insane ideas, like plans to preemptively reject a Trump victory and to employ the military to protect such Machiavellian congressional action.

While the fringe used to represent a tiny minority, now the political middle is alienated, becoming more open to violence, and is openly contemptuous of its opponents. Calling Trump a “threat to democracy” repeatedly has itself threatened democracy by undermining his legitimacy during his first term and prospectively undermining his legitimacy if he should prevail in 2024.

The precursor to action is belief. The beliefs of the left now require purifying violence against the total threat of “MAGA Americans,” whom they dismiss as enemies against whom all manner of violence is permitted. No longer fringe, this Manichean view of politics is now a common view held by school teachers, union delegates, lawyers, and elected congressmen, which none have any shame in shouting from the rooftops. After all, in their eyes, they’re doing the Lord’s work and fighting for Our Democracy™!

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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.

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