Over the last week or so, observers—mostly on the right—have made a great deal of noise about the musings of Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia. Jones, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, openly and enthusiastically discussed killing a political opponent—the former Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates—and, more disturbingly, hoped this opponent’s children would die so that he could watch their mother suffer as she held them in her arms.

Understandably, most of the commentary on Jones and his ghoulish desires has focused on his crass exhortation to violence and the ghastly cruelty of his repeatedly expressed desire to watch children die while relishing their mother’s pain. Jones is, almost inarguably, a twisted man with a moral compass that points straight downward. That he remains his party’s nominee and that no high-profile members of that party have withdrawn their endorsement of him tells you all you need to know about the moral condition of the nation’s ruling class.

All of that said, for me, the most interesting part of Jones’s exposed texts is the justification he gives for wanting Todd and Jennifer Gilbert to suffer as they hold their dying children. When confronted about that statement, he replies, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Everything else in Jones’s rant can be dismissed as the overheated rhetoric of a disturbed man, the bizarre fantasies of someone unfit to mingle with normal people in civil society, much less serve them as their chief law enforcement official. It is, as I said, twisted.

By contrast, Jones’ explanation that only pain can create the necessary changes in perceptions that affect policy prescriptions is different. It is, in a sense, rational. It is an expression of purpose. Moreover, it is an expression of purpose that is so clear and so lucid that it belies the idea that the rest of his tirade is merely an emotional outburst. In other words, it demonstrates that his embrace of violence and cruelty is intentional, deliberate, and calculated. Jay Jones knew what he was saying, knew what it meant, and connected it all to a broader political philosophy: Only pain can create change among the enemy; therefore, creating pain is good, and inflicting it on one’s enemy is the sole means of achieving progress.

What’s most disturbing about this is that Jones is hardly the only person who thinks this way. He may be the only one stupid enough to put it in print (or 1s and 0s, as the case may be), but he’s not alone in believing that the application of pain to political opponents is both good and productive. Indeed, this is—and always has been—the defining motivational principle of the political left.

Now, to be clear, I think that, historically, “the left” has been largely absent from American politics. With a few exceptions (the Progressives and the radical New Dealers), even most Democrats in this country have, traditionally, been anti-leftist. The economics of Marxism never caught on here the way it did in Europe, and, for the most part, Republicans and Democrats have a shared disdain for collectivism.

At the same time, however, as I have noted repeatedly (here and elsewhere), in the West, economic Marxism largely died after World War I and collapsed completely in the 1960s. And what replaced it—cultural Marxism, the cultural left—has made far greater inroads among this nation’s governing elites. Whereas most Democrats would, even today, deny any affinity for leftist economics, many of them—perhaps a majority of them, especially among the ruling class—share the cultural left’s beliefs about current and historical social conditions and the “inequity” they embody. They are cultural Marxists and, thus, inheritors of the left’s pain-and-envy-based approach to change.

The left today is, in many ways, perfectly Nietzschean. That’s not to say that it embraces his vision or shares his beliefs (although it does both to some extent, in some cases). Rather, the left exemplifies much of what Nietzsche found loathsome and self-destructive in Western civilization.

Nietzsche disliked the left. “Socialism,” he wrote in Human, All Too Human, “is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be.” He continued:

Thus, its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense… it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word “justice” like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), and to give them a good conscience for the evil game that they are supposed to play.

In this sense—and especially in his dismissal of the left’s false notion of “justice”—Nietzsche is equating socialism with religion and comparing its morality to the “slave morality” that he saw as the defining characteristic of the Western religious tradition. In short, Nietzsche viewed slave morality as the result of ressentiment, the deep-seated emotional response to powerlessness that blames an external “enemy” for all suffering and manifests as envy, jealousy, and revenge. Whereas Aristotle defined “anger” in largely heroic terms, encapsulating man’s desire to seek retribution for legitimate reasons and in response to “belittlement that is undeserved,” Nietzsche defined ressentiment as a weak emotion, the response of life’s losers to their self-inflicted suffering and the transference of their self-loathing to an external actor, a scapegoat.

For Christians, it is possible to dismiss Nietzsche’s critique of their supposed slave morality by pointing to the victory of the Resurrection and to note that the fulfillment of their conception of justice is other-worldly and, therefore, does not require the temporal moral inversion Nietzsche condemns. As an atheist, he just doesn’t “get it.” He can’t possibly get it without belief in the afterlife.

For leftists—whom Nietzsche (and countless others) saw as heretical, Millenarian Christians—such a dismissal is not so easy. His depiction of their ressentiment is largely undeniable. It is painfully accurate.

Ressentiment can, on occasion, be acted upon. In most cases, however, “slaves”—those who are noble neither by birth nor temperament—are unable to act. They wallow in their frustration and their hatred, often creating imaginary incidents of revenge and the infliction of pain. They threaten. They bluster. They try to cause small-scale suffering and infliction of pain in the hope that that pain will undermine the moral codes and empower them. In short, they believe that “only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

The left is, in this sense, quite small and petty, angry but impotent, and willing to undertake vain acts of vengeance instead of real acts of justice, of which it is incapable. Nevertheless, it redefines justice to serve its purposes, to enhance its self-perception, and to justify its ressentiment.