Where’s the revulsion at radical progressive violence?

Don’t hold your breath: the suspected arson attack on the Republican Party of New Mexico’s Albuquerque headquarters will not give way to an outpouring of hand-wringing anxiety over the threat posed by radical progressive activism.

There will be no trend pieces in mainstream venues making the obvious link between the campaign of attacks on Tesla vehicles and other symbols of Elon Musk’s commercial dominance, the number of progressives who insist that property destruction and vandalism are legitimate expressions of political dissent, and this. Don’t expect the words that were spraypainted across the building’s façade — “ICE = KKK” — to inspire enterprising journalists who covered the “abolish ICE” movement to draw any inconvenient inferences. There will be no effort to revisit the extent to which Democratic politicians tripped over themselves to validate the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last December as an inevitable manifestation of voters’ economic anxiety. No one who covets their influence with the Left will wonder aloud what behaviors that ghoulish display inadvertently licensed.

Indeed, maybe there should be no trend pieces, no introspection, and no speculation about what this pattern says about the American Left. Perhaps it is too presumptuous to even call it a pattern. Certainly, the argument that discrete criminal acts should not be blamed on anyone other than their perpetrators is valid and proper. But we can be certain that the kind of forbearance we’re seeing from mainstream and left-partisan media outlets would not be forthcoming if the violence could be assigned to the American Right.

The Left’s cultural observers have no problem identifying troubling trends in the increasingly menacing conduct of the extremely online Right’s approach to engaging in political dissent. Nor do they struggle to establish predicates for that behavior that implicate figures within the highest echelons of Republican politics. We are not treated to anything like that when the partisan roles are reversed. Indeed, when Republican politicians are marked for violence or the GOP identifies violent trends in American society, we get chin-stroking ruminations on how the statistics do not justify the Right’s heavy breathing.

We are facing “an epidemic of Right-wing terror,” the GOP’s critics insist. And yet this plague seems to be forever to be infecting fringe elements on the left and manifesting in violence directed at their opponents. There is a trend here, but it is one of selection bias. When episodes of right-wing political violence erupt, they comport with what law enforcement, political institutions, and the press are already vigilant against. That is the sort of violence they can recognize, and they understand its antecedents. But when the Left whips itself into a froth and some unhinged spectator to that discourse takes matters into his or her own hands, few in mainstream venues bother to connect the dots.

Perhaps they honestly don’t see the provocations and excuse-making that create incentives for those who aspire to infamy to act out on their most anti-social impulses. Maybe acknowledging the factors that can inspire violence is just too inconvenient. But events like the arson in New Mexico are clarifying because, save for a handful of perfunctory dispatches from the site of the incident that amount to a box-checking exercise, the press allows those events to wash over the country without conducting a finger-pointing audit of America’s violent political culture. The same cannot be said of the national reaction to high-profile episodes of right-wing violence, and that asymmetry is a problem.

As I recently wrote in an exploration of the Left’s fetishization of political violence, events like these do not happen in a vacuum. Violence begets reprisals and invites a cascading cycle of reciprocity, particularly if one side of the equation is convinced that the other can act with impunity. Unless Americans and their institutions begin to respond to political violence with consistency — as in, consistent revulsion — we should expect more violence.